- On the last day of the old year in CounterPunch, two
Israelis, Jeff Halper who heads the Israeli peace movement ICAHD and Neve
Gordon who is chairman of the department of politics and government at
Ben-Gurion University, asked, "Where's
the Academic Outrage Over the Bombing of a University in Gaza?"
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- "Not one of the nearly 450 presidents of American
colleges and universities who prominently denounced an effort by British
academics to boycott Israeli universities in September 2007 have raised
their voice in opposition to Israel's bombardment of the Islamic University
of Gaza earlier this week," report Halper and Gordon. They note that
Columbia University president Lee C. Bollinger, who has in the past ignorantly
insulted Islamic representatives, "has been silent."
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- It is the goyim moralists who are silent, not the Jews.
It is the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, not the goyim media, that provides
reports of Israel's abuse of Palestinians. Gideon Levy's "The Neighborhood
Bully Strikes Again" was published in Haaretz (29 December), not in
the goyim press. Levy's words--"Once again, Israel's violent responses,
even if there is justification for them, exceed all proportion and cross
every red line of humaneness, morality, international law and wisdom"--are
not words that can appear in American print or TV media. Such words, printed
in Israeli newspapers, never reach the goyim.
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- The extent of Americans' ignorance is breathtaking. Israel
has the Palestinians jammed into tightly controlled ghettos known as Gaza
and the West Bank. With Egypt's help, Israel controls the inflows of food,
medicines, water, and energy into Gaza. Palestinians in Gaza are not permitted
to enter Israel or Egypt. Last week a humanitarian ship bringing food and
medicine was rammed by Israeli gunboats and turned away.
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- In the West Bank Palestinians are walled off from their
fields, jobs, medical care, education, water, and from one another by endless
checkpoints, roads for "Jews only," walls, barbed wire, and machine
gun towers. Palestinians are being evicted from their towns house by house,
block by block.
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- Israel's slow theft of Palestine is illegal under international
law but protected by US "diplomacy."
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- The Palestinians are no more of a threat to Israel than
Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto were a threat to the Nazi state. Yet, everywhere
in America--Congress, the executive branch, the print and TV media, the
universities, evangelical Christian institutions--there is the belief that
Israel is on the verge of annihilation by Palestinian terrorists. This
ignorance, so carefully cultivated by the Israel Lobby, turns genocidal
aggression into self-defense.
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- It fools Americans, but it doesn't fool Israelis. The
Israelis have always known that "self-defense" is a cloak for
a Zionist policy of territorial expansion. The policy is controversial
within Israel. Many Israelis object, just as many Americans object to President
Bush's illegal wars and violations of US civil liberties. Many Israelis
give voice to their moral conscience, but they are overwhelmed by vested
interests.
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- Karl Marx declared morality to be merely a mask for vested
interests. The writings of Marx and Engels are scornful of good will and
moral ideals as effective forces in history. The Israeli state epitomizes
Marx's doctrine that power alone is the effective force.
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- Many American conservatives share the Israeli state's
belief in the efficacy of power. Conservatives who turned against Bush's
wars did so because the US was not brutal enough. They turned away from
Bush's long inconclusive wars in the way that fans desert a losing team.
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- Americans used to say that "the pen is mightier
than the sword," but this hasn't been the case for US and Israeli
aggression. The success the two regimes have had in instilling fear into
their populations is part of the explanation for the impotence of morality.
Another part of the explanation is that vested interests are a powerful
constraint on morality.
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- Consider the case of Lee Bollinger. Columbia University
is dependent on Jewish money, faculty and students. If Bollinger were to
take a stand against Israel's mistreatment of the Palestinians, he would
be denounced as an anti-semite. Presidents of competitor universities would
not come to his defense. They would pile on in hopes of recruiting Columbia's
top faculty and students and redirecting the flow of financial resources
from Columbia to themselves.
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- An American newspaper or TV network that took a stand
against Israel's abuse of Palestinians would be confronted with an advertising
boycott organized by AIPAC. American politicians who criticize Israel go
down to defeat by Israel Lobby money.
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- Hegel gave too much emphasis to ideas, Marx too much
to material interests. Both forces operate in the world. There are times
in history when revolutionary ideas shatter material interests. Other times
the two coexist in a balance of power. In other times material interests
prevail over morality.
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- We are living in the latter time. Financial interests,
the military-security complex, and the Israel Lobby are the powers that
rule America. They are buttressed by neoconservatives and Christian Zionists
and by the patriotic hubris that America is the main force for good operating
in the world. The evils America commits are dismissed as necessary to the
service of good. The destruction of Iraq, for example, is justified as
"bringing freedom and democracy to the Iraqi people."
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- A number of commentators, including myself, predict a
decline in America's economic power. As this occurs, Israel will have to
abandon its policy of violence. With the accumulated hatred that its policies
have fomented, Israel will be vulnerable.
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- The world will need to remember that although Israel
is a Jewish state, it is a state whose policies many Jews find objectionable,
just as a majority of American Jews oppose President Bush's wars of aggression
in the Middle East and his unconstitutional policies at home. We must not
confuse Israel's Zionist government with world Jewry, just as we must not
confuse the American people with the war criminals in the Bush Regime.
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- Consider, who do you trust with your civil liberties,
the US Department of Justice or the ACLU's phalanx of Jewish attorneys?
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- We must avoid the mistake that was made by blaming the
German people for Hitler. It was the aristocratic German military that
tried to remove Hitler. In contrast, Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy
Pelosi blocked the attempt to impeach George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Pelosi
is a discredit to California, but shall we blame all of America for Pelosi's
defense of war criminals? How can we do so when US Rep. Dennis Kucinich
courageously read out the articles of impeachment on the House floor?
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- Are all Americans guilty because Kucinich did not prevail?
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- Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury
in the Reagan administration. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He
can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com
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