U.S. / Israel Coalition Seeks Palestinian Annihalation
In memoriam: Dr. Edward Said (1935-2003)
Wiping Palestine from the Pentagon's New Map?
Man thinks 'cause he rules the earth he can do with it as he please | And if things don't change soon, he will. | Oh, man has invented his doom, | First step was touching the moon. | Now, there's a woman on my block, | She just sit there as the night grows still. | She say who gonna take away his license to kill?
Bob Dylan | License to Kill
Continuing the theme of nuclear proliferation by those supposedly opposing it, we explore the Holy Land of Palestine, a corner of the world where the ancient and the modern are forced to coexist cheek by jowl. Whether it is Sharon's cheek or Arafat's jowl is of no consequence. Who is more afraid of whom, is. Events on the ground show Old Testament terror tactics being visited on some while others enjoy New World protection. In such an environment, equilibrium and harmony will remain elusive until the United States removes itself from the equation.
"...America has remained Israel's most steadfast friend and ally. In turn, Israel has become America's most steadfast friend and ally in the Middle East." U.S. Senator Joseph Lieberman
As much as I appreciate the thrust of Electronic Intifada's Ali Abunimah's 10th anniversary editorial commemorating the failed Oslo peace accords, I believe he evades fundamental truths.
I cannot accept Palestinians, forced to flee their homes following Israel's 1948 UN-sanctioned independence, see a two-state settlement as more than a brief respite on the long march to a united Palestine. Daily, directly and indirectly, South Africans see the deep emotion evinced by the return of land to dispossessed persons or peoples. Indeed, land restitution forms a fundamental building block in South Africans' reconciliation to each other.
Noting that "...most Palestinians and Israelis, the Arab League, the UN and the U.S. all support a two-state solution", Abunimah foresees increasing insistence on one man-one vote in a Greater Palestine resulting from Israeli intransigence and Ariel Sharon's stated decision to murder Yasser Arafat.
It's a crock. Abunimah knows it. A legitimate demand to return, despite the compromise reached with the Oslo accords, should not see another decade of murder, deceit and the assassination of an elected leader to motivate it. Most Palestinians must feel a desire for the return reaching out to them in their dreams, affecting their thoughts, deeds and actions, generating deeper resentment for those who would see them dead.
Palestinians and Israelis will see an end to this conflict only when they share a Palestine incorporating Israel. How could it be otherwise? The South African experience tells us it cannot be. In South Africa, the apartheid state and its banned opposition, which spoke for most consigned to the Bantustans, realized that while the African National Congress's (ANC) armed struggle could do little to oust or even crack apartheid's armor, the state would have to kill most South Africans to quash the struggle for that now-outdated form of governance, democracy.
For decades, the stalemated warring parties sought ways of levering military resources to their advantage. Ultimately, several factors drove both parties to the negotiating table.
Nelson Mandela's overtures to P.W. Botha followed by his dialog with F.W. de Klerk, international sanctions targeting structural apartheid and those running it, and an increasingly volatile populace increased the possible cost of an impossible victory by one over the other to unacceptable levels.
A negotiated, equitable settlement was the only way out. So it is with Israel and Palestine.
Most Palestinians and many Israelis know this to be true. Abunimah correctly deduces that actions by Hamas and the Israeli state do much to undermine such a settlement. He must accept, however, that if the world is to maintain pressure on Sharon's government, Hamas and similar movements are necessary.
Why? The onus is on Israel, a supposed First World democracy infinitely more wealthy and better placed than its Palestinian neighbor, to take the lead in making peace.
Instead, a fear-filled Sharon and his allies are working non-stop to destroy the Palestinian people. In giving voice to his government's desire to kill Arafat, a figurehead whose authority has been stripped of him by the Israeli war machine, Sharon denies a just peace or a Palestine in which all have the vote and equal say in governance. He thinks and speaks it out of existence.
In Ariel Sharon's twisted mind you, Ali Abunimah, do not exist. If you force yourself into being, he will squash you like a bug without a second thought.
Yes, the United States has been sitting on its hands, but Abunimah levels the allegation as a sign of U.S. weakness. He is wrong. Sharon is Washington's puppet; Washington does not dance to Sharon's tune. As it seeks to dominate the Middle East, the vociferous, pro-Israeli neo-con lobby now formulating global policy in Washington needs its Israeli forward base as never before.
U.S. threats to withhold tens of billions of dollars aid to Israel amount to nothing when Washington later loosens the purse strings without fanfare. The incarceration of Palestinians, ardent nationalists not afraid to fight for their rights, is a neo-con priority as it creates firebreaks around new theaters of war in Syria, Iran and what is left of Palestine itself.
"The friendship between Israel and the United States is a great asset to our country." White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card
Click here for detailed maps of The Wall
Now, they take him and they teach him and they groom him for life | And they set him on a path where he's bound to get ill, | Then they bury him with stars, | Sell his body like they do used cars. | Now, there's a woman on my block, | She just sit there facin' the hill. | She say who gonna take away his license to kill?
A cash-strapped Israel's ability to continue building the $1.8 billion, 540-mile Separation Wall, imprisoning the Palestinian people in a fraction of the 22% of Palestinian land demarcated by the 1967 Green Line (accepted in the Oslo accords), is evidence of U.S. complicity in their repression and subjugation.
The Palestinian people are capable, according to neo-cons, of bringing Israel to its knees. Hence tacit approval for continued Israeli atrocities; the continued establishment of Israeli 'settlements'; indifference to a genocidal apartheid, the sanctioning of Yasser Arafat's assassination; silence in the face of Sharon's inevitable destruction of any peace accord; a callous disregard for the corralling of millions of Palestinians into an area less than half the size of the Occupied Territories; a willingness to pay for a wall creating dozens of Sabras and Shatilas with United States tax dollars and, if needs be, the annihilation of Palestine.
Apartheid sought to separate people through legislation. Israel, through the course followed by The Wall, seeks to eliminate a people. Most will become refugees, dispersed through the Middle East, driven into eternal exile by Washington and Tel Aviv.
The Wall is an international abomination, a dark stain on the soul of mankind, a crime against humanity and tragic evidence of global apathy in the face of incremental genocide. Likening this concrete example of social engineering at its most diabolical to the internationally recognized Berlin Wall gives the impression separation is its goal. It is not. It is a Nazi wall, a barrier of the type erected around Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau, Belsen and other monuments to man's inhumanity to man.
Shortly after work on The Wall started, it formed a small semi-circle separating the north-western West Bank from much of its Green Line land and Israel. 210,000 Palestinians were imprisoned in enclaves; 67 villages fell between the Green Line and the concrete barrier separating them from their cities; 2,800 acres of land had been confiscated; 83,000 olive trees had been uprooted, and 30 water wells, producing 4 million cubic meters of water per annum had been confiscated.
A security fence seeking an end to suicide bombings would have followed the easily patrolled Green Line. The Wall does not. Following the dictates of crazed politicians and demented settlers, The Wall twists and turns through an increasingly small area of Palestine. When complete, 500,000 Palestinians will fall between it and the Green Line. They will be prisoners confined to single-access enclaves.
Palestinians will lose 55% of their remaining land (already only 22% of pre-1967 Palestine). Confiscated territory constitutes 80% of Palestine's arable land and 65% of its water resources.
That wash-and-rinse Democrats and Republicans give precedence to courting "the Jewish vote" in the run up to the 2004 U.S. elections (a sure sign racism is alive and well and living in the U.S.) over the asphyxiation of an entire nation, clearly demonstrates where Americans stand on Palestinian self-determination and democracy in the Middle East.
That Americans in general happily accept a two-state, "separate but equal", apartheid solution says it all.
"The work that AIPAC does is a vital part of our democratic process. You speak out boldly, and that's good for America, it's good for Israel and good for the cause of peace and justice in the world." U.S. President George W. Bush
Click here for interactive map of Israeli missile sites and silos
Now, he's hell-bent for destruction, he's afraid and confused, | And his brain has been mismanaged with great skill. | All he believes are his eyes | And his eyes, they just tell him lies. | But there's a woman on my block, | Sitting there in a cold chill. | She say who gonna take away his license to kill?
Why, however, would the U.S. want Sharon to wall off the Palestinian people and wall in the Israelis?
Israel is the barrel of the gun pointed at the Middle East's head. The Palestinian demand for self-rule or, dare one hope, democracy in their own country, stands to unsettle a cozy, multi-trillion dollar relationship reaching back to the establishment of the anachronistic, self-proclaimed 'Jewish' state.
Any bullets fired from the loaded gun that is the current Israeli state should be defensive anti-ballistic missile missiles fired from jointly developed $2bn Israeli-American ARROW Weapon System batteries on incoming nuclear or other ballistic missiles.
Initiated in 1988, at the time of the Rumsfeld Commission, the program has moved through three phases, from experimentation, through development of the Arrow 2 anti-missile missile guided by the U.S.-developed Green Pine radar system, to the deployment of two batteries. The U.S. congress has subsequently approved funding half the cost of deploying a third.
Israel suits the Bush administration's need for a test bed meeting the demands of its increasingly expensive preemptive counterproliferation nuclear weapon strategy. Yeah, you read it right... preemptive counterproliferation. The counterproliferation concept first reared its head in a 1993 Clinton Administration document entitled Defense Counterproliferation Initiative, upgraded in 1996.
A great deal of flesh has since been added to its bones.
Having departed from Cold War nuclear policies of deterrence and Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) to viewing Tactical Nuclear Weapons (TNW) such as the 0.3 kiloton Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP) bunker buster as legitimate battlefield weaponry, the Bushites have reintroduced the nuclear arms race with a bang.
Cold War MAD assured deterrence. It was the best of an extremely bad deal. Now, using "terrorism" as its rationale and public lever, the neo-cons who pulled the United States out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) in 2002 are developing low-yield TNWs to deter and preempt the production of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) by "rogue" states.
The development and deployment of TNWs, as well as a policy of preemption, form an integral part of The National Security Strategy of the United States of America.
"Our comprehensive strategy to combat WMD includes: Proactive Counterproliferation Efforts. We must deter and defend against the threat before it is unleashed. We must ensure that key capabilities - detection, active and passive defenses, and our counterforce capabilities - are integrated into our defense transformation and our homeland security systems."
"...we will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of self defense by acting preemptively against such terrorists, to prevent them from doing harm against our people and our country."
Rather than being an improvement on deterrence, preemptive counterproliferation, managed by the autonomous Missile Defense Agency (MDA) (incorporating the Ballistic Missile Defense Program's proposed National Missile Defense (NMD) system and a Theater Missile Defense (TMD) system), will speed the arms race; open it to more players; increase the chance of error; blur the distinction between defensive and offensive weaponry and, by dramatically increasing the likelihood and feasibility of all-out nuclear war, create the situation it purports to abort.
Preemptive counterproliferation compounds the devastating consequences wrought by the U.S.' unilateral adoption of a policy of preemption. Ostensibly designed to limit threat, it has increased it. Counterproliferation will do the same.
The Nuclear Posture Review, which attracted strong congressional support in February 2003, details circumstances under which the U.S. may use TNWs.
In the manner of Israel's transparently opaque nuclear defense posture until the late 90s, the authors of subsequent official reports tip their caps to using conventional weapons where they will serve the same purpose but, besides indicating an enlarged nuclear arsenal, they give themselves the option to use either.
Their opacity lends them an air of idiocy, like generals choosing to invade and occupy Iraq indefinitely at enormous cost when surgical nuclear strikes are available and unilaterally assumed legal.
Had the U.S. used a single low-yield RNEP bunker buster (a refinement of the B61-11 deployed in Europe during the mid to late 90s) on Baghdad, the ground shock, heat blast and resulting gamma-radiation field would have killed up to 50,000 people within 24 hours.
The potential repercussions of offloading such a weapon over North Korea could escalate a nuclear conflict in a matter of hours. We are all aware of the possible horrors brought about by the use of 100-kiloton bombs.
Facing overwhelming nuclear firepower, named 'enemies' of the United States such as Libya, Syria, Iran and North Korea do not yet possess delivery systems enabling them to attack the U.S. mainland. Iraq never had a hope in hell of building any such thing. Besides China, analysts believe only North Korea possesses the needed warheads. Were either to attack the U.S. (an extremely long shot in China's case), they would subject themselves to instant obliteration.
Nuclear deterrence through the threat of second strikes remains the most effective counter to such single-strike nuclear attacks. Deterrence also precludes the use of WMD.
TNWs increase rather than decrease the chances of an enemy developing or using WMD. Such WMD would be used in the event of attack by low-yield TNWs. Should the threat of WMD be contrived (Iraq / Iran / Libya), states or organizations would resort to the uncontrollable weapon over which the Bush and Sharon regimes profess control, i.e. terror.
Paradoxically, through his command of nuclear power and the state of Israel, George W. Bush does control global terror. Sharon, his jackbooted, nuclear-warhead wielding capo, implements it.
Thomas P.M. Barnett, author of The Pentagon's New Map, would have us believe Israel is an island in an alien sea. Possessing its own nuclear triad and serving as the U.S.' testing ground for a forward-based Theater Missile Defense (TMD) system, Israel is nothing more than an over-privileged nuclear porcupine in possession of several hundred conventional and tactical nuclear warheads.
Its delivery systems and silos circling Palestine and facing all-comers, Israel possesses a land, sea and air-based triad of some 400+ nuclear warheads the U.S. would see protected at any cost; to prevent it falling into the hands of "terrorists", of course.
If the United States is embarking on a takeover of Middle Eastern oil; if reported breakdowns between the House of Saud and Washington are to be believed; if the U.S. launches an Iranian or any other offensive designed to boost the Republicans' 2004 reelection campaign; if the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq escalate; if Bush is unable to garner international military and financial support for his foray into the region, and if there is any substantive backlash from a country like Syria in the face of conventional or preemptive counterproliferation attacks, the last thing the neo-conservative administration of George W. Bush needs is a restive Palestinian population.
It would rather see Palestine disappear from the map than watch the world's fourth or fifth-largest nuclear arsenal (and the U.S.-sponsored medical, scientific, communications, economic, transport, electronic and engineering technologies supporting Israel's consumer society) opened to inspection or sabotage.
In fact, it will probably preempt such a possibility. And it will ask an ever-obliging Sharon to do its dirty work for it.
I'm sure Ali Abunimah knows this.
"AIPAC has a job to do. We need you to keep up the advocacy that is keeping Israel strong - and America safe." U.S. Senator Tom Daschle
Conclusion
Until the United States distances itself economically and materially from Israel and its many lobbyists crowding the Capitol; until the U.S. leaves the people of Greater Palestine to hammer out a mutually acceptable settlement (in much the same way South Africa's Botha regime and its imagined Total Onslaught faded to obscurity in 1989), the people on both sides of The Wall will know nothing but fear, enmity and terror.
It is high time more commentators linked a hypocritical America's military interests in the region to the intractable problems facing two peoples who want nothing more than to live in peace in their own country.
"I'm an Israeli at heart." U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay
Now he worships at an altar of a stagnant pool | And when he sees his reflection, he's fulfilled. | Oh, man is opposed to fair play, | He wants it all and he wants it his way. | Now, there's a woman on my block, | She just sit there as the night grows still. | She say who gonna take away his license to kill?
Bob Dylan | License to Kill
[First posted at Open Source Politics]
