American Security & Israel: The Core Issues

How American underwriting of the Zionist pursuit of a Greater Israel--with its implementing policies of military pressure against Iran as well as collective punishment, ethnic cleansing, apartheid regarding Palestinians--may affect U.S. national security is an issue of such sensitivity that some just want to shove it under the rug.

Ephraim Kam, Deputy Director of the Institute for National Security Studies in Israel, wrote a commentary in Haaretz on March 23, 2010, in which he professed to have difficulty understanding Petraeus’ claim that resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli dispute would mitigate America’s broader problems with the Muslim world.

His piece was opinion, not analysis, but still, just to look serious, he might have asserted straight out that American association with the Israeli apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and collective punishment of Palestinians angers no one else in the Muslim world. He might have asserted straight out that allowing democracy in the Palestinian colony, as was tried with the January 2006 election that Hamas won, rather than creating a militia to overthrow Palestinian parties not favored in Tel Aviv, would do nothing to undermine those members of Hamas favoring anti-Israeli violence and would do nothing to undermine those fringe radical groups that fire rockets at Israel against the wishes of Hamas. He might have asserted straight out that all global Muslim expressions of outrage at Israeli behavior are hypocritical, that in fact no Muslim cares about Palestinians. He might have asserted that resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict would have no impact on Lebanon’s Hezbollah, even though it is being pulled two ways – both toward democratic participation in the Lebanese system and toward resistance to Israel. He might futher have asserted that Lebanese Hezbollah members have no patriotic feelings and no interest in autonomy, that all they aspire to is to take orders forever from Tehran. He might have asserted that Syrians also aspire to nothing more than serving Tehran’s highly dangerous foreign policy purposes. He might have asserted that a calmer and more moral Mideast would have no impact on the Iranian national security community’s thinking about the degree of risk that Iran should assume. He might have asserted that a Washington decision-making community freed of Israeli right wing propaganda still would be unable to find the presence of mind to conceive of more effective ways of dealing with the Iranian nuclear issue than economic warfare and threats of military attack.

If he had made all these assertions that flow logically from the pretense that no connection exists between repression of Palestinians and the broader conflict between the West and the Muslim world, then at least the issue under discussion would be clearly on the table, visible for all to see. Then, we might actually have a serious dialogue about the linkages between Israel and that Western-Islamic confrontation.

Well, I guess that explains it: he did not make those logically implied assertions because an open dialogue about such linkages is exactly what he and his fellow right wing expansionists are afraid of.

What Petraeus said was intellectually trite, a fact long obvious to all global affairs thinkers, but politically dynamite. All of a sudden, in the U.S., it is no longer “anti-Semite” to discuss the impact of Washington’s obeisance to the Israeli right wing on American security. Petraeus, being one of the guys on the ground and thus personally at risk, is more concerned about American soldiers being killed than he is about what might be politically correct on the Potomac, and he wants Americans to have that discussion.

What do you say: discuss it or cover your eyes?