A Monster Beyond Control?

On the first anniversary of the beginning of Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip – in my view it was a demonstration of Israeli state terrorism at its most naked – it’s not enough to say that the governments of the Western powers (and others) are complicit in Israel’s on-going collective punishment of 1.5 million Palestinians, 53% of whom are children.

What is actually happening in the blockaded Gaza Strip, and less obviously on the occupied West Bank, is the continuation by stealth of Zionism’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine. My friend Professor Ilan Pappe, Israel’s leading “revisionist” (meaning honest) historian and author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, would and has put it another way. What we are witnessing is, in his words, “genocide in slow motion.” And that, really, is what the governments of the Western powers (and others) are complicit in.

The question that provokes in my mind is: Why, really, are the major powers (and others) allowing it to happen?

The only answer that makes some sense to me is this. They have concluded, but cannot say, that nuclear-armed Israel, with the assistance of the Zionist lobby in all of its manifestations, is a monster beyond control.

In my analysis it’s possible to identify the moment in history when the major powers abandoned any hope they might have had of containing Zionism’s colonial ambitions.

It came, the moment, in the immediate aftermath of the 1967 war.

Contrary to Zionism’s version of the story, it was a war of Israeli aggression not self-defense. As I document in some detail in my book Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Israel’s military and political leaders knew the Arabs were not intending to attack.

That being so, what the major powers ought to have said to Israel (in the diplomatic language of a Security Council Resolution and more explicitly behind closed doors) is something like: “Aggression cannot be rewarded. Aggressors cannot keep territory conquered in war. You are now required to get the hell out of it without laying down conditions for your withdrawal.”

To drive home the point, they could and should have reminded Israel of what President Eisenhower said to the people of America when he demanded Israel’s unconditional withdrawal from Egyptian territory after its collusion with Britain and France in 1956. Eisenhower, the first and the last American president to contain Zionism, said this:

If we agree that armed attack can properly achieve the purposes of the assailant, then I fear we will have turned back the clock of international order. We will have countenanced the use of force as a means of settling international differences and gaining national advantage… If the UN once admits that international disputes can be settled using force, then we will have destroyed the very foundation of the organisation and our best hope for establishing a real world order.

As it happened, the major powers could not say that to Israel in 1967 because the Johnson administration had colluded with Israel to the extent of giving it the greenlight to smash Egypt’s armed forces, in the hope that a humiliating defeat for them would lead to the overthrow of President Nasser.

But also true is that President Johnson sought and obtained an assurance that Israel would not take advantage of the war situation to grab Jordanian and Syrian territory. It was because some in the Johnson administration (probably Defense Secretary McNamara and the Joint Chiefs of Staff) didn’t trust Israel to keep its word that the U.S. spy ship, the Liberty, was stationed off the Israel/Gaza coast to listen to IDF movement orders. And it was because Israeli Defense Minister Dayan didn’t want Johnson to know that he intended to take the West Bank and the Golan Heights that he, Dayan, ordered the attack on the Liberty. (The full story of that attack and Johnson’s cover-up of it is also in my book, in a chapter headed “The Liberty Affair – ‘Pure Murder’ on a ‘Great Day’ “).

Despite that, the major powers, including and led by America, could still have acted firmly to contain Zionism’s colonial ambitions. They could have said to Israel something like: “We can just about live with the fact that you will retain the newly occupied Arab territories as a bargaining chip, to be exchanged for peace with your Arab neighbours, but we will not allow you to settle those territories. Not one building. If you defy us on this matter, the Security Council will authorize enforcement action as necessary to oblige you to comply with international law.”

In what became Security Council Resolution 242, it was the failure of the major powers to read the riot act to Israel on the matter of not settling the newly occupied territories that marks the moment when they, the major powers, became resigned to the fact that the Zionist state, assisted by its awesomely powerful global lobby, was a monster they could not control. (They could slap it on the wrist from time to time but not control it).

The lesson of the cold-blooded attack on the Liberty was that there is nothing the Zionist state might not do, to its friends as well as its enemies, in order to get its own way. (In my book I explain, on the basis of a conversation with Dayan, the real reason for Israel’s decision to acquire a nuclear arsenal. It was to have the deterrent threat capability of saying to its friends, “Don’t push us further than we are prepared to go or we’ll use these things.”)

So in the full light of the truth of history as it relates to the making and sustaining of conflict in and over Palestine that became Israel, it’s not surprising that the major powers (and others) are today complicit, more by default than design I say, in Zionism’s crimes.

Alan Hart has been engaged with events in the Middle East and globally as a researcher, author, and a correspondent for ITN and the BBC. Read other articles by Alan, or visit Alan's website.

7 comments on this article so far ...

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  1. Rehmat said on December 28th, 2009 at 11:14am #

    Zionism is as much Judaism as Nazism to Catholicism – though as many many as 150,000 German Jews served in Nazi Army and Hitler’s grandmother and his both girlfriends happened to be Jewish. If one read the Zionist literature from non-Zionist sources – one will find that most of Zionist top leaders were anti-Jew aka anti-Semites.

    Thanks to their monopoly on western mass-media – Zionist-elite have succeeded in the Palestinian Holocaust and Exodus from their ancestral lands since 1948 – because the words “Holocause” and “Exodus” has been Judodized.

    Reconstructing ‘Exodus’ myth
    http://rehmat1.wordpress.com/2009/12/25/reconstructing-exodus-myth/

  2. Maryb said on December 28th, 2009 at 2:57pm #

    So Jews are no longer prepared to be pushed around. Is that so? They are prepared to push fellow Jews who try to break the blockade of Gaza around quite literally. If they had been Palestinian they would probably have been killed.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXt3BWnf9Pc
    27 December 2009

    Note the mounted police, the military, the navy gunships in the background, the jet ski, the police. All that’s missing are some F16s and some drones dropping white phosphorus shells. Ashkelon power station is in the background so the location is a beach on the border with Northern Gaza. Also note the tank traps.

  3. Kim Petersen said on December 28th, 2009 at 9:42pm #

    I appreciate Ilan Pappe’s more honest wording; now he’s calling Israeli ethnic cleansing what it is: genocide. I had noted his reluctance to use word genocide in my review of his book.

    https://new.dissidentvoice.org/Mar07/Petersen18.htm
    https://new.dissidentvoice.org/2007/06/bleaching-the-atrocities-of-genocide/

  4. Mulga Mumblebrain said on December 29th, 2009 at 1:21am #

    The cancerous effect of Israel in the Near and Middle East, illustrated by the millions of deaths in the various aggressions of the Israeli organised Western War of Terror against the Islamic world, now,in pursuit of the destruction of the Islamic states, as outlined in Oded Yinon’s Zionist Plan for the Middle East, being extended to Yemen,Eritrea and Baluchistan in Pakistan, is plain. Yinon’s plan, reiterated by Netanyahu et als ‘A Clean Break’, is to destroy all the Islamic states of the Near and Middle East and break them up along sectarian and ethnic lines, the better that they be dominated by the Master Race in their Judaic Reich.
    This project, every bit as monstrous in its implications for millions of casualties as any fascist or imperialistic project in history, looked like it had broken down in the heroic resistance of the Iraqis. The atrocities committed in Iraq, the millions of deaths since 1991, the destruction of the country’s infrastructure, the brutal colonial laws that even outlaw farmers sharing seeds, the deliberate destruction of cultural treasures, the mass assassinations of intellectuals by Mossad and the poisoning of the very substance of the land with horror weapons like depleted uranium that will poison Iraqis forever are diabolical in their extent and evil. Yet the Zionazis have not deviated one iota from their Satanic project. Where Bush ran out of steam, the Zionist Manchurian Candidate, the House Negro as Malcolm X called the type, Obama, the ‘first Jewish President of the USA’, has more resolve. Not only did he inaugurate his Presidency with the terror bombing by drone and killing of civilians including children, in Pakistan and Afghanistan,but he, or his Zionist boss, Rahm Emanuel,appointed a death-squad boss, McChrystal to pursue a terror war of assassination, ‘free-fire’ zones in Afghanistan and Pakistan, is sending tens of thousands more troops to terrorise the populace into surrender. Moreover he has extended the war to Yemen, with mass slaughter of civilians, Eritrea, clearly targeted for attack, and being softened up by sanctions in the old method,and is mounting a determined effort to repeat 1953 and overthrow an elected Government in Iran, with the complete complicity of the Western media sewer, the despicable BBC to the fore.
    While all this murder and destruction is being rained on the Middle East, the extent of civilian deaths is being removed from the media propaganda system. Or the figures are reduced by 90% by such as the despicable Iraqi Body Count (itself a nasty quasi-euphemistic usage, straight from the Pentagon)which false numbers are then used as if gospel, while the real figures, produced by demographers, are denied and the scientists who produced them are abused by vicious bigots. It is,of course, the equivalent of saying that the Nazis killed 600,000 Jews or two million Soviets.
    One little studied effect of Israeli evil is the even greater use in Western public discourse of the Zionist tactic of the Big Lie. I’m certain that various Rightwing causes, anthropogenic climate change denial to the fore, have been incentivised in their lying by the evident success of the Judeofascists and their allies in arrogantly lying and viciously abusing those who tell the truth. Moreover both poisonous groups have the entire swamp of the Rightwing media,such a septic mire of liars and ideological fanatics, at their disposal, hence the near absolute dominance of the Israeli propaganda machine in the Western media. Verily,Zionism is one of the gravest ills besetting the world, a ruthless, racist,expansionist ideology, born of absolute hatred for the ‘two-legged animals’ who have to be cleansed from the Judaic lebensraum in the East, ‘from the Nile to the Euphrates’, which is utilising Judaic money power in politics and the media, to pursue a war of mass destruction and murder against the entire Middle East. And to make matters even worse, the homunculi of the Western political class are such vicious cravens, that they go along with it,although they arewell rewarded, from Judaic loose change, for doing so.

  5. William James Martin said on December 29th, 2009 at 9:27am #

    It is difficult to slay a draggon if you are goveling in the dirt before his feet, which aptly describes the US Congress.
    wjm

  6. demize said on December 29th, 2009 at 12:30pm #

    @Mulga an adapt description with the appropriate level of vitriol “helps the medicine go down” I’m in a lyrical mood today.

  7. demize said on December 29th, 2009 at 12:30pm #

    Adept.