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by Peter A. Belmont / 2009-04-16
© 2009 Peter Belmont
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Israelis and Americans are betrayed by their governments which, having acquired power one way or another, use it (to make war, to enrich special interests, etc.) against the public interest, without (further) correctly informed democratic consent. The Israeli and American publics believe myths and lies fed to them by their governments in order to manufacture consent.
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Uri Avnery’s ’Rest Has Come to the Weary’ is a very valuable article for me, a non-Zionist Jew usually very critical of Israel. It puts a “human face” on Zionism and lets me see Israelis as at least some of them—maybe many of them—were. They may be hiding, today, from important realities, as who is not?, but at least the mass of people seem to have been somewhat innocent in 1948.
This article points up a distinction we all need to be aware of—Americans, Israelis, and everyone else—namely, that national leaders, in democracies and dictatorships alike, have their programs, which may not be known to or accepted by the people, and certainly did not spring from democratic decision-making. Governance often seems a sort of piracy, where the office-holder says, “gee, now that I have [seized] all this power, how can I use it undemocratically (for undisclosed projects, perhaps for my own gain)?” For example, President George W. Bush did not ask
permission to invade Iraq to enrich Blackwater or Halliburton or to enrich oil companies; no, he told us it was for US security. And “we, like sheep” believed him or at least gave him the go-ahead. Similarly, President Lyndon Johnson’s lie about the attack in the Tonkin Gulf was an act of deception to expand a war without public understanding and acquiescence in the real reasons, which, presumably, did not bear inspection. Presidents Johnson and Bush certainly had consent for their wars, even “informed consent,” but the information which “informed” that consent was lies.
If Israel’s pre-state and early-state leaders had an explicit knowledge that the Arabs would not defeat them, then, according to Avnery, they surely did not share that with their people. (Going ahead with state-creation would have been hare-brained adolescent daring without private assessments of likely success, for, at least as I see it, there was no necessity for Palestinian Jews to make an attempt at state-creation which might well have resulted in disaster. The choice of continued British supervision or of a bi-national state was always available.) Israel’s massive and foreign-financed re-arming, in 1948, from Czechoslovakia during a cease-fire during which there was a UN-imposed arms-embargo, an embargo enforced against the Arab states but ignored (at least by Czechoslovakia) as against Israel, suggests that the Jewish leaders knew they had (or would soon have) a large advantage in armaments.
If Israel’s leaders intended the expulsion of the Palestinian Arabs, a goal openly and widely discussed by pre-state Zionists under the name of “transfer,” they seem to have kept it a secret, so the ordinary Palestinian Jews could maintain their lofty ideals and not suffer any “cognitive dissonance.” Ordinary Jews did not know that their bright new country was about to embark on massive dispossession of the local non-Jewish population. They were never asked. They never gave their permission. Later they were told it was necessary for their security, because Israel had been attacked. (The idea that it was Israel which had done the attacking—by early terrorism and later by armed state-formation—was not developed among these Jews at that time.)
As Americans contemplate our own nation’s imperial actions in the world—for example, imposing dictatorships in the Middle East (the Shah in Iran (1953), the new US-affiliated government in Iraq) and
the Americas (Pinochet, and others too numerous to list)—we should ask not only who profits from the policy (“Cui bono?”) to see if it is the American people generally or a far narrower special interest, and should ask whether we the people had given “informed consent” to the policy. Every military adventure undertaken by a government without its people’s informed consent is likely to be a crime, not only internationally as in wars of aggression and assassinations , but in the sense of a massive expenditure of public funds to enrich a private few.
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