The Gaza Tragedy: The West's Connivance with Israeli Apartheid

Posted January 10th, 2009 by PTZeleza in Global Affairs

Israel is back to flexing its brutal military muscles against the Palestinians in a savage war that has killed hundreds and wounded thousands and pulverized the already tattered infrastructure of the overcrowded refugee ghetto called Gaza, while the West watches with criminal indifference and the corrupt Arab regimes cower with disgraceful impotence. This is a sickeningly familiar story of Western, especially American connivance with settler colonial barbarism. Like apartheid South Africa, Israel pursues the doomed dreams of an exclusive settler colonial state, the racist fantasy that the ‘natives' can be permanently dispossessed of their land and their humanity through ferocious state military terror.

In the end it didn't work for apartheid South Africa, and it won't work for an apartheid Israel. Apartheid South Africa was brought down by generations of internal resistance supported by mounting regional and international solidarity that included an ever tightening noose of sanctions. It is time for all those who truly seek to bring this madness to an end to treat Israel the way apartheid South Africa was treated, as a pariah state, as a skunk of the world, as President Nelson Mandela called apartheid South Africa on his inauguration. In one of the commentaries below, Naomi Klein, the award winning journalist and author of the acclaimed book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, repeats the growing calls for sanctions against Israel.

The lies--of Israel as the perennial unprovoked victim--are told and repeated with wild abandon in the forlorn hope that through sheer repetition they will morph into truth. The echoes with apartheid South Africa are uncanny, unsettling. Remember the claim that apartheid South Africa used to make that it was an embattled democracy in a sea of dictatorships, a lone outpost of western civilization on the ‘dark continent'. But this self-serving rhetoric did not fool the opponents of apartheid, for it was clearly evident that a settler colonial state cannot be democratic for in essence, its very existence, requires the denial of democratic rights, of citizenship, to the occupied ‘natives', to its dispossesed and despised subjects.

The incoming Obama Administration risks dissipating the temporary goodwill garnered in much of the world by the election of President Obama if it continues to coddle the apartheid policies and behavior of the state of Israel. It is troubling that President-elect Obama has been silent on Israel's Gaza invasion on the grounds that there is only one president at a time who can speak on American foreign policy; yet this has not stopped him speaking eloquently and forcefully on the financial crisis facing the United States and how to resolve it. As many thoughtful American observers have noted, America's unconditional support of Israel has not been good for the United States, let alone for the future of Israel itself.

For all those interested in understanding and reshaping U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East I would recommend John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt's persuasive book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, in which they argue there is no compelling strategic, moral, or economic rationale for America's uncritical and uncompromising relationship with Israel. Indeed, U.S. Mideast policy dictated by Israeli interests and the Israel lobby has been a strategic disaster for the United States and will continue to be so for it has entailed promoting and endorsing policies that foster anti-Americanism and are counterproductive for long-term American interests and the well-being of the Mid-East region including Israel itself. Such is the sad state of affairs that it is easier to criticize Israeli policies in Israel than in the United States.

The following commentaries on the current Israeli invasion of Gaza offer eloquent testimony to the utter criminality of the invasion and the West's political and moral culpability. For more go to http://www.zeleza.com/blogging/global-affairs/gaza-tragedy-wests-connivance-israeli-apartheid