Our Life and Times by Kevin A. Barry and Mitch Weerth

Israel lobby and the massacres in Gaza

On Nov. 7, the Israeli military took advantage of the fact that the world media was focused on the U.S. elections to commit one of its dirtiest deeds. As it has done so many times since June, it sent shells into a populated area of Beit Hanun on the Gaza Strip. This time, it killed 18 Palestinian civilians, six of them children and eight of them women.  The stated reason was to respond to a rocket from somewhere in the area that had landed harmlessly in Israel.

Since June 25, when militants from the fundamentalist Hamas movement captured an Israeli soldier, Israel has engaged in the collective punishment of Gaza, itself a war crime.  Some 350 Palestinians have been killed, 70 of them in a single week during November.  During the same period, rockets fired by Palestinian militants have killed five Israelis. For this reason, the UN Security Council considered a resolution condemning Israel's "disproportionate" use of force, but the U.S. predictably vetoed it.

The totally uncritical support that the U.S. gives to Israel has led to some new debates since the publication last March of an essay, "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," by conservatives John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt.  Some leftist intellectuals have supported their critique.

But as a detailed analysis by William X in the autonomist WORLD WAR 4 REPORT shows, although it may be true that its leaders misperceive U.S. imperial interests, the Mearsheimer-Walt thesis amounts to "the unlikely position of a client state seizing control of imperial policy" http://ww4report.com/node/2709. (Michael Moore's FAHRENHEIT 9/11 propagates similar distortions  but casts its blame on the Saudi Arabian rather than the Israel lobby.)

William X continued: "The unlikely proposition of a client state seizing control of imperial policy is taken as a fait accompli. The possibility does not even seem to have occurred to them that U.S. elites-even if in a counter-productive strategic blunder-have perceived a convergence of U.S. imperial and Israeli national interests at this juncture or perceived a unique usefulness of Israel as a regional proxy. Maintaining a regional proxy (which implies a more nuanced relationship than that between the imperial center and outright puppets, such as the Cold War military dictatorships of Central America) means granting a certain degree of access to imperial power and decision-making. It does not mean a surrender of power and decision-making.

"Even in cases where the privileged clients have nowhere near the degree of access to power that Israel's ideological agents have been granted in the current administration, this error has often been evidenced. U.S. policy on Cuba has remained essentially unchanged through both Democratic and Republican administrations since 1959. The all-too-conventional wisdom holds that this is due to the voting power of the exile establishment in Miami and that establishment is itself encouraged to nourish the illusion of determinant influence. But the notorious Cuban American National Foundation has only won its degree of access to Washington power in the context of official concerns about the spread of the revolutionary contagion throughout Latin America, undermining U.S. hegemony over the western hemisphere. The Miami establishment has proven its usefulness in providing a political support base for counter-revolutionary intrigues and a pool of terrorists which the CIA has tapped not only against Fidel Castro's regime but also against revolutionary Nicaragua in the 1980s. The notion that decisions of global strategic import are made to appease sectors of the domestic electorate is an illusion which those sectors are allowed to cultivate to ensure their loyalty and usefulness as proxies."