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December 4, 2001
Rep. Ron Paul
Keep Your
Eye on the Target
Susan
Herman
Ashcroft
and the Patriot Act
Tariq Ali
The Afghan
King and the Nazis
November 30, 2001
Jordan
Green
Disappeared
in the Southland
Willliam Blum
Rebuilding
Afghanistan?
November 29, 2001
Phillip
Cryan
Defining
Terrorism
Robert Fisk
We Are the
War Criminals Now
November 28, 2001
Tom Turnipseed
A
Continuum of Terror
Patrick Cockburn
Tribal
Council:
Don't Blame It All on Taliban
Robert
Fisk
At
Last, The Truth about the Sabra and Chatila Massacres
Harry Browne
The Bill of
Rights:
They Threw It All Away
Sunil
Sharma
Suffer
Palestine's Children
November 27, 2001
Paul Coggins
Kafka and
the Patriot Act
Tariq
Ali
Tigris
and Euprhates
November 26, 2001
Robert Fisk
Blood and
Tears in Kandahar
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Boeing's
Sweet Deal
CounterPunch Wire
Human
Rights Abuses and
Nuke Waste Shipments
Alexander
Cockburn
Harry
Potter and Terrorism
November 25, 2001
Ralph Nader
The Crisis
in Leadership
Sam Bahour
Israel's
Choice
November 24, 2001
Patrick Cockburn
He Who
Has
the Guns Rules
November 20, 2001
Sam Bahour
Plain
Truths About Palestine
Michael Ratner
Moving Toward
a
Police State
A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
November 19, 2001
Edward
Said
Suicidal
Ignorance
November 18, 2001
John Farley
Shame on You,
Chelsea!
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War Diary
CIA's Assassination Plan a History of
Torture in US Prisons
bin Laden and Bush
Business Connections
Aisha Ikramuddin on the Hidden Hype
of US Food Bombs
Peter Linebaugh on
Pakistan
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Jiang Zemin Tells Bush:
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How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
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Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
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The
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by Douglas Valentine
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December
5, 2001
America's Israel
By C.G. Estabrook
The proper way to begin to understand the "Israeli-Palestinian
problem" is to recognize that Israel is a wholly-owned subsidiary
of the United States government. Criticism of its racist and
oppressive policies towards non-Jews and of its brutal and illegal
occupation of Palestine is necessarily criticism of the policies
of American governments, Republican as well as Democrat, that
have made these things possible.
During the Cold War, it was fashionable
to sneer at the Cuban economy as "unviable" because
it depended on money from the Soviet Union, principally in exchange
for Cuba's sugar crop (owing to the long-standing US embargo);
but every year for a generation Israel has received much more
money per capita from the United States than Cuba received from
the USSR in its best year. The present Israeli economy is of
course unviable -- it survives as a military outpost of the US,
armed to the teeth to prevent the emergence in the Middle East
of any domestic radicalism that would threaten US control of
the world's greatest geopolitical prize, Mideast oil. To control
world energy resources is to control the world economy, as the
US has done for generations -- and intends to continue to do.
Israel is vital to its plans, and therefore successive US governments
have been willing to put up with Israel's enormities in regard
to the Palestinian people.
But it has been pointed out that our
principal client is a racist state in the legal -- and not just
psychological -- sense of the term. A legally racist state is
one in which privileges for a certain group defined by descent
-- and disabilities for those not so descended -- are enshrined
in law and governmental practice: disregarding anything thought
or done, you belong to the privileged group if your parent(s)
did, and if not, not. That was the case in South Africa from
1948 to 1991 and in many southern states in the US for the first
half of the 20th century. Those states ceased to be legally racist
when those laws were abolished, although psychological racism
remained.
Israel of course is racist in a legal
sense in that one group defined by descent, Jews, are privileged.
(It is not of course a matter of religion, the majority of Jews
in Israel not being religious.) Indeed, Israel is a uniquely
racist state, in that all states, democratic and dictatorial,
are taken to be the states of their inhabitants -- but not Israel:
it is by law the state of one group defined by descent, the "Jewish
people world-wide." It is as if a radical faction of the
Irish Republican Army should come to power in Ireland and declare
Ireland the state of the "Irish people world-wide,"
so that an Irishman in South Boston (or Urbana) had more rights
in Dublin than an Englishman (or a Jew) whose family had been
there for generations. (There is not to my knowledge any such
faction in the IRA.)
It is surprising in the extreme to see
self-styled "supporters of Israel" write rabid letters
to editors in this country whenever the state of Israel or any
of its government's policies are criticized. If they really loved
Israel and its people, as they profess, you'd think they would
want to encourage a situation in which the citizens of Israel
could live in peace with their neighbors and prosper in an open,
democratic society that was not the economic dependence of another
state. Instead, they support Israel's expanding moral corruption
as a militarized colony, its prime ministers including men inspired
by a nazi ideology (in the Jabotinsky tradition) and guilty of
war crimes. Beleaguered and hated by the people surrounding it
(and many in it) and armed with illegal nuclear weapons, Israel
threatens the world with massive destruction. The Air Force officer
in charge of nuclear strategy for the last US administration,
Gen. Lee Butler, said, "It is dangerous in the extreme that
in the cauldron of animosities that we call the Middle East,
one nation has armed itself, ostensibly, with stockpiles of nuclear
weapons, perhaps numbering in the hundreds, and that inspires
other nations to do so."
What could Israel do to cease being a
pariah state, if its Washington masters permitted it? First of
all, it could end the occupation of Palestinian territory, declared
illegal by the UN Security Council thirty-four years ago, and
not just pretend to do so by maintaining the proposed Palestinian
statelet as a set of Indian reservations, controlled by the Israeli
military. It could withdraw the settlements that cover the map
of the West Bank and Gaza like a rash, settlements illegal under
the Forth Geneva Convention (1949). It could establish the rights
of non-Jewish citizens within Israel and come to an agreement
on a "law of return" for Palestinians and their families
driven out of Israel fifty years ago. (The existing Law of Return
applies only to Jews, whose forbears may have left the area in
the time of the Roman Emperor Titus, or before.) And it could
move towards agreements on disarmament and economic cooperation
with its neighbors, with the goal of an economically self-sufficient
region, not dependent on US handouts. (Israel, followed distantly
by Egypt, is by far the largest recipient of US aid.) The route
to peace in the Middle East begins and ends in Washington. CP
Carl Estabrook
teaches at the University of Illinois and is the host of News
From Neptune, a weekly radio show on politics and the media.
He writes a regular column for CounterPunch.
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