Analysis: The US undermines its own foundations

Netanyahu’s government disregards U.S. values, and Washington’s support for Israel’s actions in Gaza is pushing both nations into a dire situation

As The Washington Post declared in its editorial, the American democracy is cracking. The problems with the U.S. political system can (not “at times” as it says, but all the time now), feel overwhelming and intractable. Contrary to what the U.S. elites hope, seemingly nothing can help repair the institutions that could steer the country back to its founding ideals that have been under the invasion of neo-cons and neo-liberals. Their very existence is enough to be considered an “American Nightmare” (as professor Wendy Brown, an American political theorist in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton describes it). Yet, their constant fight to take full control of the bureaucratic helm of the government apparatus since the days of America’s 43rd President George W. Bush not only weakened the American democracy but also created former President Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) movement in which the misguided regular Joes try to retake the government from the hands of the pugnacious elites.

Alas, right now the White House, the Foggy Bottom and the Pentagon are the battlefields of neo-cons and neo-libs – and the neo-cons seem to be winning the upper hand, which forces us to dredge up the nasty subject: The neo-con cabal is supporting the Zionist plan to expunge Palestine from the face of the earth; making the U.S. a joint offender in the Israeli genocide of Palestinian people.

Policy to kill

Israel’s scorched earth policy has not been solely designed to inflict mass devastation on Hamas to wipe it “off the face of the earth”; in fact, it is meant to erase the last remaining borders that created a country half as large as Long Island for 2 million people. Israel’s “kill, steal and occupy” policy has left nothing to be called “Palestinian land,” including in Eastern Jerusalem. Any Jewish man donning a kippa and a machine gun can walk into any neighborhood, knock on the door of the property he likes and ask the owner to leave. If the latter doesn’t, the “settler” kills the owner of the house for threatening him; the famous Israel Defense Forces (IDF) rushes to the scene, removes the body and arrests several other Arabs as well. Thus, one more piece of the Promised Land is returned to its rightful owner according to this or that chapter in the Talmud or some other sacred text.

The scales have already been tipped on the second day of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s “war against Hamas” for the free-thinking public in the world: Netanyahu was not trying to rescue those kidnapped by Hamas; he had launched “Operation Erase Palestine.” That was what the neo-con cabal has been waiting for since the day Bush put the world on the spot in his address to the joint session of Congress on Sept. 20, 2001, when he said, “U.S. has the right to defend itself; either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” More recently, the visiting Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin repeated that Israel had the right to protect civilians in Tel Aviv, and the U.S. has a moral duty to provide “unshakable support for Israel’s security and right to defend itself.”

This is Austin’s second visit to Israel since the conflict began. The other leader of the neo-con conspiracy, Secretary of State Tony Blinken, has already visited Israel three times since Oct. 7. They both visited Netanyahu amid mounting concern over the rising death toll in Gaza and deteriorating conditions for its 2 million-plus residents.

Oct. 7, a milestone?

Acting as if Tel Aviv’s objectives were inspired by the Oct. 7 raid and kidnapping of 200-odd Israeli military and civilian people by Hamas, Israel’s air force, artillery and tanks have been bombing Gaza indiscriminately. Hamas videos show that several hostages were killed in the Israeli bombing. The whole world was left stunned when Israeli soldiers killed three hostages after they waved a white flag and shouted in Hebrew that they were no threat. Now the world knows that Israel has even a military doctrine to kill captured Israeli soldiers rather than leave them as hostages. This directive is known as the “Hannibal Protocol” and, according to it, Israeli soldiers were ordered by their own government to kill any Israeli soldier captured by the enemy. (“A dead soldier is better than a captured soldier.”)

In the meantime, the previous so-called “humanitarian cease-fires” were neither humanitarian nor authentic cease-fires! Apparently, first Netanyahu had to yield to the pressure of the U.S., which in turn had to yield to the reaction of the people globally; and second, the IDF needed to regroup its forces. British and German foreign ministers’ call for a “sustainable cease-fire,” requiring that Hamas lay down its arms, is not sincere and sustainable. They simply endorse the expansion of the Israeli occupy-and-settle policy to Gaza.

U.S. President Joe Biden is also talking out of both sides of his mouth on the issue. He says Netanyahu needed to alter his approach (his approach to what?) but he cannot because his “government is making it very difficult for him to move.” This clear hoodwink is being presented as a rift between the U.S. and Israel. It is not. On the one hand, Biden says the U.S. still wants the two-state solution (that is, a Palestinian state next to Israel) but Israel does not; and he says he supports Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.

Can Biden not see what millions of others see? The so-called “Israeli military campaign in Gaza” is not military but political expunging of the people needed to create the second state in the area, the Palestinians. Every word Biden utters regarding the Israeli massacres in Gaza is helping to sink the U.S. to the bottom of humanitarian standards. Can Biden not see that Israel’s claims about “the rape and sexual violence inflicted by Hamas during its terror attack on Israel” are sheer lies fabricated by the very government that Biden thinks is preventing a peaceful solution? But if you don’t condemn Hamas for it, you are supporting Hamas terrorism, according to Biden.

Now, Biden is supporting the Israeli government by putting together an international coalition to respond to Houthi attacks that have disrupted Red Sea shipping. (The usual suspects are in that coalition, but one wonders what Bahrain was thinking when it joined them.) Yes, we know every U.S. president, regardless of political party, has maintained the belief that Israel was like the U.S. in terms of commitment to pluralism, democratic values and independent judiciary. But Netanyahu and his government do not commit to such U.S. values. The U.S. support of genocidal massacres in Gaza, which soon will be followed by the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people from what is supposed to be Palestine, is simply sinking the U.S. into the abyss that Israel has been floundering desperately in since the war it started in Gaza.

Netanyahu is not teaching “Hamas a lesson it won’t forget.” So far, he couldn’t harm a hair on Hamas’s collective head. So far he has killed more than 20,000 innocent people; he massacred 8,000 babies and young kids; he tarnished what little international respect Israel had. He demolished three-quarters of the buildings in Gaza. But Hamas is still there, almost intact.

Biden’s Zionist heart should bleed for his country’s credibility, too.

Source: Daily Sabah/Hakkı Öcal