Greater America defending Little America "Israel"

By Majid Kayali

Since the beginning of Israel's brutal war against the Palestinians of Gaza, the Biden administration has shown unlimited support for it. It quickly bought its narrative about that war, without any examination, knowing that it quickly revealed many major lies and intentional manipulation of public opinion, according to Israeli reports.

These reports revealed that an Israeli military plane targeted a mass concert of teenagers, in light of the turmoil resulting from the Hamas attack on October 7, and that some Israeli army units bombed the homes of settlers in the Gaza Strip, on suspicion that Hamas fighters “Inside it, he recently repeated his hasty killing of three Israelis in the Shujaiya neighborhood, who were detained by Hamas.

This also included exposing Israel’s lies regarding the existence of tunnels under Al-Shifa Hospital, or elsewhere, which revealed its intention to undermine the health system in Gaza, in the context of its effort to destroy all the infrastructure in the Strip, with roads, electricity and water stations, schools, mosques, shelters, and even cemeteries. To turn it into an unlivable area.

It also seemed clear that the American administration was negligent in granting Israel the “right to self-defense,” and even the exclusive right, as a victim of a terrorist attack, in disregard of the nature of Israel as a state occupying Palestinian lands, in accordance with international standards that it recognizes (if we ignore its establishment in 1948). At the expense of the Palestinian people), as if it deals with the Palestinians as people of unknown identity and history, or as aliens to place and time, or as a superfluous people who have no rights, and this is the meaning of the stigma of terrorism, which labels the entire Palestinian people, or the Palestinians of Gaza, according to Israeli standards, Note that the United States does not only define “Hamas” as a terrorist organization, as the Palestine Liberation Organization is also such, according to the US Congress Act (1987); The problem is that the organization’s leadership was unaware of, or overlooked, the request to cancel this decision before coming to the White House in Washington to sign the Oslo Accords at the time (1993).

The background to the American view of denying the right to self-defense to the Palestinians, and preventing them from being described as victims, lies in its failure to recognize them as a people with the right to sovereignty over their land, in a colonial, arrogant and racist view that divides the world into good people and bad people, the world of light and the world of darkness, the man of civilization and the man of barbarism. Therefore, anything that comes from the first two should be accepted, no matter how harmful it appears to be to others, while considering any reaction from others to defend themselves and their rights as human beings, including their right to life, freedom, justice and equality, as a dare against civilization, and an act of brutality or terrorism, which is presumed Suppressing and eradicating it, and this is the logic of Biden and his administration, in the position of not stopping the war completely, until Hamas is uprooted, dismantled, or forced to surrender, while allowing Israel to do what it does so that no one will think about doing what it did in... the future.

Let us note that Biden’s position is the same as that of British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who recently answered a question from a member of the House of Commons regarding the inadmissibility of indiscriminate killing of civilians, saying that “Israel has the right to defend itself, and to be sure that something like this (Hamas operation) will not happen to its citizens again... many civilians are dying, of course, but this is different from saying that international humanitarian law has been violated! This conversation took place 75 days after that brutal war, and after 100,000 Palestinian victims, dead, wounded, detained, and missing under the rubble, as if they had no consideration, which means that the problem, for Biden and Sunak (and some Western leaders in Germany, France, and Italy), is only in the Hamas attack on October 7, and the presence of dozens of Israelis as detainees or hostages, meaning that all the Palestinian people have no account in this equation, despite the suffering of 75 years of Palestinian refugees, and 56 years of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and despite More than two million Palestinians have been besieged in Gaza for 17 years.

Israel would not have continued its war, which is described as a war of genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza, or as a war of ethnic cleansing, had the American administration not stood with it. In addition to adopting its narrative, it supported it with weapons, ammunition, and money, and worked to cover it politically, mobilizing the support of Western countries for it, and preventing the issuance of any decision. From the UN Security Council condemning that war or calling for it to be stopped permanently, despite the political, moral, security, and economic consequences that this imposes on the United States and Western countries, and on their image in the world, including doubting the message they claim as a protector of liberal democratic values, and the values of freedom, justice, and equality, on the global level. 

In conclusion, Western societies and their governments have taken on their governments to manipulate public opinion by broadcasting a message favoring Israel, covering up its crimes against the Palestinians, and their attempts to delegitimize or criminalize criticism of Israel, by equating anti-Semitism with hostility to Israel, considering this a confiscation of freedom of opinion, and as a restriction of the right to dissent.

The American administration’s action does not come in a vacuum. It abandoned, a long time ago, its role as an honest sponsor, as a neutral party, and as a reliable guarantor of the settlement process between Israel and the Palestinians (which is the illusion that the Palestinian leadership bet on three decades ago). It did nothing to oblige Israel with the entitlements required of it in the Oslo process (1993), nor to stop settlement and attempts to perpetuate the occupation, in the West Bank, nor even to curb its efforts to restrict the Palestinian Authority and belittle it in front of its people. That is, Israel does everything it does in Gaza and in the West Bank. They kill, arrest, demolish homes, confiscate lands, and form militias for extremist settlers to harass Palestinians, knowing that this is taking place in an area administered by the Palestinian Authority, which has security, economic, and administrative coordination with the Israeli authorities.

On the other hand, opposing positions of Jewish figures can be presented here. Norman Finkelstein, whose parents survived the Holocaust, sees what Hamas did as a natural response to Israel’s policies, as prisoners in concentration camps (as were his parents) broke through the gates... “My parents would have been happy about this... My parents would have sympathized with those who broke through the gates of the (Gaza) concentration camp that destroyed their lives... I once asked my mother how you felt about what German cities were exposed to during the war under the bombing, and she answered me: We felt that as long as we will die and we will take some of them with us... It was impossible for them to say a kind word about the Germans, given the experience they lived through... So they continued to hate those who destroyed their lives.” Note that the writer is an American academic, and is the author of the book: “The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering” (2000). In the opinion of Gideon Levy, “a few hundred Palestinian fighters have proven that it is impossible to imprison two million people forever, without paying a heavy price... Netanyahu bears a very heavy responsibility for what happened... We must now cry bitterly for the Israeli victims; but we must and we should also cry for Gaza, most of whose residents are refugees strangled by the hands of Israel; Gaza that has not known a single day of freedom” (Haaretz, 10/8/2023).

Many Jewish intellectuals, in Israel and abroad, also rejected Israel’s characterization of the October 7 event as a Holocaust, or as its own American September 11, or Israel’s Pearl Harbor, including Ilan Pappe, Judith Butler, and Amira Hess, and recently the Russian-American (Jewish) writer published ) Masha Gessen, a descendant of a family that survived the Holocaust (like Finkelstein), wrote an article in The New Yorker entitled: “In the Shadow of the Holocaust,” in which she condemned the war on Gaza and likened it to the Warsaw Ghetto, considering that “the only way we can learn from history is Comparing it to today... We are no smarter, better, or more moral than people who lived a hundred years ago. The only thing they didn't have was the awareness that the Holocaust was possible and would continue to be possible. It's a lesson, and not a particularly complex one."... Term “Jewish ghetto” (in Warsaw) is a more appropriate way to describe Gaza than “open-air prison.”

In conclusion, the United States, in its support of Israel, is based on a colonial saying that “nothing in the East is better for the West than the West itself” (i.e. Israel), especially since it does not find an effective Arab situation or system that holds it any responsibility, as the Arabs transform to mere mediators, or spectators to the annihilation of the Palestinians of Gaza, as it proceeds from the background that Israel is the most similar to it, in its use of immigration, settlement, military force, and the extermination or marginalization of the indigenous population. This, like Israel, is like a small America in the “desert” of the Middle East. .