U.S. INDEPENDENCE FROM ISRAEL

[jue]

A DECLARATION OF U.S. INDEPENDENCE FROM ISRAEL

by Chris Hedges

Israel, without the United States, would probably not exist. The country came
perilously close to extinction during the October 1973 war when Egypt, trained
and backed by the Soviet Union, crossed the Suez Canal and the Syrians poured in
over the Golan Heights. Huge American military transport planes came to the
rescue. They began landing every half-hour to refit the battered Israeli army,
which had lost most of its heavy armor. By the time the war as over, the United
States had given Israel $2.2 billion in emergency military aid.The
intervention, which enraged the Arab world, triggered the OPEC oil embargo that
for a time wreaked havoc on Western economies. This was perhaps the most
dramatic example of the sustained life-support system the United States has
provided to the Jewish state. Israel was born at midnight May 14, 1948. The U.S.
Recognized the new state 11 minutes later. The two countries have been locked in
a deadly embrace ever since.Washington, at the beginning of the
relationship, was able to be a moderating influence. An incensed President
Eisenhower demanded and got Israel's withdrawal after the Israelis occupied Gaza
in 1956. During the Six-Day War in 1967, Israeli warplanes bombed the USS
Liberty. The ship, flying the U.S. Flag and stationed 15 miles off the Israeli
coast, was intercepting tactical and strategic communications from both sides.
The Israeli strikes killed 34 U.S. Sailors and wounded 171. The deliberate
attack froze, for a while, Washington's enthusiasm for Israel. But ruptures like
this one proved to be only bumps, soon smoothed out by an increasingly
sophisticated and well-financed Israel lobby that set out to merge Israel and
American foreign policy in the Middle East.Israel has reaped tremendous
rewards from this alliance. It has been given more than $140 billion in U.S.
Direct economic and military assistance. It receives about $3 billion in direct
assistance annually, roughly one-fifth of the U.S. Foreign aid budget. Although
most American foreign aid packages stipulate that related military purchases
have to be made in the United States, Israel is allowed to use about 25 percent
of the money to subsidize its own growing and profitable defense industry. It is
exempt, unlike other nations, from accounting for how it spends the aid money.
And funds are routinely siphoned off to build new Jewish settlements, bolster
the Israeli occupation in the Palestinian territories and construct the security
barrier, which costs an estimated $1 million a mile.The barrier weaves
its way through the West Bank, creating isolated pockets of impoverished
Palestinians in ringed ghettos. By the time the barrier is finished it will
probably in effect seize up to 40 percent of Palestinian land. This is the
largest land grab by Israel since the 1967 war. And although the United States
officially opposes settlement expansion and the barrier, it also funds
them.The U.S. Has provided Israel with nearly $3 billion to develop
weapons systems and given Israel access to some of the most sophisticated items
in its own military arsenal, including Blackhawk attack helicopters and F-16
fighter jets. The United States also gives Israel access to intelligence it
denies to its NATO allies. And when Israel refused to sign the nuclear
nonproliferation treaty, the United States stood by without a word of protest as
the Israelis built the region's first nuclear weapons program.U.S.
Foreign policy, especially under the current Bush administration, has become
little more than an extension of Israeli foreign policy. The United States since
1982 has vetoed 32 Security Council resolutions critical of Israel, more than
the total number of vetoes cast by all the other Security Council members.
It refuses to enforce the Security Council resolutions it claims to support.
These resolutions call on Israel to withdraw from the occupied
territories.There is now volcanic anger and revulsion by Arabs at this
blatant favoritism. Few in the Middle East see any distinction between Israeli
and American policies, nor should they. And when the Islamic radicals speak of
U.S. Support of Israel as a prime reason for their hatred of the United States,
we should listen. The consequences of this one-sided relationship are being
played out in the disastrous war in Iraq, growing tension with Iran, and the
humanitarian and political crisis in Gaza. It is being played out in Lebanon,
where Hezbollah is gearing up for another war with Israel, one most Middle East
analysts say is inevitable. The U.S. Foreign policy in the Middle East is
unraveling. And it is doing so because of this special relationship. The
eruption of a regional conflict would usher in a nightmare of catastrophic
proportions.There were many in the American foreign policy
establishment and State Department who saw this situation coming. The decision
to throw our lot in with Israel in the Middle East was not initially a popular
one with an array of foreign policy experts, including President Harry Truman's
secretary of state, Gen. George Marshall. They warned there would be a backlash.
They knew the cost the United States would pay in the oil-rich region for this
decision, which they feared would be one of the greatest strategic blunders of
the postwar era. And they were right. The decision has jeopardized American and
Israeli security and created the kindling for a regional
conflagration.The alliance, which makes no sense in geopolitical terms,
does makes sense when seen through the lens of domestic politics. The Israel
lobby has become a potent force in the American political system. No major
candidate, Democrat or Republican, dares to challenge it. The lobby successfully
purged the State Department of Arab experts who challenged the notion that
Israeli and American interests were identical. Backers of Israel have doled out
hundreds of millions of dollars to support U.S. political candidates deemed
favorable to Israel. They have brutally punished those who strayed, including
the first President Bush, who they said was not vigorous enough in his defense
of Israeli interests. This was a lesson the next Bush White House did not
forget.George W. Bush did not want to be a one-term president like his father.
Israel advocated removing Saddam Hussein from power and currently advocates
striking Iran to prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons. Direct Israeli
involvement in American military operations in the Middle East is impossible. It
would reignite a war between Arab states and Israel. The United States, which
during the Cold War avoided direct military involvement in the region, now does
the direct bidding of Israel while Israel watches from the sidelines. During the
1991 Gulf War, Israel was a spectator, just as it is in the war with
Iraq.President Bush, facing dwindling support for the war in Iraq,
publicly holds Israel up as a model for what he would like Iraq to become.
Imagine how this idea plays out on the Arab street, which views Israel as the
Algerians viewed the French colonizers during the war of liberation.'In
Israel,' Bush said recently, 'terrorists have taken innocent human life for
years in suicide attacks. The difference is that Israel is a functioning
democracy and it's not prevented from carrying out its responsibilities. And
that's a good indicator of success that we're looking for in Iraq.' Americans
are increasingly isolated and reviled in the world. They remain blissfully
ignorant of their own culpability for this isolation. U.S. 'spin' paints the
rest of the world as unreasonable, but Israel, Americans are assured, will
always be on our side.Israel is reaping economic as well as political
rewards from its lock-down apartheid state. In the 'gated community' market it
has begun to sell systems and techniques that allow the nation to cope with
terrorism. Israel, in 2006, exported $3.4 billion in defense products -- well
over a billion dollars more than it received in American military aid. Israel
has grown into the fourth largest arms dealer in the world. Most of this growth
has come in the so-called homeland security sector.
'The key products and services,' as Naomi Klein wrote in The Nation, 'are
hi-tech fences, unmanned drones, biometric IDs, video and audio surveillance
gear, air passenger profiling and prisoner interrogation systems-precisely the
tools and technologies Israel has used to lock in the occupied territories. And
that is why the chaos in Gaza and the rest of the region doesn't threaten the
bottom line in Tel Aviv, and may actually boost it. Israel has learned to turn
endless war into a brand asset, pitching its uprooting, occupation and
containment of the Palestinian people as a half-century head start in the
'global war on terror.' 'The United States, at least officially, does
not support the occupation and calls for a viable Palestinian state. It is a
global player, with interests that stretch well beyond the boundaries of the
Middle East, and the equation that Israel's enemies are our enemies is not that
simple.'Terrorism is not a single adversary,' John Mearsheimer and
Stephen Walt wrote in The London Review of Books, 'but a tactic employed by a
wide array of political groups. The terrorist organizations that threaten Israel
do not threaten the United States, except when it intervenes against them (as in
Lebanon in 1982). Moreover, Palestinian terrorism is not random violence
directed against Israel or 'the West'; it is largely a response to Israel's
prolonged campaign to colonize the West Bank and Gaza Strip. More important,
saying that Israel and the US are united by a shared terrorist threat has the
causal relationship backwards: the US has a terrorism problem in good part
because it is so closely allied with Israel, not the other way
around.'Middle Eastern policy is shaped in the United States by those
with very close ties to the Israel lobby. Those who attempt to counter the
virulent Israeli position, such as former Secretary of State Colin Powell, are
ruthlessly slapped down. This alliance was true also during the Clinton
administration, with its array of Israeli-first Middle East experts, including
special Middle East coordinator Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk, the former deputy
director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, AIPAC, one of the most
powerful Israel lobbying groups in Washington. But at least people like Indyk
and Ross are sane, willing to consider a Palestinian state, however unviable, as
long as it is palatable to Israel. The Bush administration turned to the
far-right wing of the Israel lobby, those who have not a shred of compassion for
the Palestinians or a word of criticism for Israel. These new Middle East
experts include Elliott Abrams, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, the disgraced I.
Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and David
Wurmser.Washington was once willing to stay Israel's hand. It intervened
to thwart some of its most extreme violations of human rights. This
administration, however, has signed on for every disastrous Israeli blunder,
from building the security barrier in the West Bank, to sealing off Gaza and
triggering a humanitarian crisis, to the ruinous invasion and saturation bombing
of Lebanon.The few tepid attempts by the Bush White House to criticize
Israeli actions have all ended in hasty and humiliating retreats in the face of
Israeli pressure. When the Israel Defense Forces in April 2002 reoccupied the
West Bank, President Bush called on then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to 'halt
the incursions and begin withdrawal.' It never happened. After a week of heavy
pressure from the Israel lobby and Israel's allies in Congress, meaning just
about everyone in Congress, the president gave up, calling Sharon 'a man of
peace.' It was a humiliating moment for the United Sates, a clear sign of who
pulled the strings.There were several reasons for the war in Iraq. The
desire for American control of oil, the belief that Washington could build
puppet states in the region, and a real, if misplaced, fear of Saddam Hussein
played a part in the current disaster. But it was also strongly shaped by the
notion that what is good for Israel is good for the United States. Israel wanted
Iraq neutralized. Israeli intelligence, in the lead-up to the war, gave faulty
information to the U.S. about Iraq's alleged arsenal of weapons of mass
destruction. And when Baghdad was taken in April 2003, the Israeli government
immediately began to push for an attack on Syria. The lust for this attack has
waned, in no small part because the Americans don't have enough troops to hang
on in Iraq, much less launch a new occupation.Israel is currently
lobbying the United States to launch aerial strikes on Iran, despite the debacle
in Lebanon. Israel's iron determination to forcibly prevent a nuclear Iran makes
it probable that before the end of the Bush administration an attack on Iran
will take place. The efforts to halt nuclear development through diplomatic
means have failed. It does not matter that Iran poses no threat to the United
States. It does not matter that it does not even pose a threat to Israel, which
has several hundred nuclear weapons in its arsenal. It matters only that Israel
demands total military domination of the Middle East.The alliance
between Israel and the United States has culminated after 50 years in direct
U.S. military involvement in the Middle East. This involvement, which is not
furthering American interests, is unleashing a geopolitical nightmare. American
soldiers and Marines are dying in droves in a useless war. The impotence of the
United States in the face of Israeli pressure is complete. The White House and
the Congress have become, for perhaps the first time, a direct extension of
Israeli interests. There is no longer any debate within the United States. This
is evidenced by the obsequious nods to Israel by all the current presidential
candidates with the exception of Dennis Kucinich. The political cost for those
who challenge Israel is too high.This means there will be no peaceful
resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. It means the incidents of
Islamic terrorism against the U.S. and Israel will grow. It means that American
power and prestige are on a steep, irreversible decline. And I fear it also
means the ultimate end of the Jewish experiment in the Middle
East.The weakening of the United States, economically and militarily, is
giving rise to new centers of power. The U.S. economy, mismanaged and drained by
the Iraq war, is increasingly dependent on Chinese trade imports and on Chinese
holdings of U.S. Treasury securities. China holds dollar reserves worth $825
billion. If Beijing decides to abandon the U.S. bond market, even in part, it
would cause a free fall by the dollar. It would lead to the collapse of the
$7-trillion U.S. real estate market. There would be a wave of U.S. bank failures
and huge unemployment. The growing dependence on China has been accompanied by
aggressive work by the Chinese to build alliances with many of the world's major
exporters of oil, such as Iran, Nigeria, Sudan and Venezuela. The Chinese are
preparing for the looming worldwide clash over dwindling resources.The
future is ominous. Not only do Israel's foreign policy objectives not coincide
with American interests, they actively hurt them. The growing belligerence in
the Middle East, the calls for an attack against Iran, the collapse of the
imperial project in Iraq have all given an opening, where there was none before,
to America's rivals. It is not in Israel's interests to ignite a regional
conflict. It is not in ours. But those who have their hands on the wheel seem
determined, in the name of freedom and democracy, to keep the American ship of
state headed at breakneck speed into the cliffs before us.

[abduLMaria]

at this point, the United States is more the United States of Israel than the United States of America.

i would say that final coup happened on 9-11-01.

as far as " taking our nation back", i don't see how it can happen while the perpetrators of 9-11 & the Iraq War & the Afghan. War (etc.) are still running around loose - and in power.

i agree with DBS that these people need to be incarcerated, so that if they're running around it's within the walls of a prison.

i wouldn't say we've run into massive civil disobedience yet.  but until the managers & employees realize that harassing Muslims is not the way to secure America, it seems like the US is headed towards a Civil War.

or, if you demarcate Civil War as the killing of Americans by other Americans, that Civil War may have started on 9-11.  since it was not Israeli's alone that did the killing that day.

they have their supporters in the US government that - i think - DO KNOW WHAT IS GOING ON.  e.g. Feinstein, Pelosi, & their male counterparts.  they echo the War on Terror rhetoric, but many of them do know what's going on.  and yet they participate, because they're chicken & un-principled.

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

You might see the USA fall apart financially and possibly breakup into regionally solvent and insolvent areas.  People won't pay the taxes that the Idiot Jews, the Idiot Jew Fed and the dumb Jewified Congress have run up since the Jew Mossad attacks on 9/11.  The Weasles might find themselves getting tossed out of certain parts of the USA. NewYork, Washington D.C. and maybe parts of L.A./Miami/Chicago will become like Jewish Hong Kongs or Singapores -- Jew City States forcibly cutoff from the rest of the USA.  The parasites will then be starved in their cocoons -- maybe walls will be built as well. Just these bankrupt Jewified City-State areas and the Mother Ship Israel proper will pay back the debts.  That's fair and square to me, no?

I'd call it: "U.S. Breakup and Collapse from Israel"

[Anonymous]

abdulMaria, I do not agree with you! you know - now. There're holidays (all or any of them is a good reason) coming up and we need street light decorations!!! every shill/criminal shall make contribution personally by adopting their pole!  :idea: