US
Complicity in Israel's Misdeeds
by
Charley Reese
The
murder of Hamas' spiritual leader, Sheik Yassin, makes perfect sense as long as
you understand Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's strategy.
That
strategy is to make peace impossible.
For
three years, Sharon has done everything to prevent peace. He himself provoked
the new uprising, re-invaded the occupied territories, destroyed the Palestinian
Authority, forced Yasser Arafat into house arrest and launched an unprecedented,
brutal campaign of assassinations, curfews, fences, destruction of property and
random killing of Palestinians. The Israelis have killed about 2,700
Palestinians in the past three years, in contrast to about 700 Israelis killed
in the same period.
At
the same time, Sharon has refused all offers to negotiate, and whenever the
Palestinians arranged a cease-fire on their side, Sharon broke it with a
provocative raid or assassination. No other rogue state or rogue leader would
have been allowed to get away with such behavior, but Israel has the U.S.
government in its pocket. That's the answer to the question posed by the French
ambassador to Great Britain as to why the world allows "this (expletive
deleted) little country to cause the world so much trouble."
Sharon
doesn't want peace, because he knows that any peace settlement would involve
returning nearly all of the occupied territories to the Palestinians. Israel's
goal has always been Palestine without Palestinians. He is greatly afraid that
the world will lose patience and impose a settlement on Israel. Hence, his
strategy is to make peace impossible so that he can impose unilaterally his own
settlement – a settlement, of course, that will condemn the Palestinians to
unlivable conditions.
Now,
that's all well and good if you are an Israeli and don't mind condemning future
generations to perpetual conflict, but what about Americans? This is, after all,
not legitimately our conflict. I've traveled in Palestine and the Middle East,
and while it's interesting, it's not high on my list of vacation spots. We would
be much better off if the only Americans who ever went there were the crews of
oil tankers.
Unfortunately,
our politicians, by cravenly obeying the wishes of Israel and its powerful U.S.
lobby, have made us a part of the conflict. We've already paid in blood and
treasure. Anybody who doesn't understand that the attack on 9/11 was directly
related to the Palestinian and Israeli conflict hasn't been paying attention.
The
Arab world sees us – correctly – as an accessory before and after the fact
to all the crimes Israel commits against the Palestinians and other Arabs in the
area. We cannot load Israel down with modern weapons, with gifts of more than
$90 billion of American tax dollars, with absolute protection from all attempts
to hold it accountable under international law, and then pretend we are
innocent. We are guilty by proxy of murder, land theft, destruction of property
and all the other human misery that Israel has caused in the region.
So,
if you're one of those rah-rah Israel First supporters, don't complain when the
terrorists come looking for you. You've allowed your politicians to enlist you
in somebody else's war, and in war there are always casualties on both sides.
America
has become a nation of pathological irresponsibility. Nobody wants to take
responsibility for his or her own actions, which is the basic cause of the
litigation flood. Least of all do American politicians wish to do so. They would
rather heap on the manure that the terrorism directed at us has nothing
whatsoever to do with the policies they have followed for the past 30 years or
more. In truth, it has everything to do with those policies.
So,
if you or your loved ones get bloodied by terrorists, then blame your Christian
Zionists, your Israel First crowd and your corrupt politicians who have their
tongues in the ears and their hands in the pockets of the Israeli lobby.