Author: admin

In 1923, Vladimir Jabotinsky (a founder of Zionism) wrote “The Iron Wall,” an essay that laid out a direct comparison of expropriation of the Arabs with the genocide of the indigenous people of North America:

“There can be no discussion of voluntary reconciliation between us and the Arabs, not now, and not in the foreseeable future. All well-meaning people, with the exception of those blind from birth, understood long ago the complete impossibility of arriving at a voluntary agreement with the Arabs of Palestine for the transformation of Palestine from an Arab country to a country with a Jewish majority. Each of you has some general understanding of the history of colonization. Try to find even one example when the colonization of a country took place with the agreement of the native population. Such an event has never occurred.

“The natives will always struggle obstinately against the colonists – and it is all the same whether they are cultured or uncultured. The comrades in arms of [Hernan] Cortez or [Francisco] Pizarro conducted themselves like brigands. The Redskins fought with uncompromising fervor against both evil and good-hearted colonizers. The natives struggled because any kind of colonization anywhere at anytime is inadmissible to any native people.

“Any native people view their country as their national home, of which they will be complete masters. They will never voluntarily allow a new master. So it is for the Arabs. Compromisers among us try to convince us that the Arabs are some kind of fools who can be tricked with hidden formulations of our basic goals. I flatly refuse to accept this view of the Palestinian Arabs.

“They have the precise psychology that we have. They look upon Palestine with the same instinctive love and true fervor that any Aztec looked upon his Mexico or any Sioux upon his prairie. Each people will struggle against colonizers until the last spark of hope that they can avoid the dangers of conquest and colonization is extinguished. The Palestinians will struggle in this way until there is hardly a spark of hope.

“It matters not what kind of words we use to explain our colonization. Colonization has its own integral and inescapable meaning understood by every Jew and by every Arab. Colonization has only one goal. This is in the nature of things. To change that nature is impossible. It has been necessary to carry on colonization against the will of the Palestinian Arabs and the same condition exists now.

“Even an agreement with non-Palestinians represents the same kind of fantasy. In order for Arab nationalists of Baghdad and Mecca and Damascus to agree to pay so serious a price they would have to refuse to maintain the Arab character of Palestine.

“We cannot give any compensation for Palestine, neither to the Palestinians nor to other Arabs. Therefore, a voluntary agreement is inconceivable. All colonization, even the most restricted, must continue in defiance of the will of the native population. Therefore, it can continue and develop only under the shield of force which comprises an Iron Wall through which the local population can never break through. This is our Arab policy. To formulate it any other way would be hypocrisy.”

THAT is Zionism! Among other things, white supremacist… the reason the Bushites are so ardently incapable of being the least bit critical. White supremacy is the organzing principle underpinning the Republican Party.

Now an actual wall is being built that captures yet more Palestinian land. Despite the objection of the United States, the wall has just been condemned by a ruling of the International Court of Justice at The Hague on July 9th, 2004. But for the foreseeable future, enforcement of this ruling will remain… elusive. Like a unicorn.

The more recent analogy can be found in Apartheid South Africa, of which Israel made a key ally, where Black South Africans were pushed onto squalid reservations called Bantustans and subjected to “pass laws,” much as Palestinians are now. It should not surprise anyone that Chaim Weizmann, the president of the World Zionist Organization that cajoled the British Mandate into awarding them Palestine was a good friend of the vicious South African Apartheid architect, General Jan Smuts.

But we seldom hear of this theft, or of the massive theft of Palestinian water. The US press has been so thoroughly intimidated by Zionist publicist/attack dogs, who bait every critic of Israel as an anti-Semite, that they have developed journalistic norms with regard to Palestine-Israel that completely support the Zionist position.

Robin C. Miller’s book “The Media’s Middle East Rules of Engagement” is a good primer on how this works, listing ten “rules” that are scrupulously followed and giving examples of each.

Rule 1: See the Middle East through Israeli eyes.
Rule 2: Treat American and Israeli governmental statements as hard news.
Rule 3: Ignore the historical context.
Rule 4: Avoid the fundamental legal and moral issues posed by the Israeli occupation.
Rule 5: Suppress or minimize news unfavorable to the Israelis.
Rule 6: Muddy the waters when necessary.
Rule 7: Credit all Israeli claims, even if wholly unfounded.
Rule 8: Doubt all Palestinian assertions, no matter how self-evident.
Rule 9: Condemn only Palestinian violence.
Rule 10: Disparage the international consensus supporting Palestinian rights.

There is an eleventh rule that hovers over all the other rules. Equate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. This shuts everyone up. That’s why it is so critically important that this Eleventh Rule be challenged loudly and clearly and frequently. Anti-Zionism is NOT anti-Semitism. Zionism is not Judaism. Not all Jews are Zionists, and not all Zionists are Jews. The point is that Zionism raises many questions about what constitutes Jewishness. Israeli Jews are largely secular, so it cannot be called a strictly religious category. Race is not even a scientifically operational term. The Jewish communities around the world are distinctly developed from one another. If Zionism is to define Jewishness for itself, it can only do so – loosely – as the Diaspora, the political utility of which, for example with the African Diaspora, is one where that ’scattered’ status still results in a common historically conditioned oppression. For Israeli Jews, the contrary is true. They have become not an oppressed nationality, but an oppressing European settler state.

After the 1st Zionist Congress in Basle, Switzerland in 1897, Herzl penned his manifesto, Der Judenstaadt (The Jewish State), in which he used overtly racial-colonial language to describe the process of seizing Palestine from its inhabitants, saying that this new state would be…

“…a rampart of Europe against Asia, of civilization against barbarism [a white supremacist remark]… We shall endeavor to encourage the poverty-stricken population [Herzl knew next to nothing about Palestinians] to cross the border by securing work for it in the countries it passes through, while denying it work in our own country. The process of expropriation and displacement must be carried out prudently and discreetly. Let the landowners sell us their land at exorbitant prices. We shall sell nothing back to them.”

The British supported this position unequivocally after World War I with the Balfour Declaration of 1917. Balfour himself would say in 1919, “In Palestine, we do not even propose to consult the inhabitants of the country and (Zionism’s) immediate needs and hopes for the future are much more important than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who presently inhabit Palestine.”

One of the most despicable ideological practices of Zionism has been its pimping of the Holocaust to justify Israel’s fascist-like treatment of Palestinians. In fact, prominent Zionists consorted with Mussolini, and saw the Holocaust as a great boost for Zionism.

Jabotinsky was an admirer of Mussolini and stated his racism openly and proudly:

“It is impossible for a man to become assimilated with people whose blood is different than [sic] his own. In order to become assimilated, he must change his body, he must become one of them, in blood. There can be no assimilation. We shall never allow such things as mixed marriage because the preservation of national integrity is impossible except by means of racial purity and for that purpose we shall have this territory where our people will constitute the racially pure inhabitants.”

This founding father of Zionism could have been quoting Adolph Hitler. Now his political offspring want to capitalize on Hitler’s monumental crime to legitimate their own crimes.

The irony was that with the blood-and-soil, anti-Semitic fascism that swept up Europe and began the horrifyingly systematic, industrially-rationalized slaughter of European Jewry, and with the closure of western borders (including those of the US) to those desperately escaping genocide, Zionist settlements in Palestine filled up. Zionists themselves actively lobbied western nations to refuse those trying to escape from Hitler’s crematoria.

In 1938, Ben Gurion had already stated, “If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Israel, then I opt for the second alternative.”

As late as 1943, while the Jews of Europe were being exterminated in the millions, the U.S. Congress proposed to set up a commission to “study” the problem. Rabbi Stephen Wise, who was the principal American spokesperson for Zionism, came to Washington to testify against the rescue bill because it would divert attention from the colonization of Palestine. (Sheonman, Ralph, “The Hidden History of Zionism“)

Zionists actively collaborated with Nazis. This is a verifiable historical fact. Not only did the Zionist Federation of Germany send a resolution of support to the Nazi Party in 1933, “the World Zionist Organization Congress in 1933 defeated a resolution calling for action against Hitler by a vote of 240 to 43.” (ibid.)

The history of Zionist collaboration with fascism is barely touched upon here, because my intent is not to paraphrase the history but simply to make my point about the obscenity of Zionists now laying claim to the Nazi Holocaust as justification for the Palestinian Holocaust they are perpetrating to this very day, all the while claiming that the Palestinians and other Arabs are bent on reproducing Nazi Germany’s crimes against them.

This post was excerpted from a longer piece I did two years ago, and it is still available, if anyone is interested.

Meanwhile, the slaughter in Iraq continues; and people say, “Why do they hate us?” as American-made missles rain down from American-made helicopters on the men, women, and children of Gaza and Lebanon.

The United States cannot attack Iran, nor can Israel mount a proxy attack on Tehran, without risking a generalized and well-armed Shia rebellion in the South of Iraq against American forces. In the North of Iraq – Iraqi Kurdistan – Turkish forces cross the border to raid Kurdish positions while Iran lobs artillery fire into Kurdish mountain bases. Even as Turkey retains its commitment never to allow an independent Kurdistan on its Southern border, the Turkish government has grown increasingly Islamist and so more receptive to overtures from Iran.

The principle constraint remaining on the Turkish government is its powerful desire to become part of the European Union – a desire that is steadily losing traction with the Turkish masses whose backs are being broken with the very neoliberal “structural adjustment” policies supported by the EU.

The US attempt to use the Kurds as a counterbalance against the Shias – even resorting to election fraud to diminish the UIA vote count – has backfired spectacularly. Not only has it set the stage for a Shia-Kurd armed conflict within the newly constituted Iraqi armed forces, it has created the conditions for a tactical rapprochement between the Kurds and Sunni Arab guerrillas… an American nightmare.

Instead of knocking off Iraq then moving promptly to the next target – Iran – the Bush administration has now played the foil for Iran, and put within Iran’s reach what it has sought for decades: the position of key political actor in the region and the world.

The only place in the region where the Bush administration enjoys a shred of support from any significant segment of actual national populations is among the right wing in Israel – a strategic alliance that has cost the US dearly over the years and promises to cost it more.

( More on these developments)

So Israel takes it on itself to tear Lebanon to pieces over one prisoner of war (who WAS across the border when he was ambushed) and make a mockery of the US-Israeli profession of fealty to democratic ideals (Hamas, was elected in Palestine!). By hitting Hezbollah (which looks like they are simply destroying another nation), perhaps they can send the message ­ a message of structural weakness ­ that they will disregard Arab and Muslim life with the same impunity as the US ­ a macho demonstration sure to elicit not surrender, but more heated resistance. For this demosntration of Israeli military masculinity they will risk regional war, tell Condi Rice to shit in her hat for even questioning them, while her brain-dead boss galavants across Europe proclaiming this aggression is “self-defense.”

This is just the last in a long line of Zionist crimes (which we NEVER hear about here) with names like the King David Hotel, Baldat al-Shaikh, Yehiday, Khisas, Kazaza, the Semiramis Hotel, Dair Yassin, Naser al-Din, Abu Shusa, Tantura, Beit Daras, the Dahmash Mosque, Dawayma, Houla, Sharafat, Qibya, Kafr Qasem, Khan Yunis, Gaza City, Al Sammou, Sabra and Shatila, Oyon Qara, the Al Aqsa Mosque, the Ibrahimi Mosque, Jabalia, the Eretz Checkpoint, Mansuriah, Nabatyaih, Qana, Trqumiah… this list is very long.

When we sign the checks for these atrocities without taking the trouble to see whose lives have been cashed to redeem them, we become complicit. We’ve all heard the Israeli side of this for years. Research it for yourself, and avoid US-Israeli sources for a change. Enough is enough of bloody aggression from both.

The United States can no longer afford Israel; and those who continue to do what they cannot afford soon find themselves bankrupted. Morally, the US is already there.

Divest! Free Palestine!

In particular they demanded the removal of the plaque that pays tribute to the Irgun, the Jewish resistance branch headed by Menachem Begin, the future Prime Minister, which carried out the attack on July 22, 1946.

The plaque presents as fact the Irgun’s claim that people died because the British ignored warning calls. “For reasons known only to the British, the hotel was not evacuated,” it states.

Mr McDonald and Dr Jenkins denied that the British had been warned, adding that even if they had “this does not absolve those who planted the bomb from responsibility for the deaths”. On Monday city officials agreed to remove the language deemed offensive from the blue sign hanging on the hotel’s gates, though that had not been done shortly before it was unveiled last night.

The controversy over the plaque and the two-day celebration of the bombing, sponsored by Irgun veterans and the right-wing Menachem Begin Heritage Centre, goes to the heart of the debate over the use of political violence in the Middle East. Yesterday Mr Netanyahu argued in a speech celebrating the attack that the Irgun were governed by morals, unlike fighters from groups such as Hamas.

“It’s very important to make the distinction between terror groups and freedom fighters, and between terror action and legitimate military action,” he said. “Imagine that Hamas or Hezbollah would call the military headquarters in Tel Aviv and say, ‘We have placed a bomb and we are asking you to evacuate the area’.”

But the view of the attack was very different in 1946 when The Times branded the Irgun “terrorists in disguise”. Decades later, Irgun veterans are unrepentant. Sarah Agassi, 80, remembers spying in the King David Hotel.

She and a fellow agent posed as a couple. They danced tangos and waltzes, sipped whisky and wine while they cased out the hotel.

On the day her brother and his fellow fighters posed as Arabs delivering milk and brought seven milk churns, each containing 50kg of explosives, into the building. Ms Agassi waited across the street until her brother rushed out. She said that she then made the warning call to the British command in the hotel.

Sitting in the luxurious hotel lobby, she expressed no regret. “We fought for our independence. We thought it was the right way . . . If I had to fight for Israel, I swear even now I would do anything.”

TWO VERSIONS

The original wording:

The Hotel housed the Mandate Secretariat as well as the Army Headquarters. On July 1946 (sic) Irgun fighters at the order of the Hebrew Resistance Movement planted explosives in the basement. Warning phone calls had been made urging the hotel’s occupants to leave immediately. For reasons known only to the British the hotel was not evacuated and after 25 minutes the bombs exploded, and to the Irgun’s regret and dismay 91 persons were killed.

The amended version

. . .Warning phone calls had been made to the hotel, the Palestine Post and the French Consulate, urging the hotel’s occupants to leave immediately.

The hotel was not evacuated, and after 25 minutes the bombs exploded. The entire western wing was destroyed, and to the Irgun’s regret 92 persons were killed.

Israel’s Netanyahu rejected the proposal as drafted, but George W. Bush approved a modified version of the paper which resurfaced just before he siezed power in 2001. Presumably Bush’s attention concentrated on the following: "This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq — an important strategic advantage in its own right."

Bush was similarly interested in those parts of the document which related to Syria and other Islamic nations being "rolled back" while America simultaneously disengaged itself from interference in the ‘Palestinian problem’. The idea was for the US to withdraw completely from the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and to allow free reign to the Israelis, much as Reagan/Haig had done at the time of the Israeli-condoned Sabra and Shatila massacres in Lebanon in 1982. In addition the "Clean Break" document advocated military pre-emption and aggression versus perceived regional ‘enemies’ of the United States, principally Iraq, Syria, and Iran. Subsequent to the release of the "Clean Break" document in 1997, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld authored a letter to President Clinton calling for military force to be used in the ouster of Saddam Hussein, urging his removal as a primary "aim of American foreign policy".

Essentially the United Stated is now fighting a regional war of aggression, both directly and by its proxy (Israel) in a last-ditch attempt to leverage the events of 911 and preserve US hegemony in an all-out war versus the Arab/Islamic world, including key oil producers.  The US/Israeli axis has been targeting Lebanon, Syria, and Iran for many years, with Saudi Arabia to follow some years down the line. With the eventual fall of the House of Saud the US Pentagon has developed a contingency plan for Saudi de-stabilization. US Pentagon officials recently approved a massive arms sale to the Saudis, but the timeline for Saudi de-stabilization is far advanced; and with Saudi dependency on US weapons, America’s rulers believe Saudi and the UAE will be totally dependent on American replacement parts and support when the time comes for war.  Meanwhile, Lebanon is essential to the re-establishment of the Haifa pipeline, which will finally be  re-opened with a larger diameter pipeline and oil port in Tripoli, regardless of any outcome re the current fighting, and will guarantee Israel’s access to low-sulphur oil, while providing a new major Mediterranean oil port thus lessening reliance on Arabian Gulf ports.

Why act now? The Neo-conservatives have been unhappy with the situation in Lebanon for several years, especially with Hezbollah’s enhanced access to more advanced weaponry. And regardless of the military disaster in Iraq, Neo-cons must push forward with their agenda for crippling the Hezbollah-Iran pact with Syria as an equally important potential power play,  because Syria has obtained more advanced weaponry in recent years, including several SCUD variants with greater accuracy and more potential for striking Israel with more powerful (conventional) warheads; in such circumstances the damage to US and Israeli corporate interests in the region would be enormous. (Example: Intel, Checkpoint, etc)

Neo-conservatives see several benefits in taking this action now.  The Iran-Hezbollah alliance poses a strategic threat to US oil and business interests in the Gulf, and attacking Lebanon now provides more leverage to the US/Israeli pact on pressuring Iran over its nuclear ambitions. In addition, Neo-conservatives believe the Lebanese and Gaza action will neutralize Hezbollah and Hamas for the foreseeable future.  

The US Israeli-pact is gambling on several key (non) developments:

• US-rael believes that no other Arab nations will step in to oppose USraeli aggression in the region.
• US-rael has calculated that the sovereign nations under attack will rapidly fold, as Iraq did.
• US-rael is gambling that the occupation and establishment of buffer zones in Lebanon and the Shebaa Farms will guarantee Israel’s security.
• With Irag as a cautionary example, US-rael believes that the nations under attack will fall in line with Bush regime doctrine, once they are militarily defeated.

Unfortunately all of the above points suffer from deep potential think-tank flaws. Miscalculation on any single point above will spell disaster for the US/Israeli pact, and their future hegemonic plans. For example, at a tactical level, the Haifa pipeline and the port of Tripoli will be a key focal point for insurgent attack. On a strategic level, world opinion will solidify against the United States and Israel, resulting in major consequences for US financial instruments and further loss of leverage in global diplomatic circles with far-reaching consequences, equivalent to foreign-imposed sanctions. Most significantly, Syria and Iran will be formidable military foes to a US military machine already stretched very thin.  And if Hezbollah can successfully resist Israel through a guerilla war of attrition (as it did from 1982 to the year 2000) Israel will find itself severely militarily tested as well; notwithstanding the intervention of the Lebanese Army itself versus Israel as another unknown and mitigating factor.

 

The Neo-conservatives must embark on their final adventure now, because world and public opinion is turning against them, and their potential timeline for action has rapidly diminished.  There are already 500,000 "refugees" in Lebanon (refugees within their own country)  and enormous resentment for the US/Israeli military aggression already taking place. Under Nuremberg and the US War Crimes Act of 1996, both Israel and the United States are already in serious violation of international war tribunal laws. 

 

But in the end it may simply be the US/Israeli miscalculation on the resolve of the Arab/Islamic state to resist them – both ideologically and militarily – that will be the pact’s final undoing. 

– Montoya

Let’s go on a brief excursion into pre-history. I’m talking about June 20, 2006, when Israeli aircraft fired at least one missile at a car in an attempted extrajudicial assassination attempt on a road between Jabalya and Gaza City. The missile missed the car.  Instead it killed three Palestinian children and wounded 15.

Back we go again to June 13, 2006. Israeli aircraft fired missiles at a van in another attempted extrajudicial assassination. The successive barrages killed nine innocent Palestinians. 

Now we’re really in the dark ages, reaching far, far back to June 9, 2006, when Israel shelled a beach in Beit Lahiya killing 8 civilians and injuring 32.

That’s just a brief trip down Memory Lane, and we trip over the bodies of twenty dead and forty-seven wounded, all of them Palestinians, most of them women and children.

Israel regrets… But no! Israel doesn’t regret in the least. Most of the time it doesn’t even bother to pretend to regret. It says, “We reserve the right to slaughter Palestinians whenever we want. We reserve the right to assassinate their leaders, crush their homes, steal their water, tear out their olive groves, and when they try to resist we call them terrorists intent on wrecking the ‘peace process’”.

Now Israel says it wants to wipe out Hezbollah. It wishes no harm to the people of Lebanon, just so long as they’re not supporters of Hezbollah, or standing anywhere in the neighborhood of a person or a house or a car or a truck or a road or a bus or a field, or a power station or a port that might, in the mind of an Israeli commander or pilot, have something to do with Hezbollah. In any of those eventualities all bets are off. You or your wife or your mother or your baby get fried.

Israel regrets… But no! As noted above,  it doesn’t regret in the least. Neither does George Bush, nor Condoleezza  Rice nor John Bolton who is  the moral savage who brings shame on his country each day that he sits as America’s ambassador (unconfirmed) at the UN and who has just told the world that a dead Israel civilian is worth a whole more in terms of moral outrage than a Lebanese one.

None of them regrets. They say Hezbollah is a cancer in the body of Lebanon. Sometimes, to kill the cancer, you end up killing the body. Or bodies. Bodies of babies. Lots of them.  Go to the website fromisraeltolebanon.info and take a look. Then sign the petition on the site calling on the governments of the world to stop this barbarity.

You can say that Israel brought Hezbollah into the world. You can prove it too, though this too involves another frightening excursion into history.

This time we have to go far, almost unimaginably far, back into history. Back to 1982, before the dinosaurs, before CNN, before Fox TV, before O’Reilly and Limbaugh. But not before the neo-cons who at that time had already crawled from the primal slime and were doing exactly what they are doing now: advising an American president to give Israel the green light to “solve its security problems” by destroying Lebanon.

In 1982 Israel had a problem. Yasir Arafat, headquartered in Beirut, was making ready to announce that the PLO was prepared to sit down with Israel and embark on peaceful, good faith negotiations towards a two-state solution.

Israel didn’t want a two-state solution, which meant — if UN resolutions were to be taken seriously — a Palestinian state right next door, with water, and contiguous territory.  So Israel decided chase the PLO right out of Lebanon. It announced that the Palestinian fighters had broken the year-long cease-fire by lobbing some shells into northern Israel.

Palestinians had done nothing of the sort. I remember this very well, because Brian Urquhart, at that time assistant secretary general of the United Nations, in charge of UN observers on Israel’s northern border, invited me to his office on the 38th floor of the UN hq in mid-Manhattan and showed me all the current reports from the zone. For over a year there’d been no shelling from north of the border. Israel was lying.

With or without a pretext Israel wanted to invade Lebanon. So it did, and rolled up to Beirut. It shelled Lebanese towns and villages and bombed them from the air. Sharon’s forces killed maybe 20,000 people, and let Lebanese Christians slaughter hundreds of Palestinian refugees in the camps of Sabra and Chatilla.

The killing got so bad that even Ronald Reagan awoke from his slumbers and called Tel Aviv to tell Israel to stop. Sharon gave the White House the finger by bombing Beirut at the precise times — 2.42 and 3.38 — of two UN resolutions calling for a peaceful settlement on the matter of Palestine.

When the dust settled over the rubble, Israel bunkered down several miles inside Lebanese sovereign territory, which it illegally occupied, in defiance of all UN resolutions, for years, supervising a brutal local militia and running its own version of Abu Graibh, the torture center at the prison of Al-Khiam.

Occupy a country, torture its citizens and in the end you face resistance. In Israel’s case it was Hezbollah, and in the end Hezbollah ran Israel out of Lebanon, which is why a lot of Lebanese regard Hezbollah not as terrorists but as courageous liberators.

The years roll by and Israel does its successful best to destroy all possibility of a viable two-state solution. It builds illegal settlements. It chops up Palestine with Jews-only roads. It collars all the water. It cordons off Jerusalem. It steals even more land by bisecting Palestinian territory with its “fence”. Anyone trying to organize resistance gets jailed, tortured, or blown up.

Sick of their terrible trials,  Palestinians elect Hamas, whose leaders make it perfectly clear that they are ready to deal on the basis of the old two-state solution, which of course is the one thing Israel cannot endure. Israel doesn’t want any “peaceful solution” that gives the Palestinians anything more than a few trashed out acres surrounded with barbed wire and tanks, between the Israeli settlements whose goons can murder them pretty much at will.

So here we are, 24 years after Sharon did his best to destroy Lebanon in 1982, and his heirs are doing it all over again. Since they can’t endure the idea of any just settlement for Palestinians, it’s the only thing they know how to do. Call Lebanon a terror-haven and bomb it back to the stone age. Call Gaza a terror-haven and bomb its power plant, first stop on the journey back to the stone age. Bomb Damascus. Bomb Teheran.

Of course they won’t destroy Hezbollah. Every time they kill another Lebanese family, they multiply hatred of Israel and support for Hezbollah. They’ve even unified the parliament in Baghdad, which just voted unanimously —  Sunnis and Shi’ites and Kurds alike —  to deplore Israel’s conduct and to call for a ceasefire.

I hope you’ve enjoyed these little excursions into history, even though history is dangerous, which is why the US press gives it a wide birth. But even without the benefit of historical instruction, a majority of Americans in CNN’s instant poll –- about 55 per cent out of 800,000 as of midday, July 19 — don’t like what Israel is up to.

Dislike is one thing, but at least in the short term it doesn’t help much. Israel’s 1982 attack on Lebanon grew unpopular in the US, after the first few days. But forcing the US to pressure Israel to settle the basic problem takes political courage, and virtually no US politician is prepared to buck the Israel lobby, however many families in Lebanon and Gaza may be sacrificed on the altar of such cowardice. 

Thursday morning, however, as the bird sings outside my window, I awake to the news that the IDF is insisting on two weeks. In two weeks, they’ll be saying a month more – and the Americans will start to get antsy. The Arab killer regimes that back the bashing of Hezbollah are fidgeting nervously as pictures of the slaughter are beamed around the world: the Egyptians, for one, are reportedly furious that Bush refuses to endorse calls for a cease-fire. Any other American president would have long ago made such a pronouncement and fulfilled America’s mediating role, in line with our status as the predominant power in the region.

But not this president. This is all about Israel, and not the U.S., as the dominating power in the Middle East. Bush’s indifference to American interests and craven appeasement of the Israelis has led him to stand helplessly by as Israeli fighter jets paid for by American taxpayers drop U.S.-made ordnance on American citizens. There are 25,000 U.S. nationals in Lebanon, for all intents and purposes held hostage by the IDF. Instead of taking the Israelis to task for putting Americans at risk – without warning, and without apology – George W. Bush gave them the green light to keep up the bombing and the blockade for as long as they can get away with it.

The scandal over the reimbursement demanded by the State Department for rescuing U.S. citizens trapped in Lebanon will pale as Americans realize why it took so long to even begin the difficult task of getting our people out of there safely. Garance Franke-Ruta reports the outrageous truth on the American Prospect‘s weblog:

"A reliable source tells me that the reason the United States has been so slow in evacuating its citizens from Lebanon is that the public diplomacy (i.e., P.R.) issues raised by evacuating under Israeli assault are so complicated. Individuals within the State Department, I am told, have been reluctant to create an impression that the Israeli assault on Lebanon is as bad as it is or that civilian U.S. citizens are being threatened by U.S. ally Israel. If a conflict this severe had broken out in, say, Indonesia, the American embassy would have been shut down the next day and its personnel and families rapidly brought to safety. That’s how things normally work. (See Laura Rozen on the evacuation from Albania here.) In this case, however, the diplomatic message sent by shutting down the U.S. embassy in the face of Israeli bombing would have contradicted the U.S. government message of support for the Israeli mission against Hezbollah terrorists, which, when added to the general concern within lower-level diplomatic circles about ever creating a Fall of Saigon-style visual for the news media, have led the Americans to be slower than they could have been about getting U.S. citizens out of harm’s way."

In my last column, I likened the slowness of the American response to the federal government’s hapless efforts to deal with the effects of Hurricane Katrina, a comparison made by many others. However, the Lebanese disaster is much worse than what happened in New Orleans and environs. This isn’t incompetence: the U.S. government made a conscious decision to delay the rescue mission to avoid embarrassing the Israelis. The Bush administration can always be counted on to put Israel first – ahead even of the welfare and very lives of American citizens.

When it comes to kowtowing before the Israel lobby, however, Congress outdoes the executive branch by several degrees of servility. Pat Buchanan was exactly right when he described Congress as "Israeli-occupied territory." A resolution giving unconditional support to Israel passed the Senate unanimously: and, in the House, a similar measure passed overwhelmingly. Not that everyone who voted for it is proud of his or her vote: in the negotiations leading to the introduction of the resolution by the Republicans, Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) pledged to vote for the resolution and speak on its behalf, but refused to be a co-sponsor. Or, as Roll Call put it, she refused to "attach her name to it." Does she really imagine this kind of obfuscation is going to provide adequate cover on her left flank? The antiwar faction of her party, large and growing, is already on to her brand of warmongering, and she knows it. In any case, it takes a special kind of cowardice to slither around the issue with such snake-like alacrity.

The Democrats are competing with the GOP to see who can praise the Israeli blitzkrieg in the most obsequiously extravagant terms. Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid made a fire-breathing speech in favor the resolution, Hillary Clinton declared her " unreserved support" for the invasion, and even Russ Feingold, ostensibly the antiwar candidate among the Democratic presidential wannabes, averred:

"I stand firmly with the people of Israel and their government as they defend themselves against these outrageous attacks. What we have done by becoming mired in Iraq, and by deciding to change the balance of power in that region, is enable Iran and Syria to be much more open in tormenting Israel, the United States, and our allies."

That is gibberish. The "defense" of Israel hardly requires the bombing of northern Lebanon, including the Christian areas and the civilian infrastructure. The Israelis are even hitting the barracks of the Lebanese army – the very army the Israelis are demanding must police southern Lebanon and prevent Hezbollah attacks. Israel’s goal has nothing to do with getting any soldiers back: it’s all about the dissolution of a Parliament where Hezbollah’s representatives sit, and the division of the country. Forget the " Cedar Revolution" – touted by Bush and the neocons as indisputable evidence of a " democratic wave" supposedly sweeping the region as the direct result of Iraq’s " liberation." The Israelis have decided that the government brought to power in the " Beirut spring" must fall, and that is the end of that.

As for Syria, it has never been weaker, which is precisely why the Israelis are now engineering a provocation. It is also hard to believe the presence of 130,000 U.S. troops nearby emboldens either Syria or Iran to "torment" anybody, except, perhaps, their own people.

If anyone is being tormented, it is the Syrians, who have bent over backwards to cooperate with the Americans in the war on al-Qaeda and assiduously tried to avoid any conflict with Washington. To no avail: Israel’s enemies are our enemies. President Assad was recently given a sign of things to come when Israeli jets buzzed his summer palace. The Iranians, too, have signaled their willingness to negotiate, yet the U.S. is openly embarking on a campaign to fund a Chalabi-like "democratic" opposition, consisting of monarchists, Communist cultists, and job-seekers.

Baghdad – Beirut – Damascus – Tehran: get on board the "regime change" train and fasten your seat belt. Because it doesn’t matter how sick unto death the American public is of the neocons’ wars. They will get one after the other anyway, in rapid succession. This is due to the unprecedented power of "the Lobby" – as Professor John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt term it in their now-famous Harvard University study of Israel’s fifth column in the U.S.

This is Israel’s war, for the moment, but already the outline of a scheme to drag us in is taking shape, with calls for an " international force" to supplant the Israeli invaders, to be stationed in a buffer zone on the Lebanese-Israeli border. Not a UN force, however, but a "multinational" one, presumably made up mostly of Americans, Brits, and probably the French. It’s possible they could recruit from among the motley crew of Sunni Arab autocrats who have turned on their Lebanese "brothers" and left them to twist slowly in the wind: the Saudis, the Egyptians, and the Jordanians, who have all joined Israel in assigning the blame for this war on Hezbollah.

This would gather all the elements of a broad anti-Shia alliance in one place, and lay the foundations for future action – in Syria, perhaps, where a confrontation is looming, and ultimately in Iran, the real target of the regime-changers.

The narrative of this war is being carefully articulated: it is, we are told, a "proxy war" being waged by Hezbollah, which the conspiracy theorists insist is merely an Iranian instrument. According to this view, Hassan Nasrallah is merely Mahmoud Ahmadinejad writ small.

To begin with, Hezbollah is a nationalist organization, with the requisite Islamist veneer. It was created not by Iran but by the Israelis themselves, in 1982, when they foolishly invaded the first time – and provoked a reaction that eventually drove the IDF out of southern Lebanon. This fantasy that Hezbollah consists of remote-controlled robots operated by the mullahs of Tehran is convenient for the purposes of war propaganda, but the reality is a bit more complex.

Yet even if we accept the simplistic Israeli-neocon view of Hezbollah as merely Iranian-run automatons, their proposed course of action still fails to make much sense. The logic of the neocon argument, applied to Iraq, would require us to turn our guns on the very government we are pledged to defend against the insurgency. The principal elements of Iraq’s democratically elected Shi’ite coalition –including the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), the Badr Corps (SCIRI’s militia), and the Da’wa party – were funded by Tehran and given sanctuary on Iranian soil during the years of Ba’athist rule. Are they, too, cat’s-paws of Tehran?

Most Americans don’t want U.S. troops to return to Lebanon – perhaps they remember what happened the last time. If the question is put as Israel versus Hezbollah, then, according to this CNN poll, 57 percent are more sympathetic to Israel, while 20 percent disdain taking sides and 4 percent are pro-Hezbollah. One suspects, however, if asked to choose between Israel and Lebanon, quite a different result would be forthcoming. In any event, 47 percent disapprove of the way President Bush is handling the crisis, with 43 percent approving – and 31 percent saying Israel’s military response to the kidnapping of its soldiers went too far. As pictures of the devastation wrought by the Israeli military machine capture the brutal reality of Israel’s exercise in "self-defense," this number is bound to go higher.

Yet the momentum of the burgeoning conflict may sideline public opinion and give impetus to the War Party’s ambitious plans. As the rescue mission got belatedly underway, and American troops set foot on Lebanese soil for the first time since the ill-fated 1980s incursion, the chances of the U.S. getting roped into this snake-pit were quadrupled. Those Marines will be a magnet for every nutball "militia" and provocateur – a tripwire just waiting to be triggered.

Which leads us to wonder if this, perhaps, wasn’t built into the calculations that went into the making of this war.

No one believes the official pretext for the invasion – the capture of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah – and it is well-known that plans for the operation were ready to be taken off the shelf well before the incident. On Meet the Press the other day, Tim Russert asked NBC’s Martin Fletcher if the Israelis had been looking for an opportunity to attack Hezbollah and took the first one that came along. Fletcher’s answer was illuminating:

"I think so very strongly. I mean, they’ve never – they’ll never say that publicly, but don’t forget that when Israel left – ended their occupation of south Lebanon in the year 2000, the deal was that the Lebanese army would go in and police the border. Well, they never did that. Instead, Hezbollah moved in with all those rockets, and ever since then, about – for that last five years, Israel’s been planning what to do, how to fight Hezbollah, how to destroy them. So this is, this is not a quick reaction to a kidnapping, it’s the implementation of a plan Israel’s been working on for five years with very specific targets. They call it a work plan. They’re going step by step."

Step 1 – Seize a pretext, any pretext, to goose-step into Lebanon.

Step 2 – Simultaneously denounce Syrian influence and a hidden "spy network" supposedly still remaining in Lebanon – this in spite of the recent bust-up of a Mossad cell by Lebanese intelligence, which had been responsible for several assassinations.

Step 3 – Restart the Lebanese civil war – and drag Syria into it.

Step 4 – Engage the enemy on two fronts:

A. Diplomatically, in the United Nations, by imposing sanctions on Iran and demanding inspections of its nuclear facilities. This long drawn-out ritual is meant largely for American and European consumption – to convince world opinion that every possible avenue for a peaceful settlement has been explored, before the second front is opened up.

B. Militarily, in Lebanon, and beyond. Bashar al-Assad is a pincer movement away from being deposed. A right hook from U.S.-occupied Iraq and a left from the Israelis would knock out the last remaining Ba’athists and open up a veritable Pandora’s box of ethnic and religious conflicts long masked by the dictatorship of the Assads.

Step 5 – On to Tehran!

The hijacking of American foreign policy by a small but influential cadre of neoconservatives is no secret, nor is it a deep mystery that they have the president’s ear. Whether the sound of their whispered advice will drown out the plaintive cries of ordinary Americans, who are hardly in the mood for yet another " cakewalk," is not yet known. In the case of George W. Bush, however, it is always best to count on him living up to one’s worst expectations.