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In the aftermath of the Lebanon disaster
you can open up the Israeli press, particularly the Hebrew language
editions, and find fierce assaults on the country's elites from
left, right and center.
The overall panorama is one
of chickens of all ages coming home to roost. Small pustules
highlight larger rot. Chief of staff Dan Halutz, a narcissistic
bully like a mini-Patton, though without the latter's tactical
talents, took time off the morning he ordered the terror bombing
of south Beirut to tell the Bank Leumi to sell his stock portfolio
before the market plunged which it soon did by nearly 10
per cent.
The capacity of the US armed
forces to fight intelligently and effectively has been eroded
not necessarily a bad thing of course -- by a system of
graft-ridden procurement that favors expensive weapons systems
validated by bogus tests. Israel's supposed military requirements
have been a particularly ripe sector of that racket and the consequences
are plain to see. Israel's receipt of batteries of Patriot missiles
were no doubt hugely profitable for the parties involved in the
transaction, but in defensive function entirely useless. The
Patriot missile batteries stationed near Haifa and Safed, much
trumpeted by the IDF played no significant role in the recent
conflict.
Israel's generals paraded
on tv in resplendent uniforms even as those in northern Israel
too poor to flee, found either no shelters at all (particularly
in sectors inhabited by Israeli Arabs) or, in the words of Reuven
Pedatzur in Ha'aretz, "sat for more than one month in stinking
shelters, some of them without food or minimal conditions."
Disfigured by its "special
relationship" with the US arms industry, of which the US
Congress is an integral component, the IDF has been morally corrupted
by years of risk-free brutalization of unarmed Palestinians,
many of them children. It's one thing to level an apartment building
with a missile from a plane or crush a protester with a bulldozer
or lob shells at a Palestinian family having a picnic on a beach
or kidnap middle-aged and democratically elected Palestinian
politicians. It's another confront a foe, with modest but effectively
deployed weaponry, prepared to fight back.
Years of racism have taken
their toll too. Think of Arabs as subhuman "terrorists"
and you end up making a lot of misjudgments, tactical and strategic.
Amid the first days of the
"ceasefire" the Israeli press has been carrying reports
not only about Halutz's secret stock sale, but also that prime
minister Ehud Olmert may have accepted a $500,000 bribe as part
of a conspiracy with a building contractor; also that Justice
minister Haim Ramon has resigned to battle charges of indecent
assault on a female employee at a Defense ministry party; also
that Israel's President, Moshe Katsav, may face charges of
rape of a female employee.
On that first pre-ceasefire
weekend USA Today carried a story datelined Nabatiye by Rick
Jervis headlined "Hezbollah workers rush to help victims
rebuild", beginning "Two days after agreeing to a cease-fire
to end 34 days of fighting with Israeli forces, Hezbollah deployed
its army of social workers and engineers throughout this southern
Lebanese city. They visited wrecked homes and businesses, surveyed
damage, gave compensation estimates and coordinated relief efforts
with city officials. 'Hezbollah workers were here even before
the bombing stopped,'said Mustafa Badreddine, 50, the mayor.
'They have offices here. They have municipal resources. And the
people trust them.'"
As corrupted as the Israeli
military who shove them around, Israeli politicians have grown
accustomed to thinking that any outrage on morality and reason
will get a lusty cheer from the US political establishment, press
and entertainment industry.
They're right. They did get
material encouragement from the Bush administration, and lusty
cheers from Capitol Hill and Hollywood as congress people and
some movie industry bigwigs stampeded to cheer on Israel's onslaughts
on Lebanon and Gaza while the press echoed all the nonsense about
the kidnapping of the Israeli soldiers being a legitimate casus
belli.
Israel has been kidnapping
Lebanese for years, a hefty chunk of the 10,000 or so rotting
in horrifying Israeli prisons, like the secret Facility 1391
in central Israel, worse than Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo. On
June 25 Corporal Gilad Shalit was kidnapped in Gaza, prompting
an escalation in Israel's already barbaric assaults on the civilian
population there. Since June 25, says the Palestinian Ministry
of Detainees, Israel has kidnapped over 35 Palestinian Parliament
Members and 10 cabinet Ministers. It was certainly hard to find
in any US paper or newscast any reference to the fact that one
day before, on 24 June, Israeli forces kidnapped two civilians
in Gaza, a doctor and his brother, and sent them off to some
Israeli dungeon. As Noam Chomsky remarked to an interviewer from
al-Ahram, "The timing alone reveals with vivid clarity that
the show of outrage over the capture of Israeli soldiers is cynical
fraud, and undermines any shreds of moral legitimacy for the
ensuing actions."
You can read plenty of commentary
round the world, most particularly Israel, saying this recent
war was a benchmark event, which could conceivably teach Israel
that security is not won by unending land grabs, by spouting
hokum for US consumption about the "peace process",
and by terror bombing of Lebanon and Gaza. But not in the United
States. Open up the Washington Post and the strategic vision
on display was an utterly mad piece co-written by one of the
big boosters for war on Iraq, Kenneth Pollack, a hack thinker
at the Brookings Institution, now an integral part of Israeli
territory with its "Saban Center for Middle East Policy"
named for the fanatic Zionist billionaire Haim Saban, majority
owner of Paramount Pictures, a man who handed the Democratic
Party a total of $12.3 million in 2002, a $7 million component
of which was the biggest single contribution ever recorded up
to that time.
Silent about his own role as
war promoter (his speciality was Saddam's imaginary nuclear threat),
oblivious to the lessons of disaster in Iraq, reduplicated in
the war in Lebanon, Pollack and Georgetown U's Daniel Byman called
for more US troops to be sent to Iraq, to help set up "refugee
collection points" ie concentration camps on
Iraq's eastern border and for tripwires no doubt ultimately
nuclear to be established in expectation of war with Iran.
You think Republican neocons are the only crazy ones? Not one
word of mature reflection about the significance of the war temporarily
suspended, against Lebanon and Hezbollah.
Thirty years ago I used to
be told that liberal American Jews were aghast at the rise of
the ur-neocon fanatics like Norman Podhoretz, at Commentary,
whose parent outfit was and is the American Jewish Committee.
Soon, such liberals used to say to me off the record, there would
be a counter-attack by the forces of reason, as embodied in liberal
American Jewry. There never was, at least on any effective scale.
The liberal Jewish intelligentsia here has, politically, speaking,
sat on its hands for decades, mouths zipped shut, when it comes
to criticizing Israel. Even more effectively than America's
defense contractors they have contributed to, and indeed cheered
on Israel's corrupt rejectionism. Will this war make them change
their minds? I doubt it.
Note: An earlier version
of this column ran in The Nation, which went to press on Thursday.
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