@genesto:
“How does this jibe with your notion of Israel being a puppet of the US?”
There are obviously different factions within the US government—one of which (the one that controls Israel) believes Israel is the best first-line actor to carry out US policy in the Middle East and worldwide, another of which is wary of putting all its eggs in one basket and sees deploying Israel as simply one of several tools in the US’s toolbox. This also reflects the different factions within the Israeli government—Gilad’s view here represents the second of these views, one also shared by the US’s professional defense policy establishment and much of the Democratic Party. Whereas people like Netanyahu and much of the Republican Party would disagree on this point and argue that, e.g., relying on Saudi Arabia or Jordan or Turkey instead of Israel compromises American interests, because these countries are not as militarily effective as Israel is.
Israel’s “qualitative military edge” is in practice a euphemism for its ability to test new American weapons systems on captive populations before the rest of the market gets access to them. So Gilad is referring to situations where Israeli live fire weapons tests failed to advance US security interests, such as the 2006 Lebanon “war”, which damaged American efforts to foment sectarian divisions across the Middle East by uniting the Arab world behind Hezbollah (and revealing that even with the hi-tech US equipment the Israeli military is fairly ineffective). In his view, events like that should not have happened, whereas that war was promoted and seen as positive by the Bush-Adelson-Raytheon-Likud wing of American/Israeli politics.
The idea that the United States is Israel’s puppet is a ridiculous inversion of reality. The United States and its military and economic aid essentially built the Israeli economy and military—without the US’s patronage, Israel would collapse within a month, tops. The Israeli armed forces can’t breathe in the direction of another country without the US approving it, and as soon as the US decides it wants an Israeli war or massacre to end (or not happen in the first place), its will is done. Acts such as spying on US citizens and stealing nuclear secrets could not happen without the tacit approval of the US government, because they are in the US government’s interests.
One example: at the moment the US sends Israel $4 billion in military aid a year—money which is earmarked to get advance access to new US weapons systems and technologies. These weapons then get battlefield tested in its many wars and counterinsurgency operations that it carries out essentially at the bidding of the US, essentially acting as an advertisement investment for the US arms industry, which makes $34 billion a year (& this number is growing). It’s a very worthwhile investment and no US government is going to end it as long as the US has a Department of Defense.
Another example: In 1967, before Israel was a US puppet state, the US’s already-existing puppet state Saudi Arabia was badly losing to Egypt in the two countries’ proxy war in Yemen (an internationally funded “civil war”). The very first action Israel took in the Six Day War was to destroy the majority of the Egyptian air force, decisively turning the tide of the Yemeni civil war in favour of the Saudis. From this point onwards, including the attack on the USS Liberty (which may have happened for a variety of reasons but which regardless the US government decided was acceptable collateral damage), Israel’s position as US puppet state was well established—and of course the entire reason the USS Liberty was present in the area in the first place was to assess whether Israeli military capabilities were sufficient for the US’s purposes.
The simple fact is that Israel’s interests are the US’s interests—although there may be disagreements on a few issues such as how best to remove Iran’s autonomy, these disagreements stem from within US politics itself, not from any conflict of interest between the two countries. This is because Israel is at this point not an independent state but a protectorate employed to do all the things the US’s democratic system makes it difficult to do (e.g. send weapons to apartheid South Africa after the US congress imposed sanctions; send weapons to Central American contras when Reagan became embroiled in scandal for doing that; bomb Syrian government targets when the US can’t for fear of igniting war with Russia; etc.)
Evangelical Protestants think Middle Eastern Christians of all varieties—particularly Orthodox ones—are idolaters and Satanists rather than “true Christians” for a variety of theological reasons, and therefore would have no problem with Israel destroying their churches and monasteries. In fact they might even encourage it.
For that matter, even the “moderate Arab states” don’t care about the Palestinians, they’re all absolute monarchies or brutal dictatorships; they just don’t want a domestic insurrection on their hands from their populations who are rightfully angry that european settlers have dispossessed an indigenous population and have military dominance over the region.
Democrats are upset because an Israeli annexation of the West Bank makes it less likely the US will have leverage over the “moderate Arab states” it cooperates with in e.g. the massacre in Yemen, the economic warfare against Iran, etc. Republicans are figuring it doesn’t matter because they can just strong-arm the “moderate Arab states” into doing their bidding anyway. Neither side actually cares about the Palestinians, it’s all just a disagreement in the foreign policy establishment over how best to utilise their Israeli puppet state in the never-ending war to control the world’s supply of fossil fuels. I realise this isn’t news to anyone here but figured it had to be said.
“Keep that in mind the next time AIPAC or some other hasbarist tries to pull the old con, claiming Israel “shares Western values.” It never did, and indeed, as long as it sees itself as a Jewish country, it cannot.”
This is imperialist nonsense. The United States, Canada, New Zealand, Australia & most of Europe had “whites only” immigration policies through much of the 20th century, and still to this day accept only token numbers of people from non-favoured ethnic groups (and when exceptions are made, as in Germany, the people rise up in protest & carry out physical violence against the interlopers). New Zealand & Australia still automatically grant citizenship to anyone from their settler homeland the UK. Almost every European country sees itself as an “ethnostate”—and more importantly, it has been US/NATO policy to ensure that any explicitly pan-ethnic country is broken up into ethnostates: the balkanisation of the USSR and Yugoslavia are two well-known examples, and the US is also currently trying to do the same in Iraq and Syria. If there is one Western value that stands out above all others it is ethnocentrism.
It is true that the US itself has imported large numbers of non-white immigrants but this is mostly to act as a cheap reserve labour source, and the political and social structure of the US is immutably set up so as to ensure that white Europeans are the herrenvolk, the people of the land to whom the country truly “belongs” (by virtue of exterminating the majority of the native population).
Israel is not an outlier it is merely this value taken to its logical conclusion. As a puppet state of the US/NATO, Israel is essentially the imperialist vanguard, the testing ground for the future of imperialism and capitalism.
if the mayor of the largest Jewish city in the world (home to about ~1 million Jews, compared to about 500,000 in Jerusalem) claims that Jews cannot be safe in his own city, because it’s not part of an apartheid ethnostate, maybe……he should be replaced with a new mayor who *can* guarantee the safety of new york’s jewish population. just something to consider
Iran’s “influence” in the Middle East (which it is part of) has been primarily to defend itself and its allies—Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and increasingly now Iraq—from aggression by the United States, Israel, Saudi Arabia and their proxies. Iran supports Hezbollah because Hezbollah is the only force preventing Israel from invading and annexing parts of Lebanon; Iran supports Syria because the US & Israel have been attempting to overthrow and weaken the Syrian government and funnelling arms and money to rebel groups for a decade; Iran supports Yemen because the US & Saudi Arabia have successfully co-opted the Yemeni government and are attempting to literally partition the country; and the presence of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard across the region is mostly to fight groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda that were created as a result of 40 years (or more) of US aggression in the Middle East and whose genocidal anti-Shi’a ideology poses a significant national security threat to Iran.
There’s no evidence of any Iranian presence in the Syrian Golan Heights btw. There is however evidence of an Israeli presence there going back to 1967, including 20,000 settlers and thousands of soldiers, and involving the ethnic cleansing of about 130,000 Syrian Druze and theft of their land. Until there’s evidence of something similar being done by Iranians, I submit that they’re not the party one should be worried about in the Golan region.
If the United States were not attempting to impose its will on the entire collective Middle East, including thru propping up its Israeli puppet state, Iran would likely be doing none of these things.
Sanders has been a Zionist for his entire career and has voted in favour of billions in military aid to Israel on….probably dozens of occasions. He bears direct responsibility for Israeli massacres and ethnic cleansing as a result. So forgive me for being skeptical that this is anything but opportunism.
Zionism did not save any Jewish lives—in fact if Zionism had never existed, countless more Jewish lives would have been saved.
Zionist leaders worked hard to prevent countries like the USA, Canada and Britain from taking in Jewish refugees, pressuring them to turn them back so that they could instead be sent to Palestine. Famously they even met with Nazis before the mass extermination began, and helped circumvent the boycott of the Nazi regime by funnelling arms to it. After the war, when displaced Jews languished in refugee camps, Zionists ensured they could not return to their homes & demanded they instead be shipped to Palestine, where they (Holocaust survivors no less) were promptly drafted into Zionist militias to attack Arabs, & had their native language suppressed. These Holocaust survivors had some of the highest casualty rates in the 1948 war.
Both before and after 1948 Zionist militias attacked and killed Jews, in Palestine and throughout the Middle East & North Africa. Zionists were responsible for bombing synagogues and community centres in places like Baghdad and Cairo in order to induce the Jews of the area to flee (to Israel). Within Palestine they would kill Jews who collaborated with Palestinian Arabs or the British, with a particular focus on killing or torturing Jewish women who had relationships with non-Jewish men. It is not improbable that some high-profile antisemitic attacks of the later 20th century, such as the AMIA bombing, were also Zionist operations serving similar purposes.
If Zionism had never existed many more European Jews would have been able to flee the Holocaust; Middle Eastern & North African Jews would not have experienced the same wave of violence and persecution; and of course plenty of Jewish lives that otherwise would have ended in the various Israeli wars from 1948 to 2014 would have been saved.
More: https://mondoweiss.net/2017/01/terrorism-israeli-state/