Mark LeVine: Israel's 'Friends' Also to Blame
[Mark LeVine is a professor of history at UC Irvine and senior visiting researcher at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University in Sweden. His most recent books are Heavy Metal Islam (Random House) and Impossible Peace: Israel/Palestine Since 1989 (Zed Books).]
Perhaps now Americans will understand the true nature of the Israeli occupation.
It has never been about security. Not for one day. It has been about land and power. And this is where it has led. And we have made it possible.
Since at least the mid-1970s, only one country has had the power to force Israel to give up its dreams of permanent occupation of the West Bank: The US.
After the success against Soviet-backed Arab forces in 1967, Israel suddenly became a "strategic asset" - a useful proxy in the global great game against Communism.
For three decades the US and its political class have feigned concern, affection and even love for Israel; the reality is that Israel has always been a tool to advance US strategic goals and power, and nothing more.
All the while, thoughtful Israelis - not to mention Palestinians and the rest of the world - have begged the US to intervene, to stop the insanity before it created an abscess that threatened not just the Jewish state, but the whole region, and even global peace.
But the US goal was never to "protect" or "support" Israel....
And now at least 10 people are dead because of the shame, because of the inability of Israel's best friends to look it in the eye and say: "Stop this insanity. Treat Palestinians like humans before you destroy not only them, but you."
We cannot say that because we are guilty as well, and the US has proved singularly unable to come to grips with our own culpability in occupations from Iraq and Afghanistan to Gaza and, of course, our own original sin, which demanded millions of dead native Americans to ensure the creation of the very country that now supplies Israel with its weapons and tells it everything is going to be okay.
Some day you can let the Palestinians have casinos and they will thank you.
It is tragically fitting that this disaster should happen on Memorial Day in the US.
The martyrs of the ships are heroes, they are warriors every bit as deserving of our tears and support as the soldiers of American wars past and present.
They are, in fact, the soldiers of the future - the only ones who can help us get out of the disastrous slide to moral turpitude that we, as much as Israel, have descended as a country.
Let us hope that the deaths of the Gaza flotilla activists will not be as in vain as those of the 5,000 American soldiers who have died in our own illegal and useless wars in the last decade.
Read entire article at Al Jazeera
Perhaps now Americans will understand the true nature of the Israeli occupation.
It has never been about security. Not for one day. It has been about land and power. And this is where it has led. And we have made it possible.
Since at least the mid-1970s, only one country has had the power to force Israel to give up its dreams of permanent occupation of the West Bank: The US.
After the success against Soviet-backed Arab forces in 1967, Israel suddenly became a "strategic asset" - a useful proxy in the global great game against Communism.
For three decades the US and its political class have feigned concern, affection and even love for Israel; the reality is that Israel has always been a tool to advance US strategic goals and power, and nothing more.
All the while, thoughtful Israelis - not to mention Palestinians and the rest of the world - have begged the US to intervene, to stop the insanity before it created an abscess that threatened not just the Jewish state, but the whole region, and even global peace.
But the US goal was never to "protect" or "support" Israel....
And now at least 10 people are dead because of the shame, because of the inability of Israel's best friends to look it in the eye and say: "Stop this insanity. Treat Palestinians like humans before you destroy not only them, but you."
We cannot say that because we are guilty as well, and the US has proved singularly unable to come to grips with our own culpability in occupations from Iraq and Afghanistan to Gaza and, of course, our own original sin, which demanded millions of dead native Americans to ensure the creation of the very country that now supplies Israel with its weapons and tells it everything is going to be okay.
Some day you can let the Palestinians have casinos and they will thank you.
It is tragically fitting that this disaster should happen on Memorial Day in the US.
The martyrs of the ships are heroes, they are warriors every bit as deserving of our tears and support as the soldiers of American wars past and present.
They are, in fact, the soldiers of the future - the only ones who can help us get out of the disastrous slide to moral turpitude that we, as much as Israel, have descended as a country.
Let us hope that the deaths of the Gaza flotilla activists will not be as in vain as those of the 5,000 American soldiers who have died in our own illegal and useless wars in the last decade.