Published on Monday, March 3, 2008 by CommonDreams.org
Israeli Violence Endangers Us, Not the Presidential Candidates
by Ira Chernus
“Worst Israeli - Palestinian Clashes in a Year as Air and Ground Forces
Enter Gaza,” the
front-page headline in the Sunday (March 2) New York Times read. That
makes the conflict sound
like a roughly even match. You had to read down a few paragraphs and do
some math before
learning that the suffering is hugely one-sided. Palestinian deaths this
week outnumbered
Israeli deaths by about 30 to 1, and the count of serious injuries is even
more lopsided.
As usual in the U.S. mainstream media, there was no mention of the many
Hamas calls for a
cease-fire and immediate peace negotiations, all rejected or ignored by
Israel. Are the media
afraid that they’ll bring down a firestorm of pro-Israeli rage on their
heads if they even hint
that Hamas might have the moral upper hand here?
Politicians in the U.S. certainly tread lightly when they talk about the
Israel-Palestine
conflict. Just a day before the “worst clashes” headline, the Times ran
another front-page
story: “Obama Walks a Difficult Path as He Courts Jewish Voters.”
According to that story,
American Jews worry that Obama will not give sufficient sup****t to
Israel’s hard-line policies.
No matter how much Obama insists them that he will continue the “special
relation****p” between
the U.S. and Israel — which has always meant a green light from Wa****ngton
for virtually every
act of violence the Israelis perpetrate — many Jews remain unconvinced,
the article re****ts.
But who speaks for American Jews? Typically, it’s the leaders of national
Jewish organizations.
They would have us believe that nothing matters more to Jews than Israel.
In fact, the leaders are increasingly out of step with the mass of Jewish
voters. Look at the
numbers from the American Jewish Committee’s 2007 Annual Survey of Jewish
Opinion. Asked to name
their single most im****tant issue when voting for president, only 6% said
Israel. About
one-quarter of Orthodox Jews named Israel as their main issue. That means,
among the vast
majority who are not Orthodox, the number who put Israel at the top of
their list is so small as
to be statistically insignificant.
So the Times misled us by suggesting that Obama’s stand on Israel is a
major problem for his
campaign. If those who sup****t the Israeli government look carefully at
his position statements
on the Middle East, they will find little to disagree with. Even those who
don’t look carefully,
or remain suspicious, are unlikely to let that one issue dissuade them
from voting for him.
This is not to say that U.S. Jews have anything like a progressive
position on the
Israel-Palestine conflict. Only 46% favor establi****ng a Palestinian
state. That’s quite a bit
lower than polls find among Israeli Jews. 63% agree that “the West and the
Muslim world are
engaged in a clash of civilizations.” 82% agree that “the goal of the
Arabs is not the return of
occupied territories but rather the destruction of Israel.” Numbers like
these suggest that most
Jews would accept the Israelis’ justification for their current onslaught
in Gaza — although the
number of Jews who stand against Israeli violence is growing rapidly.
If Israel were the number one issue for Jewish voters, any thoughtful
candidate would face a
terrible dilemma. On the one hand, any criticism of Israel might really
harm the candidate’s
chances. On the other hand, it is obvious that when Israel perpetuates the
cycle of violence —
killing Palestinians rather than accepting the Hamas call for truce and
negotiations — it
endangers Americans as well as Israelis. Every Palestinian civilian that
Israel kills is another
recruiting poster for those who would like to do harm not only to Israel
but to the U.S. An
American president should feel obligated to do whatever it takes to stop
that.
Any thoughtful candidate knows that Israel refuses to negotiate with Hamas
because most
Israelis, like most U.S. Jews, believe Hamas is dead set on destroying
Israel. So whatever Hamas
leaders say, Israel discounts it as a devious trick. But this Israeli
belief about Hamas is a
leap of faith. There is no compelling evidence that requires a rational
person to accept it.
On the contrary, a rational person would say, “Let’s look at history.”
Twenty years ago, Israel
insisted that the Palestine Liberation Organization, headed by the Fatah
party, was determined
to destroy Israel. All the assurances to the contrary given by its leader,
Yassir Arafat, were
rejected as cunning lies. Israel even made it illegal for any Israeli to
talk to any
representative of the PLO.
Then the Israeli government secretly broke its own law, negotiating an
agreement with the PLO in
Oslo that was supposed to lead to a two-state solution. The negotiations
are still very rocky,
at best. But Israeli leaders now seem to accept Fatah’s good faith pursuit
of a two-state
solution, which means accepting Israel’s permanent existence. In
negotiations with Fatah, the
legal question of acknowledging Israel’s right to existence is simply
ignored.
An American president who cared above all for national security, in Israel
as well as the U.S.,
would insist that the Israelis treat Hamas the same way they treated Fatah
and the PLO: Stop
fighting, start talking, and accept de facto recognition as sufficient.
Yes, that position might be politically damaging for a presidential
candidate — if Jews voted on
the basis of the candidate’s approach to Israel. Fortunately for all the
candidates, Israel is
not the issue uppermost in Jews’ minds when they go to vote. So the
dilemma need not cause the
candidates to lose too much sleep. Once a candidate becomes president,
though, he or she should
lose plenty of sleep worrying that bellicose Israeli leaders, deaf to
Hamas appeals for
negotiation, will endanger the security of Americans and Israelis alike.
Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of
Colorado at Boulder and
author of Monsters To Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin.
chernus@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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Finally, the campaigns of 1793 and 1794 set Clausewitz on the path of
recognizing war as a
political phenomenon. Wars, as everyone knew, were fought for a purpose
that was political,
or at least always had political consequences. Not as readily apparent
was the implication
that followed. If war was meant to achieve a political purpose, everything
that entered into
war — social and economic preparation, strategic planning, the conduct of
operations, the
use of violence on all levels — should be determined by this purpose, or
at least accord
with it. Even though soldiers had to acquire special expertise, and
function in what in some
respects was a separate world, it would be a denial of reality to allow
them to carry on
their bloody work undisturbed until an armistice brought their political
employer back into
the equation. Just as war and its institutions reflected their social
environment, so every
aspect of fighting should be suffused by its political impulse, whether
this impulse was
intense or moderate. The appropriate relation****p between politics and war
occupied
Clausewitz throughout his life, but even his earliest manuscripts and
letters show his
awareness of their interaction.
The ease with which this link — always acknowledged in the abstract —
can be forgotten in
specific cases, and Clausewitz’s insistence that it must never be
overlooked, are
illustrated by his polite rejection toward the end of his life of a
strategic problem set by
the chief of the Prussian General Staff, in which every military detail of
the opposing
sides was spelled out, but no mention made of their political purpose. To
a friend who had
sent him the problem for comment, Clausewitz replied that it was not
possible to draft a
sensible plan of operations without indicating the political condition of
the states
involved, and their relation****p to each other: ‘War is not an independent
phenomenon, but
the continuation of politics by different means. Consequently, the main
lines of every major
strategic plan are largely political in nature, and their political
character increases the
more the plan applies to the entire campaign and to the whole state. A war
plan results
directly from the political conditions of the two warring states, as well
as from their
relations to third powers. A plan of campaign results from the war plan,
and frequently - if
there is only one theater of operations - may even be identical with it.
But the political
element even enters the separate components of a campaign; rarely will it
be without
influence on such major episodes of warfare as a battle, etc. According to
this point of
view, there can be no question of a purely military evaluation of a great
strategic issue,
nor of a purely military scheme to solve it.’
Everyman’s Library, 1993 ISBN: 0679420436 On war /by Clausewitz, Carl
von, 1780-1831.
Knopf, 1993. From the introduction by Peter Paret, Pg7
_____________________________________________________________________
The U-2 is a jet-powered reconnaissance aircraft specially designed to fly
at high altitudes
(i.e., above 70,000 ft [21 km]). It was used during the late 1950s to
overfly the Soviet
Union, China, the Middle East, and Cuba; flights over the Soviet Union,
the primary mission
for which the plane was designed, ended in 1960 when a U-2 flown by CIA
pilot Gary Powers
was shot down over the Soviet Union. This event was a major political
embarrassment for the U.S.
http://www.espionageinfo.com/Te-Uk/U-2-Spy-Plane.html
Soviet Prime Minister Khrushchev's reaction to the overflights which
were discovered
just before a summit conference in Paris with President Eisenhower: "It
was as though the
Americans had deliberately tried to place a time bomb under the meeting" .
. ."How could
they count on us to give them a helping hand if we allowed ourselves to be
spat upon without
so much as a murmur of protest?" The only solution was to demand a formal
public apology
from Eisenhower and a guarantee that no more overflights would take place
. . .
But the apology Khrushchev was looking for would not come. Despite
having trespassed
on the Soviet Union for the past four years with scores of flights by both
U-2's and heavy
bombers, the old general still could not say the words, it was just not in
him. . . A time
bomb had exploded, prematurely ending the summit conference. . .
Back in Wa****ngton, the mood was glum. The Senate Foreign Relations
Committee was
leaning toward holding a closed door investigation into the U-2 incident .
. . In public,
Eisenhower maintained a brave face. He "heartily approved" of the
congressional probe and
would 'of course fully cooperate,' he quickly told anyone who asked. But
in private he was
very troubled. For weeks he had tried to head off the investigation. His
major concern was
that his own personal involvement in the overflights would surface,
especially the May Day
disaster. Equally, he was very worried that details of the dangerous
bomber overflights
would leak out. The massed overflight may in fact, have been one of the
most dangerous
actions ever approved by a president.
pg. 51-55 ~Body of Secrets; Anatomy of the Ultra Secret National Security
Agency
James Bamford
----------------------------------------------------------------------
"Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of
the progress of
human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims,
have been born of
earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating,
all-absorbing, and for the time
being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does
nothing. If there is
no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and
yet depreciate
agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want
rain without
thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its
many waters."
"This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may
be both moral and
physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a
demand. It never did
and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to
and you have found
out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon
them, and these will
continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both.
The limits of
tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. In the
light of these
ideas, Negroes will be hunted at the North, and held and flogged at the
South so long as
they submit to those devilish outrages, and make no resistance, either
moral or physical.
Men may not get all they pay for in this world; but they must certainly
pay for all they
get. If we ever get free from the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us,
we must pay for
their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and
if needs be, by our
lives and the lives of others."
http://www.buildingequality.us/Quotes/Frederick_Douglass.htm
Frederick Douglass, 1857
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http://www.politicsusaweb.com/
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