With nearly 30,000 Palestinians killed by Israel and Gaza, America’s support for the Jewish state is being tested more than ever. Now the U.S. has found itself in the position of having to vote against a ceasefire resolution for the third time. Obviously this level of support is unsustainable given the ongoing genocide.
After surviving genocide in Europe during World War II, Jews moved to the state of Israel where they displaced and oppressed the local Palestinians. Now the Palestinians are the ones who are suffering from genocide at the hands of the Israelis. You know what comes next!
A few weeks ago, from an international and domestic-U.S. PR standpoint, Israel might have been able to bring its war in Gaza in for a hard landing. Now it has painted itself into a corner.
Gaza has been destroyed. By this time next year, so will Israel—not its physical plant, but its current status as a privileged, funded, protected nation-state.
The damage inflicted thus far is so severe and thorough that the Gaza Strip will be uninhabitable for the foreseeable future, at least several years. All or most of its 2.3 million residents, transformed into refugees, will be permanently displaced.
Nothing can change that. If a left-wing Israeli government were to come to power, unilaterally end the war and offer the Palestinians their own sovereign independent republic side-by-side with Israel, Gaza would need to be rebuilt at a cost of tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars. In the meantime, the Jewish state would have to provide long-term housing and public assistance for more than 2 million Palestinians throughout years of reconstruction. “You’ll end up having displaced people living in tents for a long time,” Raphael Cohen, senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, told the Associated Press. But where?
Assuming that a new regime could muster the necessary political consensus and address the ensuing security concerns surrounding a massive population of internally displaced people, Israel is a small nation of fewer than 10 million people with high unemployment and an aging population; it can’t afford such a massive undertaking or the demographics to quickly absorb 2 million traumatized Palestinians.
De facto, Gaza has been been ethnically cleansed. Gazans have been herded from the north, which has been flattened, to the south, against which IDF airstrike targeters and ground forces have recently turned their attention. The vast majority of the population of Gaza is now massed a few miles away from the Rafah border crossing to the Sinai Peninsula. All that remains is for the Israelis to expel the traumatized and radicalized Palestinians into the Egyptian desert.
More likely, Israel will open the gate. The Gazans enter the Sinai of their own accord. Where else can they go? There is no home to which they can return. This second Nakba will occur early next year.
Which will leave the ruins of Gaza desolate and dangerous. Spurred by legitimate public-health concerns, Israeli bulldozers will cart away the rubble and the tens of thousands of rotting corpses trapped underneath. Demining experts will have to find and disarm tens of thousands of unexploded bombs, a process that can require decades.
The end result: 141 square miles of prime beachfront property. Real-estate developers abhor nothing more than a vacuum along a scenic coastline. Sandals Gaza City will look smashing jammed next to Club Med Khan Yunis.
This was the thinking behind the Israeli intelligence officials who wrote a “thinking” memo that suggested that the situation be exploited as a rare opportunity to drive out all the locals so they could seize and annex the entire territory of Gaza. The revelations that Netanyahu’s government obtained Hamas’ detailed plans for the incursion a year ago, viewed a video on social media that showed Hamas fighters training for the horror through repeated drills inside a mocked-up kibbutz (jihadi culture requires those about to stage a raid to warn their enemy in advance), Egypt warned Israel that Hamas was about to attack days ahead in advance, and that the IDF failed to respond for at least eight hours after Hamas breached Israel’s high-tech “smart fence” around Gaza (despite receiving an instant alert) prompts the cynic in me to wonder whether the Israeli government let October 7th happen on purpose.
What, Netanyahu and his colleagues may have asked themselves, are a few hundred or even a few thousand Israeli lives compared to the chance to get rid of half the Palestinians in Palestine, and join Gaza to Israel in the bargain?
If so, they miscalculated. U.S. officials have conveyed to their Israeli counterparts that Israel only has a few weeks left before losing international support and suffering a “strategic defeat.” Israel plans to continue for months.
The U.S. assessment is too optimistic.
The die is cast. Defeat is inevitable.
Public opinion is trending in favor of Palestine against Israel. By this point next year an appalled world, including a huge majority of American voters, will have witnessed the abject misery and injustice of the forced displacement of more than 2 million innocent civilians. Oceans of tents in the desert, screaming orphans and wounded ex-Gazans will fill high-definition social media and broadcast screens day after disgusting day. Public support for Palestine, already at historically record levels, will be so overwhelming that governments everywhere will find the pressure impossible to ignore. It will no longer be just the usual suspects in the Arab world who issue formal protests. From Tokyo to Ottawa to Paris to Rome, it will be politically untenable for any government to allow itself to be seen as complicit with the most outrageous war crime since the Vietnam War.
Eventually, the U.S. will have to ghost Israel. No more emergency war packages, no more $4 billion a year in military and other foreign aid. Even under a second Trump Administration, we might recall our ambassador.
Israel can’t see it yet. But it is well on its way to international pariah status at a scale which apartheid-era South Africa, its close Cold War ally which also went too far, could never have imagined.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
Angie Wong: Journalist
The Obama Administration told a UN committee investigating torture by the US and its adherence to the Convention Against Torture (CAT) that it wants to guarantee future US torture victims no more than four hours of sleep.
Susan here. This is a quote from Obama’s speech:
“To my friends on the left, I ask you to reconcile your belief in freedom and dignity for all people with those images of children writhing in pain, and going still on a cold hospital floor. For sometimes resolutions and statements of condemnation are simply not enough.”
My response is this:
Fuck you, Obama. Fuck you for trying to come to us on the Left when you need us, and then shitting on us when you don’t. You do NOT have my permission to bomb Syria, and you will NEVER get it. You will NOT get my permission to bomb Syria based upon a YouTube video that conveniently surfaced just as the UN weapons inspectors were checking into their Damascus hotel. There are hundreds of videos of the so-called Syrian opposition al-Qaeda “rebels” committing atrocities like beheading Christians, practicing cannibalism, and sawing a little girl’s arms and legs off while she is still alive. And yet, we are supposed to ignore these atrocities and focus on the one (conveniently-timed) atrocity that Assad would never actually be stupid enough to commit.
I am tired of your patronization. I am tired of your lies. I am tired of looking at your face. I am tired of hearing your voice. And I’m tired of you trying to soften up Syria for the kill, and slouching us inch by inch into World War III. Because unlike Libya in 2011 and Iraq in 2003, Syria has allies, allies who are likely to retaliate. If Iran retaliates, the price of oil will go sky high, and we will freeze in winter-time, and the price of just about every product will go up due to the higher cost of shipping. Because 50% of the world’s oil comes from the Persian Gulf. I shouldn’t have to tell you this, Mr. Obama. That’s what you pay that useless Cabinet of yours to do.
But since you did address Leftists such as myself in your speech, I will tell you this: The US used chemical weapons in Vietnam (Agent Orange), and used them again in Iraq and Afghanistan (White Phosphorus, Depleted Uranium). So we are in NO position to lecture others on the use of chemicals as weapons. People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.
The president’s lawyers say he has broad powers to launch preemptive cyberattacks against other nations. The problem, as a White House official says, is selling the American people on the threat from “deadly dangerous computer code.”
Why Doesn’t Anyone Call Out Romney for Warmongering?
Mitt Romney had a barnburner of a weekend in Israel. The GOP nominee apparent shared his unique combination of economic and anthropological wisdom, attributing the fact that Israel’s GDP and average income is many times higher than those of the Palestinian Occupied Territories to Israelis’ superior “culture.”
As if spewing one of the most overtly racist lines in recent presidential campaign history wasn’t enough, eschewing “containment” (read: “diplomacy”), Romney also endorsed a preemptive Israeli military strike against Iran in order to prevent the latter’s nuclear program—Israel’s own, illegal nuclear weapons stockpile is OK since it’s a U.S. ally—from moving forward.
“We have a solemn duty and a moral imperative to deny Iran’s leaders the means to follow through on their malevolent intentions,” Romney said, stating that “no option should be excluded.”
He didn’t say how he knew the intentions of Iran’s leaders. Clairvoyance? Bush had it too.
Though Mitt slightly walked back his campaign’s sabre rattling, the message was clear. If he is elected, Israel will receive a blank check to begin a war against Iran, one of the most well-equipped military powers in the Middle East—a conflagration in which the United States could easily wind up getting dragged into. (In a subsequent interview he reiterated that “we have all options on the table. Those include military options.”)
Most criticism focused on Romney’s flouting of the traditional proscription against candidates questioning a sitting president’s foreign policy while visiting foreign soil. Though, to be fair, the differences between his and President Obama’s approach to Israel and Iran are tonal and minor.
As usual with the U.S. media, what is remarkable is what is going unsaid. Here we are, with the economy in shambles and the public worried sick about it, the electorate tired of 12 years of war against Afghanistan and nine against Iraq, yet Romney—who could be president six months from now—is out ramping up tensions and increasing the odds of a brand-new, bigger-than-ever military misadventure.
Warmongering has gone mainstream. It’s a given.
In a way, Romney’s willingness to risk war against Iran is merely another example, like the car garage and dressage, of how clueless and out of touch he is. Most Americans oppose war with Iran. For that matter, so do the citizens of the country on whose behalf we’d be killing and dying, Israel. But even Romney’s Democratic opponents give him a pass for Romney’s tough-guy act on Iran.
The reason for the somnolent non-response is obvious: it’s nothing new. Year after year, on one foreign crisis after another, American presidents repeatedly state some variation on the theme that war is always an option, that the military option is always on the table. You’ve heard that line so often that you take it for granted.
But did you know that “keeping the military option on the table” is a serious violation of international law?
The United States is an original signatory of the United Nations Charter, which has the full force of U.S. law since it was ratified by the Senate in 1945. Article 51 allows military force only in self-defense, in response to an “armed attack.” As Yale law and political science professor Bruce Ackerman wrote in The Los Angeles Times in March, international law generally allows preemptive strikes only in the case of “imminent threat.” In 1842 Secretary of State Daniel Webster wrote what remains the standard definition of “imminent,” which is that the threat must be “instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means and no moment for deliberation.” The enemy’s troops have massed on your border. They have superior force. What must be done to stop them is evident. There’s no time for diplomacy.
Iran’s nuclear program doesn’t come close to this definition, even from Israel’s standpoint. Bruce Fein, deputy attorney general under Reagan, told Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting’s Extra! Magazine: “It is nothing short of bizarre to claim, as the Obama Administration is doing, that the mere capability to make a bomb is justification for a preemptive attack. That’s a recipe for perpetual war. Almost any country could have the capability to make a bomb. They are torturing the word ‘imminent’ to the point that it has no meaning.”
By endorsing an Israeli attack against Iran at a time when there is no proof that Iran has nuclear weapons, intends to develop them, or use them if it does, Romney is going farther than Obama, who has engaged in back-channel diplomacy.
The Allies’ main brief against the Nazi leaders tried at Nuremberg was not genocide, but that they had violated international law by waging aggressive war. Yet every American president has deployed troops in aggressive military actions.
Aggressive war hasn’t been good for America’s international image, the environment, our economy or the millions who have died, mostly for causes that are now forgotten or regretted. But unless we draw the line against reckless, irresponsible rhetoric like Romney’s, it will go on forever.
(Ted Rall’s new book is “The Book of Obama: How We Went From Hope and Change to the Age of Revolt.” His website is tedrall.com. This column originally appeared at NBCNews.com)
(C) 2012 TED RALL, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
At Israel’s request, the U.S. pledges to veto Palestine’s application for statehood at the United Nations.
