March 18, 2015: Middle East Wreckage, Hard Realities, Miserable Choices

“Alas, we are not dealing anymore with your grandfather’s Israel, your father’s Iran or the Iraq your son or daughter went off to liberate”
-----Thomas Friedman, New York Times

In a New York Times  article entitled “Go Ahead, Ruin My Day”, Pulitzer Prize columnist Thomas Friedman surveyed the wreckage strewn about the Middle East in the wake of yesterday’s depressing results in Israel. “It is hard to know what is more depressing”,  he wrote,
“that Netanyahu went for the gutter in the last few days in order to salvage his campaign–renouncing his own commitment to a two-state solution with the Palestinians and race-baiting Israeli Jews to get out the vote because, he said, too many Arab Israelis were going to the polls–or the fact that it seemed to work”.  “ But the fact is”, he continued, “A good half of Israel identifies with the paranoid, everyone-is-against-us, and religious nationalist tropes Netanyahu deployed in this campaign. That, along with the fact that some 350,000 settlers are now living in the West Bank, makes it hard to see how a viable two-state solution is possible anymore no matter who would have won.”

This is not entirely the fault of Netanyahu, Freidman observes, the conflict in Gaza with Hamas, and the rejection of the two-state solution by the Palestinians by previous Prime Ministers Barak and Olmert “built Netanyahu’s base as much as he did”.  True enough, the long and twisted events of the last decades have created new difficulties and fashioned new and, increasingly, harder realities.

Moving to Iran, Friedman rightly notes that critics of Obama’s negotiations assume that the United States has more leverage than it has.  “In the brutal Middle East”, he observes, “the only thing that gets anyone’s attention is the threat of regime-toppling force. Obama has no such leverage on Iran.”  The truth–the new reality is that whatever leverage the United States possessed by way of threat of force has been spent in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.  Our military is now so exhausted that former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said that “any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big U.S. land army into the Middle East ‘should have his head examined’”.   Had those wars succeeded the reality would now be different, but they didn’t.  “Geopolitics is all about leverage”, writes Friedman, “and we are negotiating with Iran without the leverage of a credible threat of force.”  Obama is left to do the best he can with what he has, with no good options before him.

Moving from Iraq to Iran, Friedman delves into the ‘transnational’ dynamics and complexities of the region. “O.K.,” he writes, “ so we learn to live with Iran on the edge of a bomb, but shouldn’t we at least bomb the Islamic State to smithereens and help destroy this head-chopping menace? Now I despise ISIS as much as anyone, but let me just toss out a different question: Should we be arming ISIS? Or let me ask that differently: Why are we, for the third time since 9/11, fighting a war on behalf of Iran?

“In 2002, we destroyed Iran’s main Sunni foe in Afghanistan (the Taliban regime). In 2003, we destroyed Iran’s main Sunni foe in the Arab world (Saddam Hussein). But because we failed to erect a self-sustaining pluralistic order, which could have been a durable counterbalance to Iran, we created a vacuum in both Iraq and the wider Sunni Arab world. That is why Tehran’s proxies now indirectly dominate four Arab capitals: Beirut, Damascus, Sana and Baghdad.”

ISIS, with all its awfulness, emerged as the homegrown Sunni Arab response to this crushing defeat of Sunni Arabism — mixing old pro-Saddam Baathists with medieval Sunni religious fanatics with a collection of ideologues, misfits and adventure-seekers from around the Sunni Muslim world. Obviously, I abhor ISIS and don’t want to see it spread or take over Iraq. I simply raise this question rhetorically because no one else is: Why is it in our interest to destroy the last Sunni bulwark to a total Iranian takeover of Iraq? Because the Shiite militias now leading the fight against ISIS will rule better? Really?” (1)

We are left with only a series of miserable choices made infinitely more grim by the ham-handed policies that both misguided military adventure one the one hand, and ‘benign neglect’ on the other, have fostered.  Both ISIS and the Israeli election are stark warnings that the hour is getting late.
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1. “Go Ahead, Ruin My Day” .  Thomas Friedman, Op-Ed, New York Times 3.18.15

March 17, 2015: The Polls have Closed, End of the Two-State Solution, Prescription for Disaster

The polls have closed in Israel and, as we speak, the election is too close to call. Two of the three major polls have the Likud party in a dead heat with a coalition calling itself the Zionist Union dominated by the old Labor Party of Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, and Yitzhak Rabin. Each coalition is projected to win 27 seats in the Knesset (Israeli Parliament) with the party best able to put together a 60 seat majority coalition to form the new government. Accordingly, Benjamin Netanyahu has declared himself the early victor though, at this writing, the opposition has yet to concede.

By all accounts Netanyahu was losing this election. In a desperate gamble to hold power he arranged with the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives to come to Washington and address a joint session of Congress setting off a firestorm of partisan bickering as many here in this country saw the move as a bold-face affront to the current administration, and a cheap political ploy by the Rescumlican opposition in the bargain. Then yesterday ‘Bibi" boldly announced that under his leadership there will be no Palestinian State, effectively putting an end to the peace process begun so long ago at Camp David, now begging the question: ‘where do we go from here’?

New York Times and Foreign Affairs columnist and Middle East correspondent Thomas Friedman has thought long and hard on the subject. Like many of us, he celebrated the victory by the Israeli’s in the 1967 war characterizing his high school years as "one big celebration of Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War." (1) I was a senior in High School at the time, just graduating that June, but I remember the near unanimity of my classmates and the surrounding community in our support for Israel. For us the Israeli’s represented the best of the ‘western’ legacy: technologically advanced and democratic as opposed to the more ‘backward’ and autocratic regimes in the area. This was the prevailing paradigm as it pertained to the region with a little spicing, of course, of cold-war East vs. West ideology as an icing on the cake. It is a view that still pertains in much of America.

What has changed in the nearly half century since the I graduated from High School during the heat of the Six-Day War, is that the consensus concerning Israel has become torn at the edges and now is threatening to unravel altogether. Where once there was near complete bi-partisan support one now finds unquestioning support for Israel limited to the far right of the Republican Party. Across the rest of the political spectrum one encounters varying degrees of support from resignation, distrust, opposition to outright disgust with the behavior of Israel as it pertains to not only the peace process and its abuse of it, but to the ongoing building of settlements in the occupied territory.

The problem, when discussing Israel, is that it is almost impossible to raise a criticism without being accused of either overt or latent anti-Semitism. To voice any concern over the displacement of indigenous populations in what is, in effect, an ‘ethnic cleansing’, is to risk being so labeled. The charge carries with it all the emotional implications of ‘racism’ and is meant to silence the critic. I will risk it anyway.

Let’s be clear on one point here. I am not going to say that Israel has no right to exist, although justification for a ‘theological’ state smacks of iron-age political justification and is foreign to the modern ear. But the argument that without a nation-state the Jewish communities throughout the world had no means of protection, no entity to represent them and therefore made them more vulnerable to pogroms and persecutions is, in my view, salient. For this reason alone the State of Israel should and must exist. If one grants this premise it follows that Israel does have legitimate security interests and that these must be defended. The United States has always stood foursquare behind this proposition and has, accordingly, not only supplied Israel with massive amounts of military hardware and economic assistance, but has rapidly come to its aid when it was under attack, as when it was under attack by Saddam Hussein’s scud missiles and we rapidly supplied them with the means to shoot them down.

It is one thing to provide unqualified support for the legitimate security needs of the State of Israel and quite another to argue, in effect, that such support means unqualified support for whatever the Israeli’s do. The confusion of one with the other has always characterized the far right in this country, but the disentanglement of fundamental security from other facets of Israeli foreign policy began with the Suez Crisis of 1956, (2) during which the Eisenhower administration had to reign in on a military adventure in which the Israeli’s joined Britain and France in an aggression against Nasser’s Egypt. For this, Eisenhower was roundly criticized and the American consensus regarding Israel held firm.

The euphoria, and there can be no other word to describe the American reaction, surrounding the Israeli exploits of the Six-Day War in 1967 proved to be the high water mark however, for unqualified domestic consensus concerning Israel. For as America was celebrating the victory of a modern democratic state over the forces of autocracy, the attack by the Israeli’s on the U.S.S. Liberty (3) sent some nasty vibrations down the corridors of the Pentagon and State Department. America was learning that it couldn’t put blind trust in our erstwhile ally.

The distrust deepened with each passing year and each cycle of the violence that began to characterize the occupied territories taken by the Israeli’s in the conflict. The indigenous populations began to be pushed out of certain areas of the occupied lands to make way for Jewish settlements, dividing the land. Military check points were established and a military regime was soon in place with all that this implies. Resistance to the new order emerged leading to further crackdowns...the story is a familiar one, but for our purposes I want to dwell on a few instances that materially changed our diplomatic posture regarding Israel and fractured the consensus that once governed our policy toward that nation.

First after years of prodding, pleading, and negotiating President Jimmy Carter was able to get the Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachim Begin to meet at Camp David and negotiate a peace. The process proved difficult and by all accounts Sadat was about to throw in the towel and returned home. Carter begged him to stick it out and, returning to Begin threatened to withhold spare parts for the Israeli military and other aid if Israel did not comply. Under pressure, Begin signed the treaty. In the aftermath Israel did vacate some land, withdrew some settlements and there has been peace between the two countries ever since; but he treated the agreement as just another day at the office, honoring his agreement with Egypt but not honoring the promise not to build more settlements on the West Bank, and to begin serious negotiations to end the Palestinian conflict. The disingenuous behavior of the Likud leader laid the groundwork for much that followed.

The invasion by Israel of South Lebanon in 1982, and again in 1985-2000 (4) also proved to further fracture support for Israel in the United States. In 1982 the Israeli’s purposely misled the Reagan administration as to its military aims plunging much further into Lebanon that the United States government was led to believe and, when things got out of hand, the United States sent a military force to Beirut to help restore the peace. The Reagan Administration, confronted with a suicide bombing of the marine barracks, quickly withdrew American forces sending a message throughout the Arab world that would later come to haunt U.S. policymakers. The 1985 invasion proved equally disastrous for the Israelis as the world witnessed the wholesale massacre of two Palestinian refugee camps by Christian militias as the Israeli armed forces looked on. Now, after nearly 50 years the Israeli political system presents us with the spectacle of Benjamin Netanyahu who, within the span of 3 weeks, comes to Washington and, diplomatically speaking, defecates on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives and then stands before the world and announces an end to the Camp David peace process.

One still encounters unqualified support for Israel in the United States but, increasingly, it comes from the voices of Sheldon Adelson, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Fixed Noise, and various fundamentalist sects who support the state not because they care about the Jewish people or Judaism; but because they see signs of the end times and they wait impatiently for the end of this world. Some in west Texas, it has been reported, are even breeding the ‘red-haired’ heifer so soon to they expect to erect a new temple on the mount.

I encounter many such supporters trolling the internets (as ‘ol Two-Cows would say), who protest loudly about Obama betraying a friend, with Israel still holding that pristine position of good fighting the good fight against those evil ‘camel-jockeys’. I even ran across one wag who asked in all innocence "what have the Arabs contributed to civilization anyway"?

I respond, when I’m up to it by trying to set the record straight. First a real friend and ally does not fire upon one of our ships and kill our seamen. A real friend and ally does not purposely mislead us concerning its military objectives. A real friend and ally bargains in good faith when we are attempting to be an honest broker in the region. Israel has been neither a good friend or an a reliable ally. As stated in another context, nations do not have friends; they have only interests, and the interests of the United States and those of Israel, or any other country for that matter, never completely coincide. Honest differences exist and will always exist and to be accused of anti-Semitism by raising legitimate issues is a gross slander and injustice.

Secondly, it is anti-Semitic to roundly characterize the Palestinians and other peoples of the region since, as an Egyptian professor of mine once pointed out, they are Semites too. In any case I had to instruct the troll on the nets that the Arabs gave us agriculture, algebra, astronomy, philosophy, three, and if you count Zoroastrianism, four of the world’s most influential religions, not to mention mosaic art, poetry and the preservation of ancient Greek and Roman culture that sparked the Renaissance. To view them as card-board characters, ‘camel-jockeys’ in the popular parlance is to categorically misunderstand. But such is the state of American education.

I digress. The near universal consensus concerning Israel has now been shattered, and Netanyahu may have perhaps done irreparable harm with his antics of the last fortnight. The question now emerges, "where do we go from here"?

Like Tom Friedman, I too had loudly celebrated the Israeli triumph in the 1967 war. Compared to the quagmire in which we found ourselves in Viet Nam the quick triumph of the Israeli’s against the combined forces of Jordan, Syria and Egypt was exhilarating. But, like Friedman I have come to a much more ‘mature’ if more complicated understanding. It began with a reading of a book called "The Other Side of the Coin" published in the early 70's as the story of Israeli occupation began to be told, followed by years of watching the events unfold in the region and the struggle our government, be it Democratic or Republican, has had trying to broker a peace. Like Friedman I have come to appreciate the complex undercurrents and the difficulty both sides have in reaching across the great divide.

Friedman, who has won the Pulitzer Prize three times, has suggested that the failure of the two-state solution will invite, in time, pressure for a one-state solution. If this happens, Friedman has warned, the Palestinian population, now entirely incorporated into the state of Israel, will demand a ‘one-man, one-vote’ constitutional participation and, since the indigenous Palestinian population will shortly outnumber the Jewish population, Israel would no longer be a "Jewish" state by definition. This constitutes a greater threat, in Friedman’s view, than a two-state solution because if it comes to pass the very essence of Israel, so dear to the hard-line fundamentalists both at home and abroad, would disappear. For this reason, Friedman argues, Israel cannot abandon the two-state solution.

From this perspective Israel, it appears, must be saved from itself. Since Netanyahu has openly declared that no Palestinian state will emerge on his watch the United States should immediately, upon his being named Prime Minister, announce with our allies our support for a one-state solution. This could be done publicly, at the U.N. General Assembly for instance, or we could through diplomatic channels inform the Israeli government that we will change policy if Netanyahu does not immediately return to the table in good faith accompanied by an announcement that the Israelis will abandon the settlements in the occupied territories.

Absent this there is a third alternative nobody is talking about but is, I have long suspected, the real objective of the Israeli government. That is to stall, delay, obfuscate, mislead, until the world is presented with a fait accompli, and the territories are in effect annexed. The Palestinians suspect as much, so does much of the Arab world. Netanyahu, by blowing his cover in an erstwhile effort hold unto power for a little while longer, has just telegraphed the same message to us. This is a prescription for disaster. 
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1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Friedman

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Crisis

3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Liberty_incident

4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Lebanon_conflict_(1985%E2%80%932000)

March 16, 2015: Trailing in the Polls, Rat in Heat, Monument To Failure.

Trailing in the polls behind center-left Labour Party leader Herzog in the run up to this week’s national elections in Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin ‘Bibi” Netanyahu appeared in a settlement on the outskirts of East Jerusalem and proclaimed that as long as he were Prime Minister, and his Likud Party were in control, there will be no evacuations from the occupied territories, and no independent Palestinian State.

Here, laid bare in the heat of a national election, was a simple declaration that the regime of the Likud Party will not negotiate in good faith with any Palestinian authority for a so-called ‘two-state’ solution.

In an article by William Booth, the Washington Post reported in today’s evening edition that
'“On the final day of his reelection campaign, Benjamin Netanyahu said that as long as he serves as prime minister of Israel, there will not be an independent Palestinian nation.

His declaration marks the second time in a month that Netanyahu has chosen to confront Washington directly: first by opposing, in a speech before Congress, President Obama’s possible deal to try to curtail Iran’s nuclear ambitions and now by opposing a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which Secretary of State John F. Kerry spent nine months pursuing.

Netanyahu’s assertion, made on camera to an Israeli media site, appeared to reverse the prime minister’s previous declarations of support for a sovereign Palestinian state.

“I think that anyone who is going to establish a Palestinian state today and evacuate lands is giving attack grounds to the radical Islam against the state of Israel,” he said in a video interview published Monday on the NRG Web site.

“Anyone who ignores this is sticking his head in the sand. The left does this time and time again,” Netanyahu said. “We are realistic and understand.”

The final polls before Tuesday's Israeli election shows the opposition poised to defeat Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's party. (Reuters)

Netanyahu was then asked specifically if he meant that a Palestinian state would not be established if he were reelected prime minister. He answered, “Correct.”

In a speech at Bar-Ilan University in 2009, Netanyahu famously said he supported a two-state solution to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as long as Israeli conditions were met and Israel’s security was guaranteed. That speech and two rounds of U.S.-brokered peace talks since then led many to assume that the prime minister was prepared to see a Palestinian state arise on the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip.

On Monday, Americans and Israelis were left unsure whether Netanyahu was just speaking off the cuff during an interview in the heat of a very close race or whether he was signaling a real change in policy.

State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki declined comment except to say: “There are many things said leading up to elections.’’ She added: “Obviously, our view continues to be that the only way to have peace and stability in the region is for there to be a two-state solution.

Erel Margalit, an opposition leader in the Labor Party, called Netanyahu’s statements “outrageous.”

“It undermines the direction that Israel has declared it is striving for during the last three prime ministers,” Margalit told The Washington Post. “We need to build trust with the Palestinians again and make sure they do not continue with their unilateral steps.”

Saeb Erekat, the former chief Palestinian negotiator during Kerry’s peace talks, said he was not surprised to hear the remarks. “Netanyahu has done everything possible to bury the two-state solution,” he said. “This is not something new to us.”

Netanyahu’s words hit the Internet soon after the prime minister came to a Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem on Monday and warned that if it were not for him and his right-wing Likud party, residents here would be next-door neighbors with the Islamist militant movement Hamas.

At a news conference at which journalists were not allowed to ask questions, Netanyahu stood at a lectern on the terrace of Yaron and Sigal Hakoshrein’s new condominium apartment, framed by building cranes over his shoulder, towering above units under construction.

Netanyahu called his host to stand beside him and asked on camera, “Do you want to see Hamastan over there on that mountaintop?” He then pointed in the general direction of Bethlehem, the Palestinian city in the West Bank where the Bible says Jesus was born.

Yaron Hakoshrein, a Likud activist, shook his head and said no.

“Then there is only one answer. Then you have to put the voting slip for Likud in the ballot box,” Netanyahu said.

The message was not subtle — but it sure was direct.

Israelis who fear that Hamas will take over the West Bank, as it did the Gaza Strip in 2007, have adopted the shorthand “Hamastan” to express that concern. Hamas is branded a terrorist organization by Israel and the United States. Israel and Hamas fought a 50-day war last summer.

On Sunday night, Netanyahu warned supporters at a rally in Tel Aviv that he may not win Tuesday’s election, a potentially dramatic fall for a consummate political survivor whose nine years in office transformed him into the public face of contemporary Israel.

The final round of opinion polls Friday showed Netanyahu and his Likud party facing a surprisingly strong challenge by Isaac Herzog, leader of the center-left Labor Party, and his running mate, former peace negotiator Tzipi Livni, who hold a small but steady lead.

For the past five days, Netanyahu has been working to bulk up support among his nationalist right-wing base, warning Israelis that his challengers would “give away land for peace” to the Palestinians, would divide the “eternal capital of Israel” and would turn over the eastern sections to the Palestinians for a future state.

Netanyahu has vowed “no concessions” and “no withdrawals” from the West Bank in speeches and statements during the campaign.

Over the past quarter-century, Israel and the Palestinians have engaged in many talks that failed to bear fruit. Kerry’s attempt collapsed last April, with each side blaming the other.

In a statement issued from his Likud party a week ago, Netanyahu was quoted as saying that his past support for an independent Palestinian state is now irrelevant.

“In the Mideast today, any evacuated territory will be overtaken by radical Islam and terror groups backed by Iran. Therefore, there will be no withdrawals and no concessions. It’s just not relevant,” read the statement, attributing the remark to Netanyahu.

Afterward, Netanyahu’s spokesman attempted to clarify matters by stating that the prime minister meant to say that “under current conditions in the Middle East, any land that is handed over would be grabbed by Islamist extremists.
                                                                    
The Palestinian Authority under President Mahmoud Abbas, which oversees part of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, has vowed to pursue a path of nonviolence and has coordinated its security responsibilities with Israeli forces.

Netanyahu’s campaign staged its Monday news event at the Jewish settlement of Har Homa in East Jerusalem for a reason. During his first term as prime minister, Netanyahu approved construction there.                                  

Netanyahu said settlement construction at Har Homa was not only to provide housing for residents but also to deny Palestinians territory and contiguity.

Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are considered illegal under international law. U.S. diplomats prefer to call the settlements “illegitimate.” The Israelis dispute that.

“It’s a neighborhood that I initiated in 1997 in my first stint as prime minister,” Netanyahu said. He said its value was that “it stops the continued advancement of the Palestinians.’’‘(1)

“Bibi” is, of course, running like a rat in heat in an attempt to retain his hold on power.  Whether this represents a change in Likud policy or simply an attempt to rally his political base is now a question of some debate.  Many, however, myself included, see Netanyahu finally coming clean, in the heat of battle, by declaring his real agenda.  Many international observers, over the years, have been frustrated by the intransigence of both sides but it was revealed today that Netanyahu and Likud have no intention of proceeding further along the path toward peace.

The election in Israel is, no doubt, a divisive one.  But the divisions plaguing Israeli politics have now spilled over into the international arena, first by the Prime Minister’s outrageous conduct in coming to the United States and addressing Congress in an overt attempt to sabotage delicate on-going negotiations with Iran involving not only the United States but several member nations of the U.N. Security Council.  Now he stands before his nation and the world and unilaterally declares an end to the decades-long peace process.  An act an Israeli Labour Party spokesman quickly labeled ‘outrageous”.

For a long time many have suspected the Israeli government of acting in bad faith.  The result of Israeli policy–particularly under the leadership of the Likud coalition–has been to further alienate support for Israel among its allies, particularly the United States.  It has also further alienated Israel in the region. Nothing demonstrates this more vividly than the erection of that fence along its border, in effect transforming Israel into a super ghetto.

The tragedy that is the Middle East is in large part due to the legacy of the treatment of it’s peoples by European powers.  The story of the Holocaust and the impetus that gave to the nascent Zionist movement as it emerged with the Balfour agreement just prior to World War I is well known.  In the aftermath of Hitler’s terror and rampant anti-Semitism in other parts of Europe there emerged a groundswell of support for the creation of the state of Israel.  But it was British frustration in dealing with Zionist uprisings (and, yes, terrorist activities) and finally the recognition of Israel by the United States that finally made the difference.

What’s less understood here in the United States is the European legacy as it pertains to the Arab world.  With the end of the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of the First World War, Britain, France, and other European powers quickly moved to fill the void.  Most of the ‘national’ frontiers were drawn up in the British Foreign Office with Great Britain assuming ‘trusteeship’ over the territory of Palestine. What followed was that the ‘west’ quickly set up regimes that promised to maintain order and, with the discovery of oil, deliver the ‘Saudi Tea” at reasonable prices and on time.  Several ruling cliques were recognized, aided, and supported with military hardware to ensure that stability would reign. To the Arab on the street watching the national treasure being pumped out of the ground by foreign nationals for pennies on the dollar was bad enough; that damn little of it reached the villages and the people only added to the outrage.  And, when confronted with popular unrest the United States could be relied upon not only to supply the tanks and helicopters, guns and rockets, tear gas and bullets, but also the funding and training of not so secret security forces like Iran’s Savak under the late Sha.  The ‘West’ and increasingly the United States began to be seen by the Arab in the street as the ‘force-behind-the-force”.  Not only the Israeli’s but the Arab States themselves being mere puppets dancing to the command of a foreign master.  It has been the “European Neo-Colonial” postwar legacy that has been the driving force behind the divisions in the region; a legacy with an increasingly American face.

For nearly 40 years now the United States has been about the business of trying to act as a neutral arbiter in the region, resisting at all costs the inclusion of our Western Allies, the Russians, or anyone else that would offer to become an honest broker.  We have had little success.  We have had little success because it has become increasingly difficult for the players in the region (particularly ‘non-state’ players) to see us as an ‘honest broker’.  This is not only because of our unqualified support of Israel but because of our propping up increasingly unpopular and repressive regimes that serve only the petrol -industrial interests internationally and the interests of the ruling clique in our client states.  When the governments of the region turn on the people, Israel against Hamas, Egypt against the Arab Spring, Iraq against its tribal uprisings, it is with American arms, American built tanks, American built helicopters.

This posture is particularly attenuated when it comes to Israel.  The Israeli military is a wholly owned subsidiary of the American Military-Industrial complex.  The United States gives more foreign aid to Israel than any other country and without American support it is difficult to imagine an Israeli Prime Minister saying what Netanyahu said today.  The posture of the United States is seen by all parties as so one-sided that it is no wonder our Secretary of State be it Henry Kissassinger, Madeline Albright, George Schultz, or John kerry, is not taken seriously.

Violence begets violence and it has been the long-standing policy of Israel to retaliate, sometimes all out of proportion to the offense.  The result has been, however, when a cycle of acute violence erupts, for the United States to demand that the Palestinians stop their attacks, pledge not to engage in any more violence, and reign in on their radical groups.  The Palestinian Authority, as did formerly the P.L.O. worked with the west and even the Israeli’s to gain a measure of tranquility so the peace process could proceed.  Only when the Israeli response becomes nearly an international embarrassment, as in Lebanon, does the United States deign to intervene.

What has emerged, over time and the endless cycles of violence and retribution, is that the radicals have become ever more empowered because whatever level of trust established is quickly assaulted by the endless violence.  Both sides blame the other until the origins of conflict are lost in the dusty memories of time or clothed in increasingly religious garments.  Both sides entrench like the battlements on the Western Front a hundred years ago.

Nowhere is the evidence of this mentality so stark as with the wall currently being constructed around the State of Israel.  With the completion of this monument to failure, the Jewish State will become at last secure within the walls of it’s own creation.  The Warsaw Ghetto will have been successfully recreated on the banks of the Mediterranean  another inescapable legacy, or so it seems.
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(1).  Washington Post Evening Edition, March 16, 2015, article by William Booth dateline Jerusalem.