Bromwich: Hebron must remind Americans of Montgomery

David Bromwich ends a piece at Huffpo with stirringly homely excerpts of letters from Rachel Corrie, as he seeks to place the political struggle for Palestinian rights in an American context.

On Hardball on March 9, Chris Matthews in Jerusalem interviewed Ethan Bronner, the New York Times bureau chief. They began by talking about Israeli hostility toward the content of Obama's Cairo speech, and eased into a polite exchange about the prejudice against Obama's middle name, when all at once a veil dropped away:

BRONNER: I think there's also some sense here that--some degree of racism, to be perfectly honest.

MATTHEWS: Yes. They--because they see it as a black man.

The operation of Israeli racism against a black American president is powerfully enforced by the settler movement and by its American allies, the Christian Zionists. Indeed, just before the Biden visit, the Israeli primer minister was host (and a far more caring host) to the apocalyptic Judeo-Christian supremacist John Hagee.

Settler racism and Christian Zionist racism (associated with the "birther movement" in the U.S.) converge in a belief in the political and the social superiority of Israeli Jews over Palestinians -- a superiority that for the Christian Zionists corresponds (in ways that need no comment) to the natural superiority of American whites to blacks. It was salutary to see Matthews and Bronner calling racism by its name. The effects of cracks in the official silence have still to be tallied, but truth may catch as well as falsehood.

Will Americans now stop calling the annexation wall -- which cuts off West-Bank Israeli colonists from their Palestinian inferiors -- "the security fence"? It is a wall. Its function is only partly to secure. It is there also to separate, to mark off, and to overawe. It registers a difference of kind and a difference of caste. But there is no familiar name for the separation of Israelis from Palestinians. The separation produces, and it aims to support, a condition of constant inequality. It seems too weak to call the result "segregation." Ehud Barak, a solid authority one would have thought, has recently called it apartheid, and language that is accurate in the eyes of the defense minister of Israel should be good enough for Americans...

[T]hose, from the vice president down, who have now begun to speak frankly, have a new ally in General David Petraeus. For what Biden said behind closed doors to Netanyahu---that your actions are "dangerous for us"--did not come from Biden alone or from himself and the president but also from General Petraeus. A recent story in Stars and Stripes reported that Petraeus has been impressed by clear evidence that American troops are at risk from America's supply of weapons and approval to a policy that grinds down the Palestinians. Israel's continuous fertilizing of the soil in which anti-American terror is grown had driven Petraeus to ask at a January meeting of the joint chiefs of staff that Palestine be placed under the regional control of CENTCOM. The request was turned down, but the analysis that supports the request is in the public domain. It has been an open secret for a long time, and what Petraeus said to the service heads a few weeks ago, he has repeated in Congressional testimony today.

So the door to an honest discussion of Israel and Palestine has been opened wide. Too wide for AIPAC, and all its journalistic outlets, to close with their usual dispatch. We are in possession now of the realistic knowledge that Israel's policies endanger American troops and American interests; that by creating new terrorists, those policies also threaten the security of the United States. These truths are not less evident today than they were in 2001. But a disturbing fact, no matter how unsettling, does not make a decisive argument in itself. All one can hope is that, in thoughtful people, it will create a pause for thought. It is one thing to sacrifice yourself for a friend in the cause of justice; another to sacrifice yourself for a friend in the cause of injustice. With "the third intifada knocking at the door," the old American pattern -- an ever-renewable forgetfulness about the conduct of Israel and de facto postponement of the question of Palestine -- is less tenable than ever. At the same time the overcoming of segregation in the United States bears close comparison with the hardening of segregation in Israel. The oppressions of Hebron in 2010 exceed those of Montgomery in 1965. And the settlers of Hebron, unlike the white citizens' councils of Montgomery, know they have a national government they can rely on to support the next assertion of their supremacy.