Who Rules the World? (24 page)

Small wonder, then, that this insignificant earlier event merited only a few scattered words in the U.S. media during the vast furor over a real crime, in which the demonic enemy might have been indirectly involved.

One exception was the London
Daily Mail
, where Dominic Lawson wrote that although “Putin’s apologists” might bring up the Iran Air attack, the comparison actually demonstrates our high moral values as contrasted with those of the miserable Russians, who try to evade their responsibility for MH 17 with lies while Washington at once announced that the U.S. warship had shot down the Iranian aircraft—righteously.
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What more powerful evidence could there be of our nobility and their depravity?

We know why Ukrainians and Russians are in their own countries, but one might ask what exactly the
Vincennes
was doing in Iranian waters. The answer is simple: it was defending Washington’s great friend Saddam Hussein in his murderous aggression against Iran. For the victims, the shoot-down was no small matter. It was a major factor in Iran’s recognition that it could not fight on any longer, according to historian Dilip Hiro.
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It is worth remembering the extent of Washington’s devotion to its friend Saddam. Reagan removed him from the State Department’s terrorist list so that aid could be sent to expedite his assault on Iran, and later both denied his terrible crimes against the Kurds, including the use of chemical weapons, and blocked congressional condemnations of those crimes. He also accorded Saddam a privilege otherwise granted only to Israel: there was no serious reaction when Iraq attacked the USS
Stark
with Exocet missiles, killing thirty-seven crewmen, much like the case of the USS
Liberty
, attacked repeatedly by Israeli jets and torpedo ships in 1967, killing thirty-four crewmen.
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Reagan’s successor, George H. W. Bush, went on to provide further aid to Saddam, badly needed after the war with Iran that he had launched. Bush also invited Iraqi nuclear engineers to come to the United States for advanced training in weapons production. In April 1990, he dispatched a high-level Senate delegation, led by future Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole, to convey his warm regards to his friend Saddam and to assure him that he should disregard irresponsible criticism from the “haughty and pampered press,” and that such miscreants had been removed from Voice of America.
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The fawning before Saddam continued until he suddenly turned into a new Hitler a few months later when he disobeyed orders, or perhaps misunderstood them, and invaded Kuwait, with illuminating consequences that I must leave aside here.

Other precedents for MH 17 had long since been sent down the memory hole as being without significance. Take, for instance, the Libyan civilian airliner that was lost in a sandstorm in 1973 and shot down by U.S.-supplied Israeli jets, two minutes’ flight time from Cairo, toward which it was heading.
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The death toll was only 110 that time. Israel blamed the French pilot of the Libyan plane, with the endorsement of the
New York Times
, which added that the Israeli act was “at worst … an act of callousness that not even the savagery of previous Arab actions can excuse.”
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The incident was passed over quickly in the United States, with little criticism. When Israeli prime minister Golda Meir arrived in Washington four days later, she faced few embarrassing questions and returned home with new gifts of military aircraft. The reaction was much the same when Washington’s favored Angolan terrorist organization, UNITA, claimed to have shot down two civilian airliners.

Returning to the sole authentic and truly horrific crime, the
New York Times
reported that UN ambassador Samantha Power “choked up as she spoke of infants who perished in the Malaysia Airlines crash in Ukraine [and] the Dutch foreign minister, Frans Timmermans, could barely contain his anger as he recalled seeing pictures of ‘thugs’ snatching wedding bands off the fingers of the victims.”
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At the same session, the report continues, there was also “a long recitation of names and ages—all belonging to children killed in the latest Israeli offensive in Gaza.” The only reported reaction was by Palestinian envoy Riyad Mansour, who “grew quiet in the middle of” the recitation.
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The Israeli attack on Gaza in July did, however, elicit outrage in Washington. President Obama “reiterated his ‘strong condemnation’ of rocket and tunnel attacks against Israel by the militant group Hamas,”
The Hill
reported. He “also expressed ‘growing concern’ about the rising number of Palestinian civilian deaths in Gaza,” but without condemnation.
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The Senate filled that gap, voting unanimously to support Israeli actions in Gaza while condemning “the unprovoked rocket fire at Israel” by Hamas and calling on “Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to dissolve the unity governing arrangement with Hamas and condemn the attacks on Israel.”
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As for Congress, perhaps it’s enough to join the 80 percent of the public who disapprove of their performance, though the word “disapprove” is rather too mild in this case.
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But in Obama’s defense, it may be that he has no idea what Israel is doing in Gaza with the weapons that he is kind enough to supply to them. After all, he relies on U.S. intelligence, which may be too busy collecting phone calls and e-mail messages of citizens to pay much attention to such marginalia. It may be useful, then, to review what we all should know.

Israel’s goal had long been a simple one: quiet for quiet, a return to the norm (though now it may demand even more). What then was the norm?

For the West Bank, the norm has been that Israel carries forward its illegal construction of settlements and infrastructure, so that whatever might be of value can be integrated into Israel, while the Palestinians are consigned to unviable cantons and subjected to intense repression and violence. For the past fourteen years, the norm has been that Israel kills more than two Palestinian children a week. One such recent Israeli rampage was set off on June 12, 2014, by the brutal murder of three Israeli boys from a settler community in the occupied West Bank. A month before, two Palestinian boys had been shot dead in the West Bank city of Ramallah. That elicited no attention, which is understandable, since it is routine. “The institutionalised disregard for Palestinian life in the West helps explain not only why Palestinians resort to violence,” the respected Middle East analyst Mouin Rabbani reports, “but also Israel’s latest assault on the Gaza Strip.”
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Its quiet-for-quiet policy has also enabled Israel to carry forward its program of separating Gaza from the West Bank. That program has been pursued vigorously, always with U.S. support, ever since the United States and Israel accepted the Oslo Accords, which declare the two regions to be an inseparable territorial unity. A look at the map explains the rationale. Gaza provides Palestine’s only access to the outside world, so once the two are separated, any autonomy that Israel might grant to Palestinians in the West Bank would leave them effectively imprisoned between hostile states, Israel and Jordan. The imprisonment will become even more severe as Israel continues its systematic program of expelling Palestinians from the Jordan Valley and constructing Israeli settlements there.

The norm in Gaza was described in detail by the heroic Norwegian trauma surgeon Mads Gilbert, who has worked in Gaza’s main hospital through Israel’s most grotesque crimes and returned again for the current onslaught. In June 2014, immediately before it began, he submitted a report on the Gaza health sector to UNRWA, the UN agency that tries desperately, on a shoestring, to care for refugees.

“At least 57 percent of Gaza households are food insecure and about 80 percent are now aid recipients,” Gilbert reported. “Food insecurity and rising poverty also mean that most residents cannot meet their daily caloric requirements, while over 90 percent of the water in Gaza has been deemed unfit for human consumption,” a situation that became even worse when Israel again attacked water and sewage systems, leaving over a million people with even more severe disruptions of the barest necessities of life.
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Gilbert further reported that “Palestinian children in Gaza are suffering immensely. A large proportion are affected by the man-made malnourishment regime caused by the Israeli imposed blockage. Prevalence of anaemia in children < 2yrs in Gaza is at 72.8 percent, while prevalence of wasting, stunting, underweight have been documented at 34.3 percent, 31.4 percent, 31.45 percent respectively.”
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And it gets worse as the report proceeds.

The distinguished human rights lawyer Raji Sourani, who has remained in Gaza through years of Israeli brutality and terror, reports that “the most common sentence I heard when people began to talk about ceasefire: everybody says it’s better for all of us to die and not go back to the situation we used to have before this war. We don’t want that again. We have no dignity, no pride; we are just soft targets, and we are very cheap. Either this situation really improves or it is better to just die. I am talking about intellectuals, academics, ordinary people: everybody is saying that.”
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For Gaza, the plans for the norm were explained forthrightly by Dov Weisglass, a confidant of Ariel Sharon and the person who negotiated the withdrawal of Israeli settlers from Gaza in 2005. Hailed as a grand gesture in Israel and among acolytes, the withdrawal was in reality a carefully staged “national trauma,” ridiculed by informed Israeli commentators, among them the country’s leading sociologist, the late Baruch Kimmerling. What actually happened is that Israeli hawks, led by Sharon, realized that it made good sense to transfer the illegal settlers from their subsidized communities in devastated Gaza, where they were sustained at exorbitant cost, to subsidized settlements in the other occupied territories, which Israel intends to keep. Instead of simply transferring them, as would have been simple enough, it was clearly more useful to present the world with images of little children pleading with soldiers not to destroy their homes, amid cries of “Never Again,” with the implication obvious. What made the farce even more transparent was that it was a replica of the staged trauma when Israel had to evacuate the Egyptian part of the Sinai Peninsula in 1982. But it played very well for the intended audience at home and abroad.

Weisglass provided his own description of the transfer of settlers from Gaza to other occupied territories: “What I effectively agreed to with the Americans was that [the major settlement blocs in the West Bank] would not be dealt with at all, and the rest will not be dealt with until the Palestinians turn into Finns”—but a special kind of Finns, who would quietly accept rule by a foreign power. “The significance is the freezing of the political process,” Weisglass continued. “And when you freeze that process you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state and you prevent a discussion about the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package that is called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed from our agenda indefinitely. And all this with [President Bush’s] authority and permission and the ratification of both houses of Congress.”
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Weisglass explained that Gazans would remain “on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger” (which would not help Israel’s fading reputation).
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With their vaunted technical efficiency, Israeli experts determined precisely how many calories a day Gazans needed for bare survival, while also depriving them of medicines and other means of a decent life. Israeli military forces confined them by land, sea, and air to what British prime minister David Cameron accurately described as a prison camp. The Israeli withdrawal left them in total control of Gaza, hence the occupying power under international law. And to close the prison walls even more tightly, Israel excluded Palestinians from a large region along the border, including a third or more of Gaza’s scarce arable land. The justification was security for Israelis, which could have been just as well achieved by establishing the security zone on the Israeli side of the border, or by ending the savage siege and other punishments.

The official story is that after Israel graciously handed Gaza over to the Palestinians in the hope that they would construct a flourishing state, they revealed their true nature by subjecting Israel to unremitting rocket attacks and forcing the captive population to become martyrs so that Israel would be pictured in a bad light. Reality is rather different.

A few weeks after Israeli troops withdrew, leaving the occupation intact, Palestinians committed a major crime. In January 2006, they voted the wrong way in a carefully monitored free election, handing control of their parliament to Hamas. The Israeli media constantly intoned that Hamas was dedicated to the destruction of the country. In reality, Hamas’s leaders have repeatedly made it clear that they would accept a two-state settlement in accord with the international consensus that has been blocked by the United States and Israel for forty years. In contrast, Israel is dedicated to the destruction of Palestine, apart from some occasional meaningless words, and is implementing that commitment.

True, Israel accepted the “road map” for reaching a two-state settlement initiated by President Bush and adopted by the “quartet” that was supposed to supervise it: the United States, the European Union, the United Nations, and Russia. But as he accepted the road map, Prime Minister Sharon at once added fourteen reservations that effectively nullified it. The facts were known to activists, but only revealed to the general public for the first time in Jimmy Carter’s book
Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid
.
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They remain under wraps in media reporting and commentary.