Socialist Action /April 2002
Stop US Aid to Apartheid Israel
By GERRY FOLEY
In the face of a growing international outcry over Israel's massive
terror against the Palestinian population, U.S. President George Bush went
on TV on April 4 to try to defuse criticism of the United States for its
backing of the Zionist state.
Bush's hypocrisy was underlined by the contrasting headlines in The
New York Times and the Jerusalem Post. The semiofficial American
publication stressed that Bush was calling on the Israelis for restraint.
The Israeli daily, on the other hand, headlined: "U.S. Continues Support
for Israel."
The fact is that the chief political representative of U.S imperialism
put the blame for the Israeli campaign on the victims. According to him,
it was the fault of Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat: "The situation
in which he finds himself today is largely of his own making."
The White House statement continues U.S. imperialism's pattern of holding
out the prospect of a compromise to the Palestinians and the Arabs, while
continuing to give effective support to actions by the Israeli state that
preclude any compromise.
The real policy of the United States is rooted in acceptance of the Zionist
project of maintaining an exclusively Jewish state in historic Palestine
based on robbing the Palestinian people of their homeland. Within this context,
no enduring compromise is possible, and the talk of a "negotiated settlement"
serves only an anaesthetizing function, as more than a decade of experience
with the most ambitious attempt at compromise in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict, the Oslo accords, shows.
Israel's war on the Palestinian people is nearing the brink of genocide,
because that is the only thing that a general war against an unarmed people
driven into a corner of their country can mean. And that is the last resort
of a Zionist settler state that is running up against the ultimate limits
of its ability to maintain itself against the hostility of the people of
the region.
Demographers estimate that within a decade Palestinians will be in the
majority in the entire area of historic Palestine, including the present
state of Israel. This fact has been much discussed by Zionist think tanks
and is obviously on the minds of the Israeli rulers. And the prospect of
mass expulsion of the Palestinians is being discussed openly again in Israel.
At the same time, the continuing conflict is clearly leading reasonable
people to the conclusion that it is impossible to maintain a Jewish state
based on the dispossession of the Palestinian people. According to a Newsweek
poll made public on March 23, only 34 percent of Americans believe that
there will still be a Jewish state in Palestine in another 50 years.
Caught in this dilemma, the Zionist rulers are striking more and more
ruthlessly against the Palestinian population. More and more reports are
appearing that the Israeli forces are carrying out summary executions in
the Palestinian areas they have occupied. For example, the Palestinian minister
of information, Yassir Abed Rabbo, has reported that the bodies of five
Palestinian policemen were found in a bank near Arafat's headquarters, shot
in the head at close range
In the Palestinian Authority areas it has reoccupied, the Israeli military
has been demanding that all males between the ages of 15 and 45 submit to
screening for alleged terrorists.
The Israeli military even began putting classifying tattoos on Palestinian
men until it was forced to stop by an outcry in Israel and internationally.
The practice was too reminiscent of the Nazi concentration camps.
However, the practice of collective punishment of the civilian population
for attacks carried out by guerrillas was also characteristic of the Nazi
attempts to suppress partisan movements. As the Israeli "retaliation"
strikes escalate, more and more they take that form.
Moreover, the Israeli military have been showing a ruthless disregard
for civilian casualties, as indicated in the March 31 issue of the London
Sunday Times: "Civilians trying to escape had little chance. An
elderly Palestinian man shot by Israeli troops near Arafat's compound lay
in the street for hours and bled to death before ambulances could reach
him. A Palestinian woman was shot in the head as she tried to drive away
from danger."
The New York Times correspondent James Bennet felt compelled to
note in his March 31 account of the Israeli assault: "If the current
Israeli operation does not succeed in halting Palestinian attacks, it is
not clear what military options will remain."
But Bennet and the other reporters for the major international press
know that the Israeli repression, short of all-out war, is not going to
break the Palestinian resistance, and that increasing the desperation of
the Palestinian people can only increase the incidents of suicide bombings.
The imperialist rulers know it too. They know that the Zionists are on the
brink of a general war against the Palestinians and probably a new war against
neighboring Arab states.
The response of the imperialist "statesmen" is to "deplore
the violence" and urge the Israelis to seek a negotiated settlement
with the Palestinians. But they are not making it clear that they will not
support a general assault by Israel on the Palestinian people or a war with
neighboring Arab states, which the Zionist regime could not face without
their material support.
The Pontius Pilate award goes to the United States, which voted for a
UN resolution calling for Israeli withdrawal from the Palestinian Authority
areas it has occupied, and then clearly indicated to the press that the
resolution would have no effect because it "did not have a timeline."
But as Israel escalates its assault on the Palestinians, the U.S. pretense
becomes less and less viable.
With Arafat isolated in one ruined room, and the Palestinian police slaughtered
and their headquarters ruined, the U.S. charge that Arafat is not doing
enough to stop terrorists is now a paper-thin pretext. He has neither the
political basis nor the apparatus for doing anything.
The brutal Israeli assaults have welded the Palestinian people into one
furious mass, convinced that they have nothing to lose by resisting in any
way possible because the Zionists are out to destroy them.
The past 10 years have shown that the Israeli rulers are not prepared
to grant real self-government to even a part of Palestine, they are not
ready to give up their aim of converting all of Palestine into an exclusively
Jewish state, and the United States is not going to going to force them
to do it. The U.S. rulers also continue to need the Zionist myth, and therefore
ultimately to support genocide. And since the Israelis cannot accomplish
this without U.S. support, it is the United States that is responsible.
The outrage in the world and in the Arab world in particular against
the Israeli attacks needs to be turned against the U.S. government, focused
on the demand for an end to all aid to the Zionist state.
The majority of the American people, judging from the Newsweek poll ,
have already recognized that in the long run it is impossible to maintain
a Zionist state in the Middle East. Among the Israeli population itself,
there is increasing questioning of the war against the Palestinians.
Among the Arab peoples of the region, there is growing anger at the failure
of their neocolonialist rulers to defend their brothers and sisters who
are being trampled out of existence by an imperialist-backed regime. Out
of this vortex, a solution to the conflict can come. It will have to involve
the complete dismantling of any exclusively Jewish state and its replacement
by a democratic secular Palestine, in which Jews and Arabs can live together
as equals.
Socialist Action /April 2002 |