Consortium.com,
May 27, 2011
Exclusive:
In a whirlwind trip to Washington, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu behaved less like a visiting head of state and more
like a pro-consul arriving in a conquered land to lecture its
titular leader on the limits of his independence and to receive
acclaim from subservient lawmakers. But ethics professor Daniel
C. Maguire warns that Netanyahu’s brash behavior cannot conceal
the dangers ahead.
Netanyahu’s
Pyrrhic Victory
By Daniel
C. Maguire
What a moment
for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as he spoke to a
joint session of the U.S. Congress this week. Republican and Democrat
lawmakers bouncing to their feet like yo-yo’s to cheer his
every utterance as he mocked the U.S. president’s policies.
Days earlier, sitting in the Oval Office, Netanyahu publicly scolded
Barack Obama as if the U.S. president were a schoolboy. No foreign
power ever held such sway over the government of the United States
of America.
Bibi, as Netanyahu is called, could return home and boast that
Israel’s American acolytes remain as compliant as the Stepford
wives. And Israel’s expansionism, euphemized as “settlements,”
can proceed apace.
Dictators enjoy mandated enthusiasm from their own minions. In
Syria, Bashar Assad could get it from his parliament; so too Stalin
from the Supreme Soviet.
But as Israeli Uri Avnery, former Jewish member of Israel’s
Knesset, points out Netanyahu was getting it from a powerful foreign
nation whose politics in the Middle East he effectively controlled.
No American politician could dare to withhold applause and still
get reelected, it seemed. And the American press was also in yo-yo
mode. No problem there, not even from the liberals at MSNBC.
When Israel identified and then attacked the U.S.S. Liberty on
June 8, 1967, killing 34 crew members and wounding 171, the United
States humbly bowed.
George Ball, a former undersecretary of state, said: “If
America’s leaders did not have the courage to punish Israel
for the blatant murder of American citizens, it seems clear that
their American friends would let them get away with almost anything.”
Congress’ giddy response to Netanyahu renewed that promise
of immunity.
But wait. There is another America that is stirring from its long
slumbers. Also, many in the Arab world and in Europe have never
been cowed into sleep and they are between impatience and outrage.
The United Nations General Assembly is about to give to the Palestinians
the same status as a nation that Israel got in 1948 and it is
springtime in Arab lands.
There are cracks in the Israeli immunity dike that are not sealed
by sycophantic congressional clapping.
Unpracticed as I am in singing lauds to Republican leaders, I
must praise Dwight Eisenhower and George H.W. Bush for showing
the only way to stop Israeli expansionism.
In 1956, when Israel had occupied Sinai and the Gaza strip, Ike
threatened to “halt all foreign aid and eliminate private
tax-deductible donations to Israel if it did not withdraw”
from those occupied territories.
And guess what! They quickly complied.
President George H.W. Bush reminded the Israelis that East Jerusalem
was occupied territory and not part to Israel.
His Secretary of State James Baker told AIPAC in May 1989: “Now
is the time to lay aside once and for all the unrealistic vision
of a Greater Israel. … Forswear annexation. Stop settlement
activity. Reach out to the Palestinians as neighbors who deserve
political rights.”
President Bush then threatened to withhold a substantial portion
of America’s $10 million a day of financial aid to Israel
unless the settlements were stopped between Jerusalem and Bethlehem.
To back up his word, Bush held back $700 million – and Prime
Minister Yitzhak Shamir halted construction. Still, the Bush administration
deducted $400 million, the amount estimated to have been spent
on the illegal settlements.
As soon as Bush left office in 1993, the “settlements”
resumed.
Even President George W. Bush in 2008 stated: “There should
be an end of the occupation that began in 1967. … And we
must ensure that the state of Palestine is viable, contiguous,
sovereign, and independent. … Swiss cheese isn’t going
to work when it comes to the outline of a state.”
There I have done it. I have praised Republicans. But where are
those brave and just voices now?
Unsupported by U.S. action or at least credible threats of action,
impotent pleas to halt the expansionism called “settlement”
avail nothing. They never have; they never will.
Nemo gratis mendax. We pay a price for our lies. Likud policy
rests on two and a half lies.
Lie one: Israel is and deserves to be a Jewish democracy. That,
as Jewish Israeli historian Shlomo Sand says, is an oxymoron.
Israel, he says, is an ethnocracy.
You can’t have a Jewish democracy when 20 percent of your
citizens are Muslims and Christians. A Jewish democracy makes
no more sense than a Lutheran democracy. You can’t privilege
one religious or ethnic group and still call yourself a democracy.
Lie two is the parity lie. Even critics of Israel, like Rabbi
Michael Lerner, offer this moral equivalency defense: “The
list of atrocities is long on both sides.”
This blurs the basic moral distinction between the invader and
the invaded, between the occupier and the occupied, as well as
the comparative statistics on military strength and deaths of
civilians including children.
For example, over 1,400 Gazans were killed in reprisal for four
Israelis killed in December 2008. Operation Cast Lead could not
be called a “war” because a war implies some military
parity on both sides.
Attacks on Gaza by the fourth strongest military in the world
(and the sixth strongest nuclear power) versus Hamas, which has
neither an army, a navy, an air force, or even an air field, is
not a war. It is a massacre. (Note from history, the “Boston
massacre” involved five American deaths.)
The half lie: “security” is Israel’s hackneyed
excuse for expansionism. That is hollow. Israel is the 800-pound
gorilla in the Middle East.
As for the Palestinian side, homemade missile attacks are stupid
and only give an excuse for disproportionate reprisal. Palestinians
need a Gandhi and good sense.
Hamas has said and needs to say again that it will recognize Israel
within the 1967 borders with reparations for refugees, and it
needs to change any of its documents that contradict that.
In March 2002, the Arab League offered to recognize Israel’s
right to exist and have normal relations with Israel. The offer
had been repeatedly reconfirmed.
In April 2002, the Organization of the Islamic Conference, approved
by Iran’s delegation, endorsed this.The condition was Israel’s
compliance with the United Nations Resolutions 194, 242, 338.
Hamas agreed.
But what of the truth side of Israel’s claim of insecurity,
the other half?
The truth part can be found in changes in military science and
in the rapidly changing Arab world. The nuclear genie is out of
the bottle, and bombing Iran will not put it back in.
Suitcase-size atomic bombs exist, as do small packages of biological
weapons. The protective wall provided by the U.S.-bribed dictator
President Hosni Mubarak is no more.
Against miniaturized weapons, the massive military might of the
United States and Israel have no adequate defense.
Head of Jewish studies at Baylor University, Marc Ellis, says,
in the light of all this: ”The scenario of Israel going down
and bringing the Middle East down as its last act is hardly far-fetched.”
But Israel could find the practical wisdom and true security it
needs in its own holy scrolls.
You cannot build “Zion in bloodshed,” said Micah the
prophet. (3:10); Zechariah added: “Neither by force of arms
nor by brute strength” would the people be saved. (4:6) Isaiah
32:17, in a text that deserves Nobel prizes in Economics and in
Peace, said until you plant justice (Tsedaqah) you cannot have
peace (Shalom).
The price tag for American support of Israel also is coming to
light. The alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attack, Khalid Sheikh
Mohammed, cites the one-sided American support of Israel as a
motive for the attack, as reported in the 9/11 Commission Report.
Gen. David Petraeus has testified to Congress that American over-identification
with Israel is endangering U.S. troops in the Middle East.
Even former Vice President Dick Cheney told the American Enterprise
Institute in 2009 that the nature of U.S. support for Israel has
become one of the “true sources of resentment.”
Overwhelming military superiority no longer produces peace. As
Andrew Bacevich says, Israel and the United States are proving
that.
Pillars are shaking. Israel can have peace or expansion; it is
currently choosing expansion.
BOOK SUGGESTIONS:
Judaism Does Not Equal Israel by Marc Ellis, The New Press, 2009
Quicksand: America’s Pursuit of Power in the Middle East
by Geoffrey Wawro, The Penguin Press, 2010
We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land: A Plan That Will Work by Jimmy
Carter, Simon and Schuster, 2009.
The Attack on the Liberty: The Untold Story of Israel’s Deadly
1967 Assault on a U.S. Spy Ship by James Scott, Simon & Schuster,
2009
Daniel C. Maguire is a Professor of Moral Theology at Marquette
University, a Catholic, Jesuit institution in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
He is author of A Moral Creed for All Christians. He can be reached
at daniel.maguire@marquette.edu
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