ISRAEL RULES

Over on the Salon site Gary Kamiya has much worthwhile to say about the US government’s support of the Gaza attacks. I specifically don’t say “Our” support, because as Glenn Greenwald has also pointed out on that site recently, the majority of the American people don’t support the utter and unquestioning support that the US government and its pols have given to the long history of Israeli doings.

I recall reading recently that a very large percentage – perhaps the majority – of abortion-supporters are under the impression that ‘abortion’ in this country is only available in the first or second trimester, and only if the life or health of the mother is genuinely and grievously endangered. What they would think if they were correctly informed that such is not at all the case, that the endangered ‘health’ could include the mother’s irritation or distress at having to carry the birth to term at all … is a question begging to be answered. I don’t know where such truth would lead, but that’s the thing about democracy – you have to give The People the truth and take your chances as to what The aforesaid People will decide. It’s not a recipe for ensuring that you get what you want all the time. Which is gall and wormwood to various Advocacies.

I mention it because there seems to be a connection between the dots.

“The Israeli rules” – to use Kamiya’s acute phrase – recall to me my thought that the playbook developed by the Israeli realm in the days of LBJ were quickly taken up by the then-nascent Advocacies of the then-nascent Identities.

And since the playbook was pretty much taken from Goebbels’s brilliant modus operandi for the manipulation and coercion of public opinion … well, you can imagine what effect it would have on a democratic politics and the Branches that were designed to serve it.

Having by LBJ’s day already established itself through the armed amphibious invasion of Palestine by non-state actors , preceded by a regime of terrorist bombings that even targeted the then-protectors of the peace, the British, the Israeli government set out in the later 1960s not simply to ‘change’ American public policy and public opinion, but to manipulate it.

And the manner of it – as best I can make out – was on this wise: a) the outrageous (and it truly was) extermination of six million members of the Jewish religion by the Third Reich was given a more user-friendly name – The Holocaust; b) that Holocaust created a ‘moral emergency’ that justified ‘all means necessary’ to prevent its ever happening again – in effect, a ‘007’ license to ‘do whatever it takes’ (the Bond movies were in full swing by the late 1960s); c) anybody who disagreed with the ‘whatever it took’ must be ‘anti-Semitic’, which is the first step to being in favor of another Holocaust; d) thus you were either ‘with’ the Israeli government’s every action or you were ‘against’ it – which made you an anti-Semite and probably a closet Nazi, and – mirroring American concerns at the time – a racist; e) by virtue of its status as ‘victim’ – or at least as representative or ‘survivor’ of the six million victim – the Israeli realm could claim a moral status that justified whatever it had to do, and if you opposed or even doubted the realm or the status or the actions then you were a victimizer; f) victims, by definition, could not go on to victimize anybody else and to suggest that such was not the case was to ‘disrespect’ the victims’ pain and victimize the victims all over again. Thus the playbook.

We recall that the excuse given for going into Czechoslovakia was to rescue and avenge the victimized Sudeten Germans; for invading Poland, to prevent and avenge the victimization of German nationals – women and children, nicely filmed – by the monstrous, ape-like Poles; for invading Russia, to provide the ever-victimized German Volk with room-to-live, Lebensraum, denied them by the Slavic Untermenschen who dwelt in lumpish sloth and primitive waste on the rich and fertile lands of the Ukraine. And, to recall T.H. White’s marvelous encapsulation in the war of the ants in ‘The Once and Future King’: “they are attacking us by defending themselves”.

It cannot be coincidence that Our domestic politics, bethumpt by the agitations and alarums of the later 1960s and the 1970s, began to demonstrate many of the very same characteristic tropes – minus, thankfully, the many, many deaths … except for fetuses – but they weren’t human anyway; such is the genius of the plan, as Goebbels saw in his fetid acuity. Or, if human, then ‘Unlebensvurdigeslebens’ – lives unworthy of life. All the bases covered. Say what you will of the conceptual incongruities and haphazard execution of many aspects of Hitler’s Reich, but Goebby knew his business and he had it down to a ‘T’. Had he lived, he might have wound up being brought over here, like Werner von Braun – who had ‘rockets!’; but in the event, his ‘product’ was taken as spoils of war, along with the rockets, the military strategies and doctrine, and the shape of the helmets. And it has proven even more useful and durable than the hardware. To Our great damage and detriment. And the world’s peoples’.

Now We are engaged in a great global war, Our polity deeply weakened through political fragmentation and a pervasive inability to recognize truth or respect life. We have much ‘hope’, nice and vague, but no serious ability to actual change Our ways. Them Kathliks would say that no amount of telling-the-beads would effect forgiveness or redemption, lacking that changing-of-the-ways. But what do they know of the sovereign patriotism of King Jesus? The application of a bit more violence, all the more vigorous for being in so righteous a cause, is what must be sustained. “Wohlt ihr denn totallen Krieg?” (Hint: the answer given to Goebby that bleak late-winter day at the Sportpalast in 1943 was a resounding ‘Ja!’. Stalingrad had fallen the month before and the handwriting was, so to speak, on the wall.)

But as Greenwald and others have noted, it is not the will of The People. It is the imposed will of Our political class and a sizable chunk of Our so-called ‘elites’, those who presume – Fundamentalist or Progressive – to know what is ‘real’ and ‘right’ and best for Us.

Or for themselves, anyway. I still can’t figure out: given how vote-grubby modern pols are, so eager to keep folks ‘happy’, then why are they – Democrats even more so than Republicans – continuing on a course which is not only so morally repugnant and geostrategically counterproductive but – more to the Beltway point – unpopular with the voters?

What comes to mind first is the Roman Senate under the later Empire and the Weimar-era Reichstag. In both cases there were so many troubles besetting their respective nations that one problem could not be solved without aggravating half a dozen others. Not even Solomon – you should pardon the expression – could have pulled the later Empire or Weimar out of the death spiral.

But that’s not enough. The pols aren’t decent legislators faced with an impossible multitude of undeserved challenges. No. The Beltway at this point reminds me more of the Renaissance Papal Curia, just before Luther’s final break: they could see, if they wanted to, what was wrong and what they had to do, but they couldn’t bring themselves to do it … they were too addicted, too compromised, by a long and deep indulgence in debaucheries that had increased their power and wealth and status – and having over the long course of time brought into their midst other like unto themselves, there were no real souls of integrity and strength among them. You can almost watch them throw away one opportunity after another to change their ways, to reform. But the reform would first have to be of themselves, and that they were not at all prepared to do. Surely, they must have thought, God would see them through -they were, after all, his special favorites.

And the Reformation came.

Having taken so much money from the Israel-indentured PACs, how can they stop now, there in the Beltway? By now, you could almost wonder if some low-grade treason isn’t lurking around; the ‘realm’ is still, technically anyway, a ‘foreign power’, even if it’s US money and equipment and bombs that keep it that way. Oy.

Worse, I wonder again if the Israelis didn’t take a page from the malicious, freakish mastermind, J. Edgar Hoover (after all, they took the whole book from Goebbels)? Suppose that for the past half-century they have been keeping a Hoovery ‘file’ on every pol – one that, they assure the jittery pol , they will see ‘comes to light’ unless fealty is pledged to the Israeli realm … ?

American pols not being as a group that much more morally evolved than Renaissance cardinals, one can only imagine that there must be one frakking hell of a file cabinet somewhere in the ‘realm’.

We as The People have a steep learning curve ahead, and all this on top of the heart-gnawing anxieties about personal and familial economic survival.

It’s deep-end-of-the-pool-time. Time to show what We got. Time to let the Greatest Generation see that they weren’t the last of the American kind. Or not.

ISRAEL DOES HAVE A RIGHT TO EXIST

In his Opinion piece in ‘The Boston Globe’ yesterday, Jeff Jacoby says that Israel has a right to exist. Further, he asserts that anti-Zionism is bigotry and it is “preposterous” to say otherwise. He supports that by proposing that if somebody were to say “that Ireland has no right to exist, that Irish nationalism is racism, and that those who murder Irishmen are actually victims deserving the world’s sympathy” then “Who would take his fulminations as anything but anti-Irish bigotry? Or believe him if he says he harbors no prejudice against the Irish?”

I have nothing against the Jewish people. And there was indeed a concerted effort on the part of the Third Reich to destroy European Jewry, and six million Jewish human beings were thereby destroyed.

Whether it wise for the United States to enthusiastically and immediately recognize the entity raised up in consequence of the forcible armed taking of Palestine is open to question; as is – and even more so – the 1967, LBJ-initiated American embrace of whatever the Israeli ‘realm’ (how can you have a realm without a king, linguistically speaking?) saw fit to do.

The Irish, my first thought is, have been around in the same place for millennia. So Jacoby’s equation of “Ireland’ and ‘Israel’ in that sense is not particularly accurate, as history goes. Of course, the question arises whether the Celts ‘found’ an ‘empty land’ when they first came over to the Emerald Isle back in the mists of pre-Roman time. After all, maybe the ancestors of the Irish had to engage in the same type of take-over as the first-arrived future-Israelis had to do just 60 years ago. If so, then in 1948 the world saw pretty much a throw-back to the old primitive-civilizational, tribal history of one people displacing another.

Although if there were prior inhabitants of the fabled Isle, there was probably a great deal of blending and mixing, interpenetration of cultures – you could say – lasting for quite a long time, until the ‘Irish’ were in many ways a product of the Celtic and the lifeways of the earlier inhabitants.

If so, then the Israeli phenomenon is hell-and-gone from that. The Israeli approach appears to be something akin to subjugation if not extermination of the Palestinian folk who inhabited ‘the land’ in 1948; blending and interpentration of cultures is most certainly not in the playbook. And who could be surprised that in the face of that game-plan, the pre-Israeli inhabitants have – with an oh-so-human display of self-preservation – continued to resist as best they can the ‘blessings’ of their assigned role in the Israeli – and the Zionist – vision?

But Jacoby got me to thinking – and the Israeli government actually beat me to it: just how is the story of the Israeli taking of Palestine any different from the American taking of ‘America’, as We like to call it? After all, there were peoples all over this huge chunk of the continent, and while they didn’t have a European-style government set up, they surely had a culture and a history here; their gods and their dead were here, and they had – according to their lights – a ‘going concern’ in terms of habitation.

They were infected, lied-to, tricked, hunted down, shot, hung and in the end even machine-gunned next to pits into which their bodies would fall (now that sounds familiar) and all but exterminated. Nor is there today any American desire to have any courts go over the vast detritus of broken, solemnly-pledged treaties, to adjudicate whether there was just and fair dealing, whether indeed the treaty-contracts were honored by the American parties, and consequently whether – the treaties having been broken in the interests of American expansion– most of the real-estate of this great country actually reverted back to the Indians for the cause of American ‘failure to perform’ long ago. Oy!

The Israelis are on to something when they claim that they are the ‘Americans’ of the modern Middle East.

Of course, it was not historically advisable to pull an 18th-century play in the middle of the 20th century, precisely as the entire colonialist phase of European and Western history was coming to a close.

Let alone, because a significant moral element in the closing of that phase stemmed from the shock and outrage at what the Nazi Reich (realm?) had perpetrated against, among others, those of Jewish faith.

“It may seem strange” – to borrow Lincoln’s tactful phrase – that a people so recently subjected to the dark pandemonium of forced uprooting, concentration in camps, and extermination would so soon thereafter seek to impose such a fate on anybody else.

That monstrous disconnect, generating a cognitive, moral and political dissonance of stupendous proportions, has been the exact reality that Israeli propaganda, diplomacy, and military exertions have been designed to hide, to prevent from remaining visible and audible in American public life and discourse. It has proven impossible to prevent among the Israeli citizenry themselves, thanks to some courageous ‘press’ and ‘media’ in their midst who have kept the difficult truths alive for the still-vital conscience of the Israeli people); We for the most part no longer enjoy such a civilized and crucial benefit.

Does Israel have a right to exist? Well, according to the law of the gun, yes. And the United States is hardly in a position to lecture the ‘realm’ from any moral high ground. Nor have We in Our employ many politicians who would care to try, if indeed they retain any ability to operate in the realm of morality at all any longer.

But the Israeli government cannot at the same time insist that it is the overall, the ‘real’, victim in this intensifying catastrophe. You cannot be David and Goliath. Not, anyway, without being very very two-faced.

The Israeli ‘experiment’ faces its own demographic pressures militating against its long-term success; its own fundamental conceptual inconsistency – seeking to be a one-religion ‘modern democracy’; its own tactical and karmic blowback from its sustained program of deceit and violence; and – the hellhot ironies! – its loss of the political and financial support of its superpower enabler, in no small part through the efforts of Israel-indentured neocons and Fundamentalists and vote-cagey Democrats who squandered and have now irretrievably lost the United States’ financial, diplomatic and military hegemony which Truman and Johnson yoked to the very whims of the Israeli government without a serious thought to the ultimate common-weal of the United States and the strictures of genuine justice and morality.

Consequences, thus, all around. Toothy turkeys coming home to roost. A thorough-going, full-spectrum debauchery of the power and integrity of both the United States and the Israeli realm.
But hey – they had a ‘right’ to do it.

Me, I am thinking of what Jefferson said about slavery: “I tremble for my country, when I think on the fact that there is a just God”.