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by Peter A. Belmont / 2011-02-18
© 2011 Peter Belmont
Almost every player in the Israel/Palestine misery is asking for help, actually or figuratively—or should be doing so.
Captives of Israel, the Palestinians are abjectly powerless, facing a regime whose thugishness puts that of the worst Arab despotisms to shame. They ask for help. How they’ve hoped, for so many years, that a president of the USA would appear as a deus ex machina to rescue them from Israel’s cruel attentions.
Captives of the pro-Israel Lobby (and of the military-industrial-complex), presidents of the USA have needed help and most must have tried to engineer means to achieve that help, but have necessarily done so sub silentio, always moved by the need to secure re-election or to secure some election for their party. These electoral ambitions are the principal chains which make captives of American presidents. (I discount the bullet, such as that which killed JFK, though bullets too may have been tools of control of American presidents.)
Israeli governments may not always have thought of themselves as captives, but the unplanned ascendancy of the settlers, nationalists, and religious parties has made captives of any Israeli politicians who might have desired to make a “just and lasting peace” with the Palestinians. The existence of an Israeli “left” until it essentially vanished a few years ago suggests that at least some Israelis feel themselves prisoners, even today.
Today (2011-2-18), President Obama followed so many of his predecessors in infamy, casting the USA’s veto in the UN Security Council (UNSC) on a draft resolution which did no more than restate the law as it had many times been stated in that same UNSC—that Israel’s settlements are illegal. “The earth, not the sun, is at the center of the universe,” he seemed to echo the Pope of Galileo’s time. The settlements which the UNSC and also the International Court of Justice have declared to be illegal may not be said—and are not said—by a USA president to be illegal, even though they are as illegal as can be and every one knows it.
”I am a captive of the Lobby, [help me],” the president (all but) said today. And the Palestinians said, today, “We are still prisoners of the Israelis—help us.” And at least a few Israelis said, “We are prisoners of the settler movement, prisoners of the American’s pro-Israel-hardline Lobby, prisoners of our own fears, [help us].”
Only the Palestinians dare to ask for help out loud.
Who, anyway, could help? The answer is: the nations to whom the USA and Israel have so falsely claimed to be “lights.”
The nations who watched today’s charade at the UNSC, a tragedy playing out with that sickening feeling you get when you see a car skidding on ice toward a cliff and know it will go over, carrying away all hands—the nations can help.
Turkey and the South Americans and a few Europeans not excessively (as Germany and UK) in the hands of Zionist fanatics could move the UNGA into ”emergency special session” and seek agreement within the UNGA to do what the UNSC has refused (because of the lonely USA veto) to do; and they could do far more.
The UNGA could formulate a BDS-like resolution demanding that Israel remove the settlers, demolish the wall and the settlements, and lift the siege on Gaza. Their resolution could set a time limit for completion, set monthly milestones, and set forth sanctions for UNGA member nations to impose on Israel for Israeli failures to keep to published milestones and schedules.
None of these countries wants to do this.
All hoped the UNSC would do its job, hoped that recent events (the WikiLeaks, the al-Jazeera-leaked Palestinian Papers, Tunisia, Sudan, Egypt, would have changed the world enough that the president of the USA (soi-disant the most powerful man on earth!) could see beyond its pitiful domestic political power struggles to do a statesmanlike thing.
But pitiful domestic politics triumphed in the USA and statesmanship once again had to await a better day.
And so the nations, even and especially those with trade with Israel, must contemplate trade sanctions as tools to persuade Israel to do what the USA is too weak to demand—comply with international law.
Let no-one suppose that Israeli/Palestinian peace is around any nearby corner. It has never been further away.
What is needed is help. A Divine Wind (kamikazi) must once again blow in the world, but not this time a wind of suicide bombing (as was the kamikazi of WWII Japan; rather, a kamikazi like the original storms (divine winds) which saved Japan from invasion from China and Korea by the armies and navies of Kublai Khan in the 1200s.
Today’s divine wind must blow strongly enough that the USA and Israel will be powerless before it. This wind must be the righteous breath of a world tired (at long last) of empire, tired of colonialism, tired of rule by oligarchies, and quite possibly tired of the economic rule imposed for so long by America, the so-called “neoliberalism” with its dreadful suppression of the needs of ordinary people in favor of the profits of large corporations and banks.
The nations can begin in the UNGA by doing what the UNSC never even contemplated—demanding that Israel ignore the permissiveness of the USA and attend to the strictures of all the other nations. And these strictures need to be severe enough to persuade Israel that its interest lies not in continued occupation of the Golan Heights and Gaza and the West Bank but, rather, in dignified withdrawal behind its own internationally recognized borders. Discovering just how severe such strictures need be may be a matter of experiment, although the use preliminarily of mild strictures risks the boiling-frog scenario whereby Israel may continue and increase its lawlessness and cruelty in the hope that it can make the nations blink first. Who would attack the king must make sure to kill him swiftly.
Will such help suffice? Only time will tell. So far, the nations have not acted, and the USA and Israel and the Palestinians have remained prisoners, each needing help, the Palestinians alone asking for help.
The tool which has served the Palestinians since 1967, really since 1947, has been “sumud”—steadfastness. They have not given up. But sumud alone will not defeat Israel or persuade Israel to voluntarily pull back its cruel army of occupation and settlers. USA steadfastness shows no signs of outlasting or overcoming the pro-Israel Lobby (or the Military-Industrial-Complex, which delivers arms to Israel and to all its neighbors). Israeli steadfastness, if any may be so called, has rather gone in the wrong direction, toward increased lawlessness and increased persecution of Palestinians.
As for myself, I write. And I hope. And my (secular) prayers go to nations like Turkey and the South Americans which have shown independence of the USA of a sort which could lead to non-military progress on many fronts, including the amelioration of the Israeli practices of occupation.
I think that most people hope for world progress based on non-violent assertion (and obtaining) of human and democratic rights. That is the message of the revolution in Egypt—that it was peaceful (on the parts of the revolutionaries at least) and successful—and greeted with enormous warmth throughout the rest of the world (showing the rest of the world also hungry for an end to the military dictatorships and armies of occupation that so afflict their own and other countries).
And if Israel is ever, at long last, required to begin removing settlers, wall, and settlements, I suspect that peace will not be far behind. But peace must await the removal of the settlements, etc., and not the other way around.
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