Is Israel A Racist State?

A subject much discussed these days is: is Israel a racist state? Israel and the U.S. walked out of the U.N.'s 2001 World Conference Against Racism in Durban because there had been criticism of Israel, and Israel has already refused to attend a follow-up conference in Geneva April 2009.
In Durban, Israel's policies had been described as "apartheid," a situation well-documented subsequently by President Jimmy Carter in his 2006 best-selling book Palestine Peace Not Apartheid.

Israel claims to be both a "democracy" and a "Jewish state," but the problem is that when the U.N. carved Israel out of Palestine, the land was already populated by Arabs who had lived there 1300 years. A writer, whose letter to the editor was published in The Wall Street Journal 12/10/07, stated that although he had been taught in Hebrew School that Jews returned to an empty land, he later discovered the truth. Early Jewish leaders had ethnically cleansed out the Arab population through terrorism, massacres, and mass expulsion, as documented in Israeli historian Ilan Pappe's important 2006 book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. After six months in 1948 there were 800,000 Palestinian Arab refugees. However, large numbers of Arabs remain and are referred to as the "demographic problem." Arabs in Israel are not granted the same rights as Jewish citizens. After 60 years Israel still has no constitution because of the impossibility of reconciling "democracy" with "Jewish state" given the "demographic problem."

Although Arabs have agreed to a just peace, as in the Arab Peace Plan, Israel refuses to end its illegal occupation and colonization. Meanwhile Jewish "settlers" keep grabbing Palestinian Arab land, expanding "settlements" connected by Jews-only roads, and attacking Arabs, their homes, and crops. Even murder of Arabs leads to scant punishment, as documented in the book Lords of the Land, written by Israeli scholars, Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar. On the other hand, the Israeli human rights group Yesh Din reported that West Bank Palestinian Arabs receive almost automatic conviction, being convicted 99.7% of the time. (AP 1/7/08)

This Palestinian Holocaust-In-Slow-Motion can be visualized as collective macro-torture with a mammoth vise implacably closing in on a population which can be murdered at will, reminiscent of the Pit and the Pendulum.

One might say: so what? What does this matter to Americans? Yet even those who do not subscribe to the "I'm my brother's keeper" philosophy might consider that our support of Israel-right-or-wrong has meant that in the Arab/Muslim world, America is identified with Israel.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, says his hatred of us is due to our bias in favor of Israel (see The 9/11 Commission Report, p. 147). The same thing was said by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's nephew Ramzi Yousef, who masterminded the 1993 World Trade Center attack and vowed to return (see James Bamford's A Pretext for War). Being considered Israel's Siamese twin, it's crucial that we work to rectify Israel's racist apartheid policies by pushing for a just Israeli/Palestinian peace.

Iraq War: Don't Blame Big Oil

Although it has been very fashionable to claim we invaded Iraq for oil, the truth is that it was the Israel Lobby, not the oil lobby, which pushed for war. Unlike pro-Israel strategists who seek to trash and destabilize Israel's many enemies, Big Oil prefers stability which is better for business.

As stressed in three recent books: John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt's The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy; James Petras' The Power of Israel in the United States; and Stephen J. Sniegoski's The Transparent Cabal---The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel, it is not the oil companies who are the war-mongers. In fact, it's quite the opposite: oil companies have a history of lobbying to repeal sanctions on so-called rogue states in order to facilitate oil industry investment and development.

Furthermore, the oil companies were not the ones who manipulated the intelligence to trick us into the preemptive unnecessary war with Iraq, whose long-term cost is estimated to be $3 trillion by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz. On the other hand, Zionist neocons, who had previously written strategy papers for Israel, such as "A Clean Break" in 1996, advocating preemptive Middle East wars to benefit Israel, formed a network at the highest levels in the Bush administration from which emanated the now-discredited pro-war garbage parroted by Cheney and Bush. These Israel Lobby neocons are ideologically linked to the far-right Israeli Likud Party war-mongers who serve to make the racist apartheid occupation of Palestine permanent. No land for peace.

In contrast, peace is what benefits Big Oil. Indeed, the entire global economy requires stability and peace to achieve its best results. Oil-rich states have long been willing to make a just peace with Israel: the 2002 Saudi Peace Plan, now known as the Arab Peace Plan, was accepted by Saddam Hussein as well as by Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat. Iranian leaders and Hamas leaders have likewise said they would abide by any peace settlement acceptable to the Palestinians.

Such a peace would not only end anti-American terrorism, but would also take the pressure off the requirement for a shotgun approach to our energy crisis. Developing alternative energy sources is important but doing it right requires time and money, currently in short supply. In the meantime, there is abundant Middle East oil and all these countries eager to sell it. Tragically, Israel rejects peace by refusing to relinquish stolen Palestinian, Syrian, and Lebanese land and therefore hates to see even one penny paid to its enemies for oil.

Iraq's Farewell Kiss

President Bush made a surprise visit to Baghdad to boast about his legacy and to sign the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA). However, Bush's surprise was a 28-year-old journalist, Muntader al Zaidi, who hurled his shoes at Bush, shouting that this was a "farewell kiss" to the "dog" from "the widows, the orphans, and those who were killed in Iraq." These mother-of-all-insults are designed to portray Bush as not only less-than-human but also as lower and filthier than the dirt under one's shoes.

As Dr. Stephen J. Sniegoski points out in his outstanding 2008 book The Transparent Cabal---The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel, the neocons' motive in taking us to war was to create instability in Iraq to benefit Israel. Israeli and neocon strategists have long promoted the destabilization and fragmentation of Israel's many enemies.

For example, Sniegowski cites the important work of Israeli Oded Yinon entitled "A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s," published in the World Zionist Organization's Kivunim February 1982, which advocated the dissolution of Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and the Arabian peninsula, along ethnic/religious lines. The goal was to create numerous small powerless statelets so that Israel could reign supreme.

The blatant lack of planning by the neocons for post-war Iraq is thus explained by the fact that the neocons wanted instability. This would be an excuse for a prolonged or permanent occupation by US forces, which in turn would serve as a base from which to wage war on Israel's other enemies, such as Iran.

Ironically, the SOFA which Bush came to sign stipulates not only that our forces leave on a scheduled timeline, but also that we not use Iraq as a base from which to attack Iraq's neighbors, such as Iran. Moreover, Bush's legacy of horrible suffering inflicted on the Iraq people returned to him in the form of two shoes.

The Neocon Dilemma

A brilliantly colorful full-page advertisement in The New York Times 11/10/08 features flags of over 50 countries which have endorsed the Arab Peace Initiative calling for Israel to end the occupation of Palestine in return for peace and normalization of relations with all these countries. Like Hamas, many countries do not recognize Israel because of its brutal racist apartheid occupation, which is in defiance of UN Security Council Resolution 242, etc.

Since the Israel Lobby/neocons have no intention of ending this occupation, their dilemma is: which country do we go to war with next? Or better still, which country do we pressure America into fighting next?

Of course, it appears that what the Israel Lobby/neocons really want is a world-wide conflagration pitting Israel, the US, India, Georgia and whatever other countries they can enlist against the Arab/Muslim world, especially Pakistan, Syria, and Iran, plus Russia and whoever else dares defy this neocon alliance.

This is why the neocons are so excited at the prospect of re-starting the Cold War with Russia: the US and Israel armed Georgia who complied by firing missiles into South Ossetia, where there are internationally sanctioned Russian peace keepers, on August 7, 2008. The Russians responded as expected. Now the neocons are pushing for Georgia to join NATO and for the US to further provoke Russia with missiles and missile shields at Russia's doorstep. The US and Israel have also grandstanded relations with India, including highly publicized nuclear deals, along with flamboyant Indian investment in Afghanistan, which is highly unsettling to Pakistan.

It is noteworthy that the recent Mumbai attacks included targeting a Jewish center. The surviving terrorist, Azam Amir Kasab, said the attack on the Chabad House was to avenge Israeli atrocities in Palestine.

Rather than promoting peace between India and Pakistan and between Israel and the Arab/Muslim world, the Israel Lobby/neocons clearly prefer endless war.