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NEWS & LETTERS, October - November 2007
Our Life and Times
Israel... and its lobby
by Kevin A. Barry and Mitch Weerth
Recently, Israel tightened its blockade on the 1.5 million people of the Gaza Strip still further, declaring it a "hostile territory." Already having cut off the movement of people and most goods, it announced on Sept. 20 that it would allow food, water, and medical supplies to cross into Gaza, but that henceforth it "would impose restrictions... to limit the circulation of goods as well as the supply of gasoline and electricity."
Gasoline is necessary for ambulances and electricity is required for the functioning of all medical institutions as well as the water supply, which comes primarily from wells with electric pumps. Such measures would particularly target the most vulnerable: children, the elderly, and the ill. United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon declared Israel in violation of international law, which prohibits collective punishments on the part of an occupying power.
As usual, the U.S. supported Israel’s moves, on the grounds that the fundamentalist Hamas movement, which took power in Gaza in June, is a terrorist group. Here again, the notion is one of the collective punishment of Palestinian people. They are "guilty" of having voted for Hamas in the January 2006 elections and then for largely supporting Hamas during the mini-civil war last June, which overthrew the remnants of the more secular but corrupt Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in Gaza.
Under the grand illusion that they can impose a settlement on the Palestinian people, the U.S. and Israel are now supporting the PLO’s Mahmoud Abbas, who holds power in the West Bank. But Israel has only played at negotiating with Abbas. Its biggest concession has been the release of a few hundred Palestinian prisoners, out of the 11,000 Israel is holding! Abbas’s support shrinks further every time he’s photographed with an Israeli or U.S. official, while no concrete moves are taken to allow the establishment of a Palestinian state. The reactionary Hamas is the gainer here.
The U.S. gives Israel wide latitude to attack neighboring states. Thus, it said absolutely nothing after Israel bombed Syria, also in September. Neither the U.S. nor Israel will publicly discuss the raid, but leaks to the media suggest the possibility of an attack on a nuclear power facility.
In the U.S., there is not a hint of criticism of Israel’s occupation, of its aggression, or of its apartheid-like wall through the West Bank in the speeches of any of the leading presidential candidates. In addition, a McCarthyite campaign of vilification on the part of the Israel Lobby rains down upon any and all critics of Israel. The Lobby succeeded in getting Professor Norman Finkelstein fired from DePaul University, despite strong faculty support for his scholarship.
Some critics of Israel, whether on the Left or those on the Right like John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, authors of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, argue that the Lobby is distorting U.S. foreign policy. This too is an illusion, behind which hides the notion of an "honest" imperialism, not swayed by "special interests."
As historian Mark LeVine noted in a review of The Israel Lobby, "In fact, it is the other way around. The United States has been using Israel to fulfill its policies objectives for four decades, right up to last summer, when the Bush administration encouraged a disastrous proxy war with Hezbollah as a way of testing the weapons and tactics of Iran, Hezbollah's main sponsor, in the event of a U.S. attack" (Asia Times, Sept. 7, 2007).
Human Rights Watch has just issued a damning 243-page report on the 2006 war, which concludes: "Most of the civilian deaths resulted from Israel’s frequent failure to abide by a fundamental obligation of the laws of war: the duty to distinguish between military targets and civilians.... Hezbollah did at times violate the laws of war by firing rockets from or storing ammunition in civilian areas, but those violations were not widespread and did not account for the vast majority of civilian deaths that we investigated."
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