Dying in Gaza

MIAMI – When the German team beat Brazil 7-1 in the World Cup last week, the shellacking sent the entire giant South American country into a virtual state of mourning. And that was only a soccer game.

Meanwhile, in the real world, a much more uneven result was being was being tallied: 204-1, as of Wednesday. That’s the difference in the number of Israeli and Palestinian deaths that have resulted from the latest Israeli attack on Gaza and the rockets fired at Israel by Palestinian militants.

That’s not a shellacking, it’s a massacre. And in this case the numbers are not goals but lives, many of them civilian, including many children.

Yet I have yet to detect any signs of mourning from the people that, to a very large extent, have supplied the weapons, monetary resources, and diplomatic cover that enable the Israelis to run up the score, time and again, in this unspeakable contest of carnage.

I am speaking of the U.S. Congress, successive administrations including this one, and ultimately the American people who overwhelmingly, actively or passively, consent to these outrages with their silence or their votes.

Sadly, there is not that much difference in the reaction of this supposedly progressive president compared to that of its predecessor. There is in both cases the ritual U.S. call for moderation “on both sides.” As if there were two more or less evenly matched nations, like the Soviets and the Nazis battling it out on the eastern front during WWII instead of a stateless people, blockaded on every side and in every way, lacking an army, a navy, or an air force pitted against one of the most powerful and implacable military powers in the world.

Then there is the classic assertion that Israel has the right to self-defense. Surely. But I wonder what definition of self defense could justify the kind of massive military action being carried out by Israel and the consequent large number of civilian casualties. Self-defense is invoked when there is an imminent threat to life. With the casualty tally now 204-1, the self-defense justification is ludicrous.

True, Palestinian extremists have carried out numerous heinous acts, including the recent murder of three Israeli teenagers. But then there are extremists on both sides, as the more recent murder and burning of the body of a young Palestinian in apparent retaliation for the killing of the three Israeli teenagers shows.

For his part, President Obama did urge Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to expand the conflict. The result of that move by Obama reveals another aspect of U.S. policy aside from its bogus even-handedness: its inefficacy.

There is no doubt that Obama’s message about not expanding the conflict meant that Israel should not send ground forces into Gaza. That message fell on deaf ears. Israeli troops are already in Gaza, which means Palestinian casualties are bound to increase. Netanyahu proved himself a faithful student of Ariel Sharon, who ignored George W. Bush’s demand that Israel stop attacking the Jenin Palestinian refugee camp. There were no consequences, not even a verbal rebuke of Sharon by Bush. Lesson learned.

The U.S. establishment media doesn’t take a backseat to anyone when it comes to playing the even-handedness card either. A typical headline: “Israel and Palestinians Continue to Trade Strikes” (Los Angeles). Some trade. One side uses largely ineffective homemade rockets that inflict few if any casualties. The other uses the most modern airplanes and other weapons designed to fight military foes with the capacity to defend themselves against urban areas largely populated by civilians along with a miniscule group of actual Hamas fighters. To find and kill those militants using air strikes amounts to a lethal form of looking for a needle in a haystack. The tactic doesn’t work and kills and wounds lots of innocent people without preventing the rockets from flying. Now Israel has invaded Gaza to try to locate the needle close-up and personal.

U.S. policy in the conflict is so one-sided and unfair that it cannot help but fail. After Arafat’s mysterious death, the U.S. touted democracy as a panacea. The Palestinians voted in a free and fair election and chose Hamas. Rather than being recognized for carrying out the first democratic election in the Arab world, the Palestinians were savagely punished by Israel, the United States, and other powers for choosing the wrong party.

Echoes of Allende: democracy goes out the window when the people choose the wrong side. Tails I win, heads you lose: the Palestinians get a whipping whether they use the ballot or the bullet. Meanwhile, no one bats an eyelash when Israelis vote for hard-liners like Sharon and Netanyahu or when these radical prime ministers invite into their cabinet all manner of fanatics, including religious zealots, diehard settlers and, on occasion, outright racists.

U.S. efforts also fail because they seem to ignore the evident reality that the Israeli leadership has no intention of allowing the Palestinians to have a real, sovereign state based on the internationally recognized (1967) boundaries, with fair land swaps that take into account new demographic realities.

That U.S. blindness concerning Israel’s real agenda is why a few months ago I predicted that Secretary of State John Kerry’s dogged efforts to revive “the peace process” would be stillborn. Despite the fact that Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas reversed himself and agreed to negotiate even as Israel was expanding settlements, Israel squelched the talks when the Palestinian Authority and Hamas announced a unity government.

Who could Israel negotiate with if the Palestinian community is divided into two parties? A single interlocutor is necessary for real negotiations, but divide and conquer is better if you have no intention to negotiate in good faith.

The ultimate reason U.S. policy can’t work – and here I am treading on dangerous ground because there are many people ready to slander anybody as an anti-Semite if they dare criticize Israel – is that is driven to an unhealthy extent by domestic politics.

No, there is no Jewish cabal that controls the government, and not even a Jewish lobby as such. But there is a very powerful and uncompromising hard-line pro-Israel lobby. That lobby includes a minority of the Jewish community, plus many Christian Evangelicals, neoconservatives, and foreign policy hawks of various religious affiliations.

To cite just one example of the power of this hard-line pro-Israel complex, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu knew he could get away with having a tantrum and publicly rebuking the president of the United States at the White House (for restating longstanding U.S. policy regarding a peace based on 1967 borders). The “Israel right or wrong” complex had his back.

As long as this situation continues – and despite the noble efforts of J-Street to advocate for a different policy there is no sign that it won’t – the United States cannot broker any kind of peace process between Israelis and Palestinians.

That would require a large and lasting dose of tough love toward Israel by the United States. It won’t happen as long as the vast majority of U.S. politicians are scared of the complex and even the “leader of the free world” has his hands tied and had to submit to being slapped down by the leader of a client state.