On Israel and Palestine- Part 7

Introduction:

The creation of the state of Israel almost 80 years ago and the conflict between its citizens and the displaced Palestinians and surrounding countries has become one of the most polarizing geopolitical topics in popular discourse. Those with any “skin in the game,” so to speak, (eg. Israelis, Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, Jews) probably have very strong beliefs about which “side” is in the right, and the actual facts and events occurring on the ground are unlikely to significantly change those beliefs, myself included. Discourse about this conflict across all forms of media is rampant in an attempt to sway public opinion, with wild claims being made to justify the actions of one side or another. It’s obviously a very complex topic and I encourage anyone interested in an in-depth look at Palestine to do their own research and reading, while being very critical of what biases sources may have.

The purpose of this series of essays is to give some basic background information for those with relatively little knowledge of the conflict and its history, to help clarify some of the conflicting and opposing claims you will often hear online or in the news, and help explain why I believe the actions of the state of Israel definitively put them on the wrong side of history and merit harsh criticism.

This will be an 8-part series that I will post over the following weeks/months, with this identical introduction in each. I will list sources I referred to at the end of each post but, as this is not an academic treatise, the formatting will be informal and will not be embedded into the text itself.

Parts 1-3 are going to give some historical background on the region. One of the fundamental arguments made by both sides in the conflict is that the land belongs to them on a historical basis. It is helpful then, to have a basic overview of the broad strokes of history and what populations lived there at various points throughout history. This will be an extremely basic summary, as you could read books on each of these periods in history and still have a lot to learn.

Parts 4-8 are going to be formatted essentially as responses to frequent claims made in defense of Israel and will cover a variety of topics, including Israeli behavior in relation to the Palestinians and its Arab neighbors, the relationship between the US and Israel, and what the future may hold.     

This is Part 7, where we will discuss the relationship between the US and Israel. 

I highly recommend reading these essays in order, and you can find the other essays here:

Part 1- https://sunflowers.ghost.io/on-israel-and-palestine-part-1/

Part 2- https://sunflowers.ghost.io/on-israel-and-palestine-part-2/

Part 3- https://sunflowers.ghost.io/on-israel-and-palestine-part-3/

Part 4- https://sunflowers.ghost.io/on-israel-and-palestine-part-4/

Part 5- https://sunflowers.ghost.io/on-israel-and-palestine-part-5/

Part 6- https://sunflowers.ghost.io/on-israel-and-palestine-part-6/

Part 8- https://sunflowers.ghost.io/on-israel-and-palestine-part-8/

Is it antisemitic to criticize Israel?

This is certainly the most common defense invoked by Israel and its proponents in the sphere of public discussion. If you criticize an action taken by the Israeli government, it’s because you must hate Jews. If you criticize Israel for its systematic and deliberate abuse of human rights, you are antisemitic, racist, pro-terrorist, a Nazi, and evil. This is, of course, a ridiculous claim meant to steer the discussion away from the abuses committed by Israel in the name of Zionism, in effect, “weaponizing” antisemitism.

First of all, from other Arabs, I will often hear the defense “How can we be antisemitic, we’re semites too!”. This is a silly argument based in semantics, because while it may be true, antisemitic here is being used to refer specifically to racism against Jews, and this is simply not a helpful defense.

This “weaponized antisemitism” is a defense tactic that has been used by Zionists even before the creation of the state of Israel, however we will defer specific examples to the next section, where we discuss American support for Israel.

To be against the actions of Israel, and to be against the political idea of Zionism, does not mean that one is against Jews specifically, and the insistence on the part of the Israelis to try to conflate Zionism with Judaism is by design and is very deliberate. The Anti-Defamation League, in the 1970’s, explicitly wrote about the idea of “The New Anti-Semitism”, where they portrayed anti-Zionism as simply an evolution of antisemitism, and equating the two as being one and the same.

This is a dangerous game to play though. If people come to be disgusted by Zionism when they see all the evidence of decades of systematic human rights abuses against the Palestinians, and these same Zionists insist, over and over again, that to hate Zionism is to hate the Jews, that they are one and the same, they may just succeed in convincing people that they are antisemitic.

Does Israel really have a disproportionate amount of influence in the US? Has the US really done so much in terms of financial, military, and diplomatic support for Israel?

I have stated it several times thus far in this series, but the US provides Israel with essentially unlimited financial military, and diplomatic support, such that it would be fair to say that Israel is only able to behave in the militarily cavalier way that it does now, because of this support.

Virtually the last time the United States had a foreign policy at odds with Israel, is when Eisenhower pressured the Israelis off of Egyptian land in the Suez Crisis. Since the Kennedy administration in the 1960’s, American foreign policy in the Middle East has essentially revolved around unconditional support for Israel. There are several reasons for this.

First, politicians in the US can find their careers in jeopardy if they do not support Israel; we will give some examples later. There is a decent proportion of the voter base in the US that are Zionists themselves, for example right-wing fundamentalist Christian Zionists, American Jews who are pro-Israel, and Israeli-American dual citizens (there are almost 200,000 of these inside the US, and about 300,000 in Israel). There is a powerful lobby (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC) in the United States that helps fund the campaigns of politicians who are pro-Israel, and will fund the opponents of those that are not pro-Israel. During the Cold War, Israel acted as a useful bulwark against Soviet influence in the Middle East. Israel provides useful intelligence to the US for the region, a region the US has significant geopolitical interest in due to oil and trade routes. Finally, the sheer number of conflicts Israel involves itself in means that American military equipment sees a lot of use, and Israel can act as a sort of testing ground for American equipment.

So how does this support for Israel manifest? One example is direct military support. Prior to October 2023, US aid accounted for a huge portion (~20%) of Israel’s defense budget. The US has recently approved direct military funding of almost $4 billion per year through 2028. There is currently an effort being pushed through the government to integrate the American and Israeli militaries so that Israel will be treated as a domestic buyer for arms sales, allowing them to circumvent congressional approval for buying military equipment. It has been formally adopted in US law since 2008 that the US government must maintain Israel’s ability to defeat any credible conventional military threat from any individual state or possible coalition of states or from non-state actors, while sustaining minimal damage and casualties (essentially enshrining the idea that Israel’s military must not just have parity with its neighbors, but must be markedly superior). In addition to exchange of war materiel, there is obviously a tremendous amount of cooperation in regards to sharing intelligence, and in recent years direct military cooperation with regards to attacking Iran.

While some may say that a large proportion of this aid is in “defensive” missile systems that can’t be used to kill Palestinians, I would argue that when Israel can hide behind this missile protection and curb the effectiveness of one of the few tools the Palestinians have to resist, this just invites the Israelis to behave as they wish without fear of consequences or reprisal.

Beyond just military and financial support, Israel receives significant diplomatic support from the US. The US has used its veto power 42 times in the UN Security Council against resolutions condemning Israeli actions (more than half of all the vetoes the US has ever invoked in the UNSC). For a few recent examples, I’ll focus on the Obama administration, supposedly a time when Obama’s “hardline stance” created friction with the two countries. While the Obama administration publicly criticized Israel for West Bank settlements and made a lot of noise about “restarting the peace process”, they would go on to veto a UN resolution that would have declared Israeli settlements illegal, sell bunker buster bombs to Israel for a potential attack on Iran, and veto the Palestinian application in the UN for recognition as a state. The greatest amount of condemnation Obama could muster was to have the US abstain from a UNSC vote about a resolution that would call for an end to Israeli settlements, and this was after Trump had been voted as president-elect. Trump, and Biden in the interim between the two Trump presidencies, would not even pay lip service to curbing Israeli crimes, and have gone on to expand the amount of aid that Israel receives, capitulating to Israeli requests for war with Iran, and recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

These are just some of the more recent examples in a long history of diplomatic support that goes back now about 60 years. Even when lip service is paid to criticizing some aspect of Israeli activity, particularly expansion of the settlements in the West Bank, no concrete actions are taken by the US to apply pressure to the Israelis to curb that behavior. Virtually any time there are negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians or one of its Arab neighbors, the US will support Israel, and having support of this superpower gives the Israelis tremendous leverage such that it undermines virtually any negotiation and allows them to act in bad faith, as we’ve discussed in multiple examples in this series thus far.

We also must expound a little more on AIPAC, perhaps Israel’s greatest tool for ensuring that American governmental policy remains favorable to Israel. AIPAC came to prominence in the 1970’s, and since then has only increased in power and influence, with the stated goal of lobbying Congress on issues related to Israel. It is difficult to gauge precisely how much money is being funneled into US politics, because there are many PACs that donate to campaigns that are not directly linked to AIPAC, but are run by an AIPAC official. In addition to donating to the campaigns of pro-Israeli politicians (and identifying non-pro-Israel politicians to try to defeat), AIPAC will fly legislators out to Israel on paid vacations, match AIPAC members with members of Congress to convey their wishes, and generally focus on ensuring there is sympathy for Israel among the general public in the US by ensuring positive portrayals in the media. Their influence is such that one former congressman has said that “When key votes are cast, the question on the House floor, troublingly, is often not, ‘What is the right thing to do for the United States of America?’, but ‘How is AIPAC going to score this?’”.

To go over all the ways AIPAC has influenced American politics would require a book, and so I will instead quote here The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, an excellent book by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt:

“[AIPAC’s] success is due to its ability to reward legislators and congressional candidates who support its agenda, and to punish whose who challenge it. …AIPAC makes sure that its friends get strong financial support from the many pro-Israel political action committees. Anyone who is seen as hostile to Israel can be sure that AIPAC will direct campaign contributions to his or her political opponents. …The bottom line is that AIPAC, a de facto agent for a foreign government, has a stranglehold on Congress, with the result that US policy towards Israel is not debated there, even though that policy has important consequences for the entire world.”

In addition to direct lobbying by Israelis and American Jewish Zionists, Israel enjoys American support in the form of right-wing fundamentalist Protestant Christian Zionists, “Evangelicals”. Part of their belief system is that Jesus will return to the “Holy Land”, and one of the prerequisites for this is that the Jews must control the Holy Land. Those Jews who have not converted when Jesus returns will then perish in Armageddon. Ironically, this is inherently an antisemitic belief, but it has not stopped the Likud from cynically encouraging this pro-Israel stance from these churches, and opening an “International Christian Embassy” in Jerusalem. A further irony is that these American Christian Zionists do not seem particularly bothered by the ill treatment that Palestinian Christians have faced under Israeli occupation.

We haven’t even touched on bias within the media, another huge topic that I can only inadequately summarize here. One can scarcely listen to the news without seeing evidence for the media’s bias when it comes to reporting on Israel and Palestine. Whenever a Palestinian kills an Israeli, even an Israeli soldier, he is a “terrorist”, but when an Israeli civilian kills Palestinians he is a “vigilante” or “lone wolf” or “extremist”. Israelis are “killed” or “murdered” by “terrorists”, but Palestinians “died” in “clashes”. Israelis are “kidnapped”, while Palestinians are “arrested”. The IDF “confirms” information, while Palestinians make “claims”. The Israelis don’t “assassinate” people or “break ceasefires”, they launch “pre-emptive strikes” or “preventative strikes” (and always, “pinpoint” or “precision” strikes, no matter how much “collateral damage” there is). The West Bank is not “occupied” it is “disputed”. The Israeli colonies in the West Bank are “settlements” or “neighborhoods” full of “settlers”, not “colonizers” (language which I have been guilty of using as well in this series of essays, for the sake of familiarity).

I want to end this section by discussing specific examples of “weaponized antisemitism” within the US, which has had the effect of suppressing almost all mainstream political condemnation of Israel. For many of these examples, I’ll be drawing from Robert Fisk’s posthumous publication: The Night of Power, wherein he interviewed many people (including politicians) whose lives and careers were destroyed by accusations of antisemitism. (as an aside, while we will focus primarily on the US, Israeli pressure on other media organizations on countries around the world is also significant, particularly in Europe)

His first example is Dennis Bernstein, a Jewish radio host in California, who had covered the story of the Israeli attack on Jenin, in the West Bank in 2002. He read aloud the vast amounts of hate mail cursing him and wishing him death, calling him a self-hating Jew on his radio program. Bernstein, in response, would claim that a combination of Israeli lobbyists and conservative Christian fundamentalists had effectively censored discussed of Israel in the US public domain. Bernstein would go on to say, “Any US journalist, columnist, editor, college professor, student-activist, public official, or clergy member who dares to speak critically of Israel or accurately report the brutalities of its illegal occupation will be vilified as an anti-Semite.”

Adam Shapiro, a Jew married to a Palestinian, was working with an NGO when in 2002 he was trapped in a building under Israeli bombardment. When he told CNN that the Sharon government was acting like “terrorists” while receiving $3 billion a year in US aid, the New York Post called him the “Jewish Taliban”, Israeli supporters publicized his family’s address, and his parents were forced to flee their home.

Norman Finkelstein, an American-Jewish academic and the son of Holocaust survivors is an outspoken critic of Israel, for which he was refused entry into Israel, and was refused tenure at his university.

J. William Fulbright, a senator, gave testimony in 1963 regarding how charitable funds from the US were sent to Israel and then recycled back into organizations in the US to turn public opinion towards Israel. This cost him the chance to be Secretary of State, and 11 years later he would lose his primary after AIPAC funded his rival’s campaign.

Paul Findley, a congressman from Illinois, would have his 22-year career destroyed after he campaigned against AIPAC specifically.

Earl Hilliard, US representative from Alabama, made the mistake of expressing sympathy for the Palestinians, and his opponent in the primary would beat him after raising large amounts of money from supporters of Israel.

Haaretz in 2009 reported that every American appointee to the American government had to “endure a thorough background check by the American Jewish community before appointment”. This comment was made after Charles Freeman was forced to withdraw from the US National Intelligence Council after saying that “as long as the United States continues unconditionally to provide the subsidies and political protection that make the Israeli occupation and the high-handed and self-defeating policies it engenders possible, there is little, if any, reason to hope that anything resembling the former peace process can be resurrected.”

When General David Petraeus, head of US Central Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in 2010 that “the conflict foments anti-American sentiment due to a perception of US favoritism for Israel”, he was forced to backtrack after the Anti-Defamation League criticized him for his statements.

When Kenneth Roth, a Jewish legal scholar and executive director of Human Rights Watch, criticized Israel’s actions in Lebanon during the 2006 war, he was condemned as an antisemite, and media within Israel and the US would go on to say that Human Rights Watch had destroyed its credibility.

We’ve already discussed his work on several occasions in this essay series, but what we have not yet discussed is the personal fallout that the Goldstone Report had on Judge Richard Goldstone. Goldstone was a South African Jew (and avowed Zionist) who had helped make his name by investigating human rights abuses in the Balkans in the 90’s. He was selected as the leader of the UN Fact-Finding Mission for the 2008 Gaza War, and while the UN had initially instructed him to inquire about violations of international law committed by Israelis against the Palestinians, he himself insisted the mission be changed to finding violations of international law committed by both Israelis and Palestinians. Over the following months, Goldstone and his team would investigate the deaths of more than 220 people, traveling throughout Gaza and the limited areas of Israel he was able to access, interviewing hundreds of people and going through thousands of pages of documentation, videos, and photographs, to create an exhaustive 452-page report. In this report, he demonstrated no favoritism for either Hamas or Israel, and was harshly critical of the former, but would find the latter guilty of targeting civilian infrastructure, using white phosphorus shells in an unjustifiable manner, using human shields, and intentionally targeting civilians.

His report, written as it was by such an internationally renowned and eminent figure, made him “the most hated man in the Jewish world”. He was harshly criticized in American and Israeli media, called a “traitor to the Jewish people”, and “evil, evil man”. The spokesman for the Israeli prime minister said, “the report was conceived in sin and is the product of a union between propaganda and bias”. The American government called the report deeply flawed (though would not specify what these flaws were), and Hillary Clinton (Secretary of State at the time) went to great efforts to quash the findings. He was ostracized from the South African Jewish community, his daughter would stop speaking with him, and protests would even prevent him from attending his grandson’s bar mitzvah. He would have his history as a judge in apartheid South Africa brought back to discredit him. In the aftermath of PTSD from the horrors he had seen in Gaza, and now the relentless slandering he was experiencing, this broken man would meekly defer his findings in favor of Israel’s own internal investigations into its military’s activity. Norman Finkelstein summarized the situation with the following quote:

“[Israel had over thirty years refined its ideological weapons so that any critic of Israel was an anti-Semite, a self-hating Jew or a Holocaust denier] but now along comes Richard Goldstone. He’s Jewish, he’s a Zionist, he says he loves Israel, he says his mother was an activist in the Zionist women’s organization, his daughter went to live in Israel, he sits on the board of governors at the Hebrew University, and he’s also a distinguished international jurist…He wrote what he wrote because it is true.”

These are just a small handful of examples to show the profound and systematic suppression of criticism of Israel that has affected academics, journalists, and politicians, and is aimed at ensuring that American support for Israel is viewed by the American public as inevitable and the natural way of things.

I want to end this section by being clear on one thing, this is not meant to convey the idea that “the Jews are controlling America”, in fact, to some extent, it’s quite the opposite. Zionism has been a useful tool for furthering American imperial interests in the Middle East, in that the colonial entity that is Israel acts as a sort of base from which the US projects power into the Middle East.

There are so many terrible things going on in the world, why does the media spend so much time covering events in Israel when there are arguably worse events going on that get less coverage?

This is a fair point, or at least it might have been before October 2023. Why so much media attention on a conflict where, even at its worst, it might result in a few hundred or a thousand Palestinian deaths. How can that compare to other conflicts even in the last few decades?

1.5 million dead in the Iran-Iraq War. 300,000 dead in Syria. 150,000 dead in Lebanon. 150,000 dead in Algeria. Half a million Iraqi children starved to death in the 90’s. Maybe as many as a million dead Iraqis in the Iraqi Civil War. And that’s just conflicts in the Middle East. Hundreds of thousands of dead Sudanese. 100,000 dead in Myanmar. Hundreds of thousands dead in the Congo, in Mali, in Niger. Half a million dead in Ukraine and Russia.

In the face of these staggering numbers, why do people care about Israel and Palestine? It’s a fair question. First of all, since October 2023, there have been about 80,000 Palestinians killed, so Israel is making a worthy effort of deserving the scrutiny and attention they receive.

But even prior to 2023, I have a few theories. The Israelis would have us believe that this attention they receive is due to antisemitism: people are looking for any excuse to make the Jews look bad. I think it’s more likely that the conflict receives extra attention because it is, in many ways, the last colonial war. Other examples of settler-colonialism throughout the world have essentially concluded that phase of their nation’s history. The US fulfilled its “Manifest Destiny”, reaching from sea to shining sea. The British replaced most of the aboriginal population of Australia and New Zealand. While many parts of the world are still confronting the legacies of their colonial histories, I can’t think of other examples where the displacement of the native population is actively happening now.

Another explanation is that Palestine captures the imagination of peoples from all 3 Abrahamic faiths, and will draw increased attention for that reason. And I think the final reason has to do with the incredible amount support Israel receives from the US. There is a big subset of the population that is simply not okay with their tax dollars going directly towards massacring or otherwise oppressing the Palestinians. In a very real sense, Americans are culpable for what is happening to Palestinians in a way that they are not for many of the other conflicts around the world today.

Israel claims to be the only democratic country in the Middle East, shouldn’t the US protect that?

I won’t belabor this point too much since we’ve talked about it previously, but Israel is an apartheid state in the way that it treats the Palestinians that it has direct control over. (and I won’t belabor the fact that the Israelis do end up having direct control over both the West Bank and Gaza, as it’s been previously discussed).

While it may offer democracy for people with Israeli citizenship, I’m not sure we can hold it up as a beacon of democracy and liberal values when a third of the population of mandate Palestine, the entirety of which is under control of the Israeli state, is kept in a stateless limbo.

Ehud Barak, when discussing the one-state solution, states that he is against it because in that scenario, Israel could choose to be Jewish, or it could choose to be democratic, but it cannot be both. This is precisely the situation being faced today, with Israeli control over all of Palestine. I have also previously quoted Henry Siegman in this series, but will repeat his quote here, this time in its entirety: “[Israel has] crossed the threshold from ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’ to the only apartheid regime in the Western world…Denying Palestinians both self-determination and Israeli citizenship amounts to a ‘double disenfranchisement’, which when based on ethnicity amounts to racism, and reserving democracy for privileged citizens and keeping others ‘behind checkpoints and barbed wire fences’ is the opposite of democracy”.

Finally, it is perhaps worth asking, since when is the US motivated by the spread of democracy throughout the world? The US will at times support democratic governments and dictators, or topple democratic governments or dictators, as the geopolitical circumstances suit them. I am not convinced that there is any pattern of American action on the international stage that would allow us to consider them “defenders of democracy”.

 Part 8- https://sunflowers.ghost.io/on-israel-and-palestine-part-8/

Sources:

• The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East by Robert Fisk
• Night of Power by Robert Fisk
• The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt
• Council on Foreign Relations: U.S. Aid to Israel in Four Charts