Tag Israel | VenusPlusX

Op-Ed: The Inherent Corruption of US-Israel Relations

A complete political perversion of diplomacy is upon us that further illustrates the underlying illogic that cements US-Israel relations.

Photo by Michael Loadenthal
Flickr/creative commons

Speaker of the House, John Boehner, and the Israeli Ambassador to the US, Ron Dermer, conspired to invite Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address both houses of Congress on March 3, just two weeks before the Israeli leader stands for re-election.

An invitation of this magnitude never goes, shouldn’t go, to a foreign leader hoping to make his bona fides for an upcoming election at home by addressing our Congress, in this case, allowing Netanyahu to undermine US leadership in nuclear disarmament talks with Iran, something Israel has objected to. Rightwing Israelis don’t want any talks about any subject between America and Iran which they view as threats to Israel’s security. And, Netanyahu at least doesn’t see the perversity of taking America’s chief podium to criticize a country where he is a guest.

House Speaker Boehner is knowingly usurping important presidential prerogatives and weakening the presidency (whomever that may be, now and the future) because foreign relations decisions (and invitations) are the exclusive purview of the executive branch, not the legislative branch, of our government. This makes Boehner (who you will remember is third in line for the presidency should anything happen to the current president and vice-president) particularly unsuited to serve our country. Boehner gives us so many self-repudiating examples of his sheer stupidity it’s hard to keep up, I know.

Jewish organizations and politicians and activists in this country have weighed in on Netanyahu’s planned address to Congress, some lobbying for a postponement to March 17, after Israeli elections, others mounting petitions to cancel it. Both President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry have refused to meet with Netanyahu during his US visit. Netanyahu’s opposing candidates back home in Israel have questioned even the legality of Netanyahu’s American address this close to the election, which is not guaranteed to go his way. A boycott by some or all members of Congress is being planned. No doubt plans are underway for March 3 street protests and other campaigns objecting to this ugly expression of the congenital dysfunction of US-Israel relations.

We have to understand history to fully comprehend how we’ve arrived at this awful point.

Once Israel and the US (and England) were able to finesse this blatant land grab based on questionable ancient principles of imminent domain and general guilt-tripping after World War II, the only hope, the only hope, for success in this region would have been the emergence of a western state that was totally dedicated to fostering regional and world peace, including the integration and uplifting of the existing population in Palestine. We all know that never happened. Instead, the superiority complex of early and current zionists has done nothing but challenge, irritate, and disappear anyone in the way of their complete domination of the region. With America and Britain’s blessing, Israel conquered Palestine, and the massacres and ethnic cleansing persist to this day.

We can’t fail to mention here that christian fundamentalists in and out of political power blindly call for the supremacy of Israel at all costs to preserve the landing strip for Jesus’s return to earth. This zealotry, on a par with zionist zealotry, undergirds America’s unquestioned love of Israel and support for its actions, no matter how heinous. The reality of the here and now and what’s best for the future are superseded by the politicization and prioritizing of these highly personal religious beliefs on the part of our elected leaders.

As we have written before, the jewish people worldwide, including Israel, and the American people, must take a step back and consider the roots of the Israel disaster and the hatred of Americans throughout Middle East it has engendered.

Yesterday, L. Michael Hager at Truthout, offered a thoughtful review of Alison Weir‘s new book, Against Our Better Judgment: The hidden history of how the US was used to create Israel (CreateSpace Publishing), shedding more light on just how deep this US-Israeli conspiracy to defraud the world goes. The full review and the book are both worth a full read, as is Ms. Weir’s website, If America Knew.

Zionist organizations established in the 1930s and ’40s lobbied President Harry Truman to recognize the state of Israel despite strong objections by Middle East experts. Loy Henderson of the State Department warned that the UN partition plan would “guarantee that the Palestine problem would be permanent and still more complicated in the future.” Both the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA echoed that view. (Hager on Weir, Truthout)

Did you know that Louis Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter, two US Supreme Court Justices at the time of the formation of modern Israel after World War II, were secret zionist supporters who led the manipulation of American and British lawmakers to support their efforts? As activists and members of the public there can be no end to our excavation of US-Israel relations because they have upended and are upending half the world, presenting one of the greatest obstacles to world peace.

Today, the US funds the Israeli military with over $3 billion aimed at oppressing Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. It is your tax dollars that support this aggression and the deaths of thousands. That’s on you. What are you going to do about it?

As citizens of our war-torn world we must reckon with how and why the world has been hurt by Israel’s actions and the continued culpability of America in destabilizing the region through its unwavering, and chronically unquestioning, support of Israel’s 60-year reign of terror.

When will we break this insane and self-destructive love affair with Israel, and stand up for the rights of Palestinians? Seek out websites and read books like Weir’s to educate yourself. Talk to your friends and families about this pressing issue. Join or otherwise support organizations who are working each day to accomplish this goal. Get the blood off your hands.

Related:
Israel’s Messy Package, Part 1 and Part 2
Professor Walt Helps Explain America’s Bankrupt Israeli Policy

Flickr/creative commons

Israel’s Messy Package (Part 2)

flickr/creative commons

Yesterday, in Part 1, I told my personal family’s jewish history in an attempt to put the existence of Israel into a broader context. Earlier enough, I had dispensed with the myth of my youth, that Israel was simply the world’s and Palestine’s gift to the jewish culture, a safe harbor for Jews following the atrocities of WWII. In fact, Israel was conceived by a militant zionist movement begun in the late 1800s, so it is motive that has to be understood for anything to change.

(We use the word, zionists, as we use the word, christianists, to denote fundamentalists who purport to believe in their respective religious traditions but display none of the characteristics, quite the opposite.)

The early zionists set on their quest to establish a religious state, with eyes on the grand prize: the occupation of the geographical, historical, and religious epicenter of the Middle East. Its big mistake, and the mistake of the US and other countries that helped bring about the 1948 establishment of the state Israel, was that two other major world religions, Christianity and Islam, also lay claim on the same pile of sand, sharing reverence to the same Abraham.

Zionists, however, proceeded and proceed today according to their belief that they are the superior race and religion which has suffered injustices for centuries (more and worse than any other) making them singularly deserving of a special berth in the world, a completely new class of world citizen with complete dominion over their tribal enemies. For starters, that’s just a galling affront to all people and all religions. Logically, adherents to any theoretical superior religion would perforce never resort to violence, and never deny the beliefs or non-beliefs of their neighbors.

Upon arrival in the region, the zionists saw no wisdom in becoming the local peaceniks or diplomatic leaders to bring about world peace (in which case they might today be considered one of the most respected countries in the region and the world). Instead they began an unending and bloody campaign to expand, encroach, invade, disenfranchise, and discriminate against all non-jews in the way, in any way they could. Rather than justifying war as their need to secure their borders, they would do better to ask themselves what they have done to draw the ire of their sequestered and suffering neighbors.

Israel was founded on the basis of religious extremism and discrimination, and has rendered itself indefensible. Just yesterday, Navi’ Pillay, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, called for an investigation into Israeli war crimes.

Israel’s failure to fully enfranchise the Palestinian people from the start, its commitment to stand in the way of any two-state solution, and their institutional religious discrimination set the course for failure. We are now living through the results of these failures, waiting for new, younger, progressive, and humane leaders to take the reins of the Israeli government, and waiting for America to wake up.

The zionists have steadily expanded their movement, now known as today’s Israel Lobby (greater than AIPAC), monolithic in scope, hiding in plain sight, and controlling practically every aspect throughout modern American life. It’s not just the $3 billion a year and technical/military assistance our tax dollars pay for. The Israel Lobby controls the election of congressmen and every presidential election, and, sadly, all media. Unquestioned loyalty to Israel has, unfortunately, always been viewed as being in America’s interests by guaranteeing a permanent base in the region to spread our own nationalistic, capitalistic religion. And, in case we forget, because the existence of Israel happens to coincide with christianist belief that it is necessary for Jesus Christ’s someday return.

The Israel Lobby reminds me of another group: the secretive christianist organization known as The Family (also as The Fellowship) with its 10,000 cells world wide that is also working for religious dominion over its perceived enemies.

So, today, I’m asking some starting questions. We’d like to hear what you think.

1. Why are activists, who are no longer hypnotized by the Israel Lobby rhetoric and working to solve the humanitarian crises underway, so roundly criticized, even from their left flank?

2. Why are so many vocal members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) movement still blinded by the Israel Lobby’s talking points, failing to recognize our innate solidarity with Israel’s victims?

3. When will America take down the veil and reveal to the world that today’s Israel has no intention of seeking a two-state solution under any circumstance and that’s why it is so ready to resort to untold violence that stifles more moderate Palestinan voices?

Israel has forgotten that diplomacy is a table from which you never get up and leave. No matter what you think about the inferiority of your neighbor, nothing, no thing, justifies violence. There is always a way. You simply need to keep talking until you get to the last word: peace.

I remember my daughter one day when she was 7 years of age exclaiming, “Mommy, mommy, I know what the opposite of war is! It’s creativity!”

It’s not too late to heed the prophetic wisdom of some of our greatest statesmen, such as Dean Acheson in 1947 warning that creating land already occupied by Palestinians would “imperil not just American but all Western interests in the Middle East.”

Also see: AIPAC Is the Only Explanation for America’s Morally Bankrupt Israel Policy

Israel’s Messy Package (Part 1) here.

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As you may have seen in VenusPlusX’s Manifesto and all over this site, we are dedicated to the end of nationalism (racist by nature) and the end of racism (the chief expression of sexual oppression) by fostering progress (universal human rights, global peace). We align with all others who see progress as the the elimination of useless, coercive, inhumane systems of governments, corporations, and religious hierarchy, salvaging parts of our human legacy worthy of respect, and adding new and human and largely voluntary associations.

in Campaigns / Events / Grassroots / News of Note / Op-Ed / Public Information by Alison Gardner 24 Jul 2014 0 comments

Israel’s Messy Package (Part 1)

“Creating land already occupied by Palestinians would ‘imperil not just American but all Western interests in the Middle East.'”

—Dean Acheson, 1947, statesman and foreign policy expert
for several presidential administrations,
including as Harry Truman’s Secretary of State

In the early 1900s, both sides of my Jewish family fled the Kiev countryside because of the militant anti-Jewish pogroms, leaving dead my paternal great grandfather and my grandmother’s infant sister killed by armed men on horseback who burned their farm to ground. Both my grandfathers were born in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. They didn’t know each other and didn’t know they would someday each meet and marry women, all four families strangers to each other but all springing from thriving family farms outside Kiev. My mother’s folks sought refuge in Glasgow, Scotland, before most of them came to the US after WWI. My paternal grandmother and her siblings, the oldest was 12-year-old Pincus, came alone in steerage and settled in Hartford, Connecticut. Growing up in this family, we all lived decidedly to the far left of Reform Judaism, anxious to not be so “jewish” as to be noticed, understandably so.

In 1967 I spent the summer in Durban, South Africa, getting to know some of my cousins, the half of the next generation of the Glasgow clan who chose to emigrate to South America instead of America. When I arrived in Durban, one cousin, a young woman close to my age of 19 at the time, was unexpectedly out of the country, much to her family’s consternation, joining the Israeli zionist army who that year expanded the chartered territory of Israel through violence and repression, into Gaza and parts of Syria and Egypt.

Photo by LeftMedia
Flickr/creative commons

That summer, I came to realize that my childhood ideas about Israel were overly simplistic: My US born family were just plain Jews, explicitly not zionists, allowing themselves to adopt the modern myth that the establishment of a modern Israel was a gift from the world (and Palestinians) following the horrors of WWII death camps (rather than an unlawful occupation of another’s country).

Before going to South Africa, my personal radicalization was underway as a deeply embedded anti-Vietnam War activist, so this summertime visit to the shores of the Indian Ocean solidified my life long commitment to pacifism. My quest for world peace is a force within me that always questions why anyone goes to war. Israel is the case study, forcing the question, How could a group, a culture and religion combined, victims of hatred for 100 years, partially eradicated in concentration camps 70 years ago, themselves become purveyors of violence and oppression?

I came to understand that this militant campaign for a Jewish state, dominating control in the Middle East, and especially over Jerusalem’s ancient, holy geographic touchstones, had being going on since the beginning of the 20th century, around the same time as my relatives’ horrors and forced migration from what is now Urkaine. This scheme was doomed from the start because of its underlying motives, not to bring peace but to go to battle if necessary for what they perceived they were owed simply because they believed they represented a race of people who are the most pure and the highest expression of religious superiority. For these reasons only, however delusional, these militant Jews should always hold a deferential berth in the world. Since WWII, this battle has resulted in the displacement and disenfranchisement of an entire population who, ironically, itself shares the same legacy despite not being “jewish.”

Any attempts at forming a theocracy are fate-filled mistakes that only end badly, whether you are talking about Israel or other countries, including in the US where we are suffering under a nascent political theocracy that would enslave its citizens just as surely as those calling for Sharia Law.

The scheme to reign supreme began long before Israel formally declared it independence in 1948, and long before my young cousin risked her life in 1967 to further an expansion throughout ancient Palestine, displacing and killing everyone in the way.

Israel is a state founded and run on the basis of religious extremism and discrimination, and should be fairly dealt with on that basis.

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Israel’s Messy Package (Part 2) which delves into the monolithic Israel Lobby that has long controlled our Congress and decides who can and cannot become President of the United States; and why those who escape Israel’s fancy hypnotism and stand up for the human rights of Israel’s victims — the Palestinians themselves joined by groups such as CodePink and activists worldwide, all the time forced to endure so much criticism, even from their left flank.

Inform yourself further with Alison Weir’s recent book, Against Our Better Judgment: The hidden history of how the U.S. was used to create Israel, and websites such as www.ifamercansknew.org and www.popularresistance.org, and, of course, here at www.venusplusx, Facebook/venusplusx, and Twitter/venusplusx.

in Campaigns / Events / Grassroots / News of Note / Op-Ed / Public Information by Alison Gardner 24 Jul 2014 0 comments