The Break on Palestine

"To wipe the spit off his face, Biden had to say it was only rain."
The Israeli journalist Akiva Eldar was tapping a vein of bitter Jewish
wit when he wrote those words about the humiliation of the vice
president on his recent state-visit to Israel. Trust a weakling, the
saying goes: if you spit in his face he'll just pretend it was rain.
Last week, an American leader finally chose not to pretend.

Before Biden issued his rebuke to a prime minister who forgot
the second rule of diplomacy -- when you undermine a friend, have the
decency to wait till he waves goodbye -- he had offered the traditional
performance of an American dignitary in Israel. Thus in response to the
unctuous platitudes of Shimon Peres, Biden had actually said:
"It's good to be home." A crazy thing for an American to say outside
America. But in the context of our relations to Israel over the past
thirty years, such a remark is almost par-for-the course. It shows how
reckless American mainstream opinion had grown in its indulgence of all
things relating to Israel. It had reached the point where a reflex
avowal of false nostalgia was taken as the simplicity of good manners.
An American politician in Israel is routinely expected to show more
piety for Tel Aviv than for Plymouth Rock.

The sentiment of "home" dished up by the vice president and the
graceless insult with which it was met by the Israeli prime minister
also reflect a political background. The United States had recently
assisted Israel in its attempt to suppress the facts and discredit the
findings of the Goldstone Report. The effort had several steps, all of
them brutal. First there was the character assassination of Judge
Goldstone. A South African Jew, a renowned authority on international
law, who had presided over the trial of Slobodan Milosevic and whose
probity had never been called into question in Israel, Goldstone was
reviled in terms of abuse that would normally be leveled against a
gutter anti-Semite. A hater of Israel, they called him; though his
daughter is an Israeli and he has enjoyed good relations with Israel in
the past. All of this was disturbing enough in itself. It is more
disturbing in the light of that Jewish ethical tradition in which no
station of life is higher and no character more venerable than that of
the honest judge. Not one major finding, not one witness, not one report
of an incident in the Goldstone Report, has yet been successfully
challenged to vindicate the crash of ad lib slanders.

A second strategy adopted by the Netanyahu government and by
the Obama administration was to claim that Goldstone's partiality was
proved by his failure to condemn Hamas. This charge is all over the
anti-Goldstone literature. Yet the report in fact condemns Hamas as well
as Israel. What next? The Israeli government and army said that all
those acts of wanton destruction enumerated in the report were not
actually done on purpose. The bombing or shelling of the chicken farms,
the flour mill, the hospitals, the mosques, the UN compound, the water
treatment plants--how could they know what they were doing? Or else,
they had good intelligence there were terrorists hiding there, but
sometimes even good intelligence is faulty. And the use of white
phosphorus? Israel is still investigating. A last resort of evasion was
to give up defending the actions of the onslaught, and, instead, change
the terminology. Claim, now, that the horror of Gaza was one of the
ironies of "asymmetrical warfare."

Asymmetrical it certainly was. 1385 Palestinians dead, 762 of
them civilians. 13 Israelis, ten of them soldiers, four by "friendly
fire." The Israeli authorities would like America and the world to think
these numbers a natural by-product of asymmetrical warfare. In Boston,
on March 5, 1770, a crowd of Americans threw rocks at British soldiers
and were answered by disorderly gunfire. Five Americans were killed, and
we call it the Boston Massacre. What was Gaza? Look again at the
numbers.

Barack Obama abetted the Israeli drive to bury the Goldstone
report by allowing his government to say it was "one-sided and deeply flawed" and also
the subject of "grave concerns." Obama had already shown his loyalty by
his silence regarding the actions of Israel in Gaza in January 2009. It
all stopped, by apparent arrangement, just before inauguration day.
Given that history, what reason had Netanyahu to suppose that Obama
would discover the end of his patience last week? There seemed no jerk
of the leash to which this American president, like so many others,
would not respond obediently. Besides, as Obama knows and as Netanyahu
knows he knows, American Jewish liberals who are loyal to Israel are the
stamina of the Democratic Party.

After an initial perfunctory apology and an incredible
profession of innocence, Benjamin Netanyahu has reverted to the
customary usage of Israeli-American public relations. He has deplored
the unhappy timing of the announcement of the 1,600 new Israeli
settlement units but meanwhile has affirmed the substance of the order.
And he has indicated his intention to resist any further
American attempt to restrain Israel. Netanyahu has two considerations in
play. One is to insert himself into American politics (not for the first
time) to weaken a president he never liked who shows serious signs
of waning popularity. Another is to buy time for the resumption of his
policies by protracting a mimic war of "wounded feelings" between the
U.S. and Israel. This can serve to draw attention away from the Israeli
subjugation of the Palestinians. There has been a danger, after all,
over several months, that Palestinian protesters, aided by Israelis who
sympathize with their cause, would crystallize into a movement
essentially non-violent in orientation and catch the conscience of
America and the world. The fear of Netanyahu and the Israeli right is
that the Palestinian cause will indeed become a non-violent mass
movement.

Israel has taken strong measures against that possibility,
especially in the last few months, by rounding up and imprisoning
non-violent protesters. Most recently, according to a report
by Amira Hass on March 15 in Haaretz, Iyad Burnat was arrested
for sending an e-mail that said "the third intifada is knocking at the
door." The consequence? The towns of Bil'in and Na'alin, centers for
non-violent protest, are closed until August 17.

In general the Netanyahu government regards the prospect of a
third intifada with fatalistic acceptance. "Arabs are like that."
However, concerning the form the intifada will take Netanyahu is not
indifferent. The next uprising will be easier to manage in public and
easier to crush if it is violent. At the annual AIPAC convention next
week--a rite of passage for American statesmen at which the burden of
both flattery and mendacity is understood to rest on American
shoulders--Netanyahu will serve the usual fare and trust nobody in the
crowd of domestic speakers to show King Olaf's powers of resistance.

But at this juncture all Americans, even the domestic
performers at AIPAC, have an advantage if they dare to take it. It lies
in the power of truths long-unspoken that, because of Israel's recent
actions, are starting to be spoken. Racism as much as fear drives the
Israeli policy toward Palestinians. This has always been known. But who
now will deny that there is also, in the Israeli distrust and visceral
ridicule of Barack Obama, an undercurrent of racism? This has only
lately been uttered in the American mass media.

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. Many witnesses who know both countries will
tell you conditions are worse today in the West Bank and Gaza than
apartheid was in South Africa. But that analogy surely will not be
discussed, not even to be violently rebutted, at the AIPAC convention
next week.

A distraction besides the pouring of unguents on a "family
feud" will preempt much talk about Palestine. Instead, a great deal will
be said about Iran. The Holocaust will be evoked in this context. But
here again an answer is timely for Americans who dare to inform
themselves. Ehud Barak on March 8 told the Foreign Affairs and Defense
Committee of the Knesset that Iran poses no existential threat to Israel. The truth is
that whatever the wild men say, no country of that region threatens any
other with extinction; but one country is widely believed to be well
equipped for nuclear war, and that country is Israel.

The existential threat in the vicinity of Israel is not
extermination but expulsion. And Israel is the agent rather than victim
of that threat. The project is being carried forward by legalized acts
of dispossession, by harassment, by deprivation of useful work, and by
the deliberate infliction of misery. The most notable Israeli spokesman
for Palestinian expulsion happens not to be a security billionaire or a
radio demagogue but the foreign minister of Israel, Avigdor Lieberman.
When Avigdor Lieberman was welcomed last February to the world of nations
by Senator Joe Lieberman, the world took note.

There have been some voices in the past decade to remind us
that the United States is endangered by the aggressive expansionist
policies of Israel. Amy Goodman, Philip Weiss, M.J. Rosenberg, Glenn
Greenwald, Tony Karon, Daniel Luban --- but it is an ungrateful subject
and not many have had the nerve or the pockets to look at it steadily.
And yet, if one takes stock of more recent stories and columns, one has
to add to the list Bill Moyers, Joe Klein, Chris Matthews. It seems
possible that a nationwide self-censorship which has lasted more than
forty years, on a subject of enormous importance -- a "friendly silence"
that is contrary to the spirit of democracy itself -- is at last
beginning to lift.

And those, 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.

Seven years ago yesterday, an American civil rights worker, Rachel
Corrie, was killed in Gaza, run over by a Caterpillar tractor driven by
a soldier of the Israel Defense Forces. A civil suit against the
Israeli defense ministry, by the parents of Rachel Corrie, was starting
in a courtroom in Haifa during the recent visit of Vice President Biden.
The event was barely noticed in the American press -- it got more
attention in Israel -- but an AP video caught the statements made by Craig and
Cindy Corrie on entering the court, statements remarkable for their
dignity and candor.

Rachel Corrie wrote in an early letter from Gaza, addressed to "friends and
family, and others" on February 7, 2003:

I have been in Palestine for two weeks and one hour
now, and I still have very few words to describe what I see. . . . I
don't know if many of the children here have ever existed without
tank-shell holes in their walls and the towers of an occupying army
surveying them constantly from the near horizons. I think, although I'm
not entirely sure, that even the smallest of these children understand
that life is not like this everywhere.

She wrote in her last letter, to her father, on March 12:

I really don't want to move back to Olympia, but do need to
go back there to clean my stuff out of the garage and talk about my
experiences here. On the other hand, now that I've crossed the ocean I'm
feeling a strong desire to try to stay across the ocean for some time. .
. .I would like to leave Rafah with a viable plan to return, too. One
of the core members of our group has to leave tomorrow--and watching her
say goodbye to people is making me realize how difficult it will be.
People here can't leave, so that complicates things. They also are
pretty matter-of-fact about the fact that they don't know if they will
be alive when we come back here.

She would have returned if she could. And the cause that prompted her
courage is a matter that the rest of us have barely begun to arrive at.