“But a conflict with Iran is not in the American people’s interest….”
I think this depends on how you define interest, but it’s certainly true that most of the American people consider the American consumer lifestyle to be in their interest & that lifestyle would be impossible to maintain without American military hegemony. Lifting sanctions and ending wars on all the US’s official state enemies would have indirect but strong effects within a few years on things like consumer prices, oil prices, etc, and the American “middle class” would undoubtedly feel these effects.
Of course, is it truly “in the interest” of Americans to drive two cars, order cheap goods from Amazon, have the newest smartphone/tablet/laptop/etc, eat vast quantities of inexpensive food, hire a cleaning lady, own a tumble dryer, enroll their children in dozens of after-school activities, play war-themed video games, etc? Probably not—all of that is a product of capitalist alienation—but Americans, especially those in the >$50,000 income bracket, are materialistic enough that they will instinctively revolt over anything that makes their commute or climate-controlled living room or new barbecue grill or Samsung Galaxy 19 more expensive.
Their former tribal lands are currently mostly the U.S. state of Minnesota, and the governor of that state would likely not be happy to see the Oceti Sakowin reestablished in St. Paul in his place. Institutions like the National Guard and US Army, as well as militias made up of police forces, mercenaries and “concerned citizens” (white), have existed in part to suppress any indigenous revolts or attempts to secede from the US for a very long time, and we already saw the deployment of those units at Standing Rock on a small scale. An attempt to establish Sioux sovereignty would undoubtedly be met with much greater force. (The Supreme Court has also repeatedly ruled that indigenous nations have no sovereignty even on their US-designated “tribal lands”.) As such it is extremely impractical for them to “return”.
Obviously it is practical for them to reside in the Mni Sota area, but under constant threat of arbitrary violence from the US police forces, which proportionally kill and imprison more indigenous people per year than any other ethnic group, as well as from white American men in general, whose use of rape and sexual violence against indigenous women as a weapon of war has continued unabated since approx 1607. There is, in general, no safe place within the US, Canada or Latin America for any indigenous person to reside.
It should be noted that the ultimate goal of Israeli settler-colonialism is to reduce the Palestinians to this same status, as inhabitants of the “Gaza Palestinian Reservation”, “Hebron Palestinian Reservation” and so on, even though they neglected the crucial initial step of handing out smallpox infected blankets.
Keith – The phenomenon of “progressive except for Palestine” has been well observed, but “progressivism” per se is essentially the left wing of capitalism, rebranded. In leftist communities there is a less well documented inverse, “anti-imperialist on Palestine only”. Most Trotskyist organisations (including, in America, the ISO, the DSA, the PSL and many others) oppose the US imperial position on Palestine, because it’s an easy and cost-free position to take—any putatively socialist organisation will have very few people who benefit from settler-colonialism in Palestine or who buy into the Zionist narrative—but otherwise either are completely ignorant of foreign policy, or follow the US line to the letter.
Thus we have DSA-endorsed politicians like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Ilhan Omar who support the imperial destruction of and wars against Venezuela, Iran, Nicaragua, Cuba, Libya, Somalia, North Korea etc, and who parrot the imperial line about e.g. fake concentration camps in China, or the CIA-sponsored “Syrian Democratic Forces” being anything other than an attempt to balkanise the Syrian state along ethnic lines. One suspects their only reason for supporting Palestine is out of a belief that a future Palestinian state would support US imperial interests better than Israel does today.
As for the “Jewish community”, if they hold leftist views on any subject it’s probably a consequence of being wealthy and university educated. As such, Israel is easy for them to denounce, because the purpose it serves in American imperialism is to enrich arms manufacturers, technology executives and private prison owners, all of which are “other people” whose activities rarely affect the average leftist American Jew. American imperialism towards Iran and Venezuela, on the other hand, serves to uphold American energy interests, and ending that imperialism would result in higher oil prices and therefore less comfortable lives for leftist American Jews. People, Jewish or otherwise, leftist or otherwise, are fundamentally self-interested.
In any case, because Israel is the occupying power, the responsibility for all civilian deaths within Israel as a result of self-defense by the occupied people falls entirely within the Israeli government. Israel’s government’s failure to end the blockade of Gaza and the occupation of the West Bank and to come into compliance with international law is what kills Israeli civilians, not “terrorism”—if Israelis are upset they should take it up with Mr. Netanyahu et al. and demand that they lift the blockade and enter peace negotiations with Hamas & Islamic Jihad.
|| jon s: All innocent civilians, murdered by terrorists. ||
Yes, collateral damage does happen sometimes in war, especially when fighting an enemy (Israel) that places its military units and sites within civilian areas. In their airstrikes in response, Israeli terrorists killed 15-16 innocent civilians alongside at least 9 Hamas and Islamic Jihad soldiers. It seems that Hamas & Islamic Jihad did a better job at respecting the principle of distinction than the IDF.
I’ve read a “religious” interpretation of Chad Gadya claiming that the original goat is the “Land of Israel”, the two zuzim are the two tablets of the commandments, and every subsequent thing in the cycle of death is another of the enemies that has captured the land (e.g. the cat is the Babylonians, the dog is the Greeks, the stick is the Romans, etc… or whatever). This was of course sent up in a modern classic of Jewish animation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-evIyrrjTTY
This is one area where following Haaretz cannot be helpful because the Israeli military has enforced censorship of unwanted news in the Israeli media with increasing zealotry since the 2008-9 massacre, when TV stations and newspapers in Israel revealed and openly discussed many things the military would rather not have been made public (e.g. the use of white phosphorus and depleted uranium).
Sources within Hamas and Islamic Jihad that I’ve come across, as well as journalists on the ground in Gaza, claim—and have video evidence—that far from being random and purposeless, they have focused on striking IDF vehicles and military emplacements with anti-tank missiles & believe they have killed or wounded a number of IDF personnel. The Israeli press has reported on the targeting of a factory near Ashkelon, resulting in two casualties (only one of which the Israeli press has been permitted to name), but Palestinian press reported that the factory was occupied by an IDF combat engineer unit.
Obviously it’s best to wait for confirmation from outside sources, which given the degree of media censorship will take some time, but Izz ad-Din al-Qassam and the Al-Quds Martyrs’ Brigade have essentially developed into competent and professional military units that the IDF has no desire to engage with, and I suspect their strategy has paid off—Israel seems to be back at the negotiating table now and IDF attacks on Gaza have ceased, at least for the moment (writing this at 4 AM Monday local time).
As someone who grew up in the US south, I gotta say I’ve never seen or heard of an Israel lobby group trying to de-platform the Klan, threaten lawsuits against municipalities where they hold public rallies, etc. For some reason it’s always orgs like the NAACP and SPLC that are doing that and never the Simon Wiesenthal Centre or whatever. Wonder why. (no I don’t actually.)
This is Israel after all so it’ll be something like “Kfar Trump” or “Qiryat Trump”. And probably one of his sons (by total coincidence, unrelated to any political considerations) will build a golf course and luxury hotel complex there—the Trump International Tower & Casino Golan Heights—which will end up in massive amounts of debt and under multiple lawsuits from contractors who haven’t been paid, and the Israeli mob will also become involved somehow. I personally can’t wait.
@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.