Opinions of Peter Belmont
Speaking Truth to Power
| USA and Israel: Does the Titanic Really Need to Sink? |
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by Peter A. Belmont / 2025-12-27
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| The USA and Israel have each, long ago, adopted long-term strategic policies that were, until recently, reasonably regarded as sustainable indefinitely. These policies are now clearly not sustainable indefinitely and can and must change. As yet I see no signs of such change. I write on December 27, 2025. As the old joke has it, the answer to the question “How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light-bulb?” is, “Only one, but the light-bulb needs to want to change.” So far, I have seen no indication that the deep-state or policy-making elites of either country has any desire to change. Changing long-held certainties is very hard on people whose identities depend (or are believed to depend) on holding fast to those certainties. Makes one think of proud and self-comforting discussions of modern engineering sublimity at the Captain’s Table of the Titanic. A. The Long-Term Policies 1. Israel’s Policies Israel adopted the policy, even before 1948, to capture and control the entirety of Palestine and even to take more territory in Lebanon, Syria, perhaps Egypt. This policy was regarded as permanent and sustainable, part of Israel’s national identity. This policy inter alia normalized cruelty to and oppression of Palestinians, whether Israeli citizens, living under occupation, or in diaspora. 2. USA’s Policies The USA adopted the policy, from 1967 onward, to protect Israel diplomatically and supply Israel with large amounts of money and armaments so that Israel could both defend itself and attack its neighbors, in each case with impunity and with immunity from retaliation and in clear violation of international law. B. Both These Policies Must Now Be Seen As Unsustainable Both of these Israeli and USA policies have been regarded as sustainable and thus permanent since 1967 if not longer. They must now be seen as unsustainable. Due to the sluggishness (to say nothing of thugginishness) in recognition of changing circumstances of imperial policy-makers in both countries, neither nation’s policy-makers have yet admitted this fairly recent sea-change. The failure to change long-continued bad habits seems typical of nations as also of individual people! 1. Why is Israel’s Policy Unsustainable? Israel’s policy of territorial expansion, endless war, and endless oppression of Palestinians led to the Hamas attack of October 2023 and the long war (which I and many people describe as “genocide”) that followed and that continues today (even with so-called ceasefires which Israel violates daily). Many people, myself among them, believe that the attack on Israel by Hamas of October 2023 was deliberately planned by Hamas to invite the genocidal behavior with which Israel in fact responded. Hamas’s plan was to give Israel the opportunity and the excuse to “let Israel act like Israel always does”. And that plan, though a horrific disaster for the Palestinian residents of Gaza, succeeded in producing the sea-change in Israel’s prospects which I am describing here. This war is bleeding Israel dry, plunging Israel (slowly but inexorably, even after huge gifts of money by the USA) into bankruptcy. Israel’s citizen-soldiers are refusing to serve. Israel’s economy is declining. Israel’s bond-ratings are sinking. Tourism is dying. Attacks from Yemen (AnsarAllah) and Lebanon (Hezbollah) are nibbling at Israel’s sense of safety and immunity. Life in Israel for Jewish Israelis—once comfortable and comforting—has become tense and unsafe. Significant elements of Israel’s intelligentsia—people who can find work and safety and citizenship outside Israel—are leaving Israel permanently, emigrating. Israel’s need for soldiers to fight its present wars in Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria, has led Israel to change its laws to draft previously exempt orthodox Jews into the army, and they are resisting this massively, leading the nation towards civil war. Most seriously from a security standpoint, the cost of expensive anti-missiles used by Israel to thwart attacks from Yemen and elsewhere is much higher than the cost of the much cheaper missiles and drones that they protect against. Even with huge USA support, Israel is slowly losing the war of attrition. And, of course, Israel has not only become to an alarming degree an international pariah but has lost the support of the American people, of an increasing, though still small, number of American politicians (long part of the ideology-based or corruption-based American Zionist movement), and of American Jews. In New York City, Zohran Mamdani recently won an election for Mayor—while demanding Palestinian rights—receiving 30% of the Jewish vote! 2. Why is the USA’s Policy Unsustainable? American policy since 1967 has been to support Israel with money, armaments, and diplomatic immunity at the UNSC independent of (in spite of) Israel’s actions, in spite of Israel’s crimes. The USA has supported Israel’s genocide under Presidents Biden and Trump and become regarded both internationally and internally as facilitators of genocide. The USA has supplied Israel with anti-missile technology (“Iron Dome”) and with a vast number of anti-missile missiles, each very expensive, and a huge number of these anti-missile missiles were expended in protecting Israel from justifiable retaliation from Iran (in the 12-day war) and from justifiable attacks from Yemen (AnsarAllah) which attacks Israel in protest of Israel’s continuing (even until today!) genocide in Gaza (and “ethnic cleansing” in the West Bank). The USA does not have an infinite supply of anti-missile missiles. The USA’s supply is finite and dwindling. It takes time and lots of money to produce more of these. The American public sees the USA pouring money down the toilet by protecting Israel against the natural (and richly deserved) consequences of Israel’s—so far unalterable—policy of endless war, endless territorial aggrandizement, and endless oppression of Palestinians. The American public (including now many Republicans!) see that the USA has needlessly become a pariah, along with Israel, without any benefit to the USA or to the American people. The satisfaction of AIPAC and the rest of the pro-Zionist donor class in the USA and the enrichment of the military-industrial-complex, which profits handsomely from the USA’s so-far endless gifts of armaments to Israel, is no longer seen as a satisfactory “benefit” to the American people, a satisfactory increment to the “national interest”—not so as to offset the costs! C Both Policies Need To Change And Can Change What’s needed is for the USA to adopt a policy of actually supporting the international-law-based two-state solution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict instead of merely pretending to support it. Israel must make an agonizing about-face, reversing its 76-year-long rejection of the two-state goal, a rejection so clearly enunciated by Bibi Netanyahu. Inasmuch as each nation’s self-regard, “identity”, is tied up in the approval and continuation of the imperial policies that I here describe and denounce, what I am recommending will be agonizing—at least for policy-making elites, the deep-states—in each country. Agonizing, but necessary, because the refusal to recognize reality cannot be prolonged indefinitely.As I see it, the choice in each country is between steadfast intransigence leading toward suicide, on the one hand, and reality-embracing (and deeply embarrassing) change, on the other. It is neither impossible nor unwise for the USA to abandon its imperial (scoff-law) attitudes, which excuse or even celebrate the violation of international law and human rights, and to adopt, instead, the (for the USA unfamiliar) role of a cooperative “citizen” in the international community. Such a change will not endanger the USA but will rescue it—so far as rescue is possible—from the dangers which the USA’s antagonistic attitude toward much of the world, greatly amplified under President Trump, have brought down on it. I hope and believe that adopting a non-belligerent and cooperative attitude toward most of the world’s nations will lead to peace and eventually to prosperity for the everyone. |
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