JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED COMMENT TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Breakthrough? Isn’t that a rather delusional word to use in this context?

How do you get a breakthrough from a nasty bully who for some years has had everything going his way? Continued assassination, torture, abuse of millions, illegal blockade, and no one dares say a word.

What incentive can you possibly think of to push Israel towards fairness and decency? How else do you make a bully behave himself if you don’t apply pressure?

Only the United States pushing hard to get results – as Obama started 3 years ago doing – would get even minimal results, but of course Obama was literally reviled and called hateful names in Israel so now he has joined the crowd of bought-and-paid for American politicians who dare not say one tough word about Israel.

We heard the quiet truth from Sarkozy and Obama at the press meeting a while back when a couple of honest exchanges were heard by reporters in error. It was almost the only truth we have had reported in years on this appalling situation.

Israel and its Lobby in the United States have created a virtual machine to stall all meaningful efforts and to create an endless, almost sickening round of absurd statements in the mouths of American politicians hoping to get elected.

Gingrich, Santorum, and Romney – to say nothing of the truly ignorant Bachmann – have all made ridiculous statements on Israel’s behalf just for some campaign funds in Iowa. Where’s Israel’s incentive to compromise?

After the last Congressional elections in the United States, about 80 new Congressman were given deluxe trips to Israel where they are typically feted and fed the right words to use in future. To refuse such a “gift” is almost like signing your own political death warrant, so virtually all of them go.

What have the poor Palestinians to counter that kind of unbelievable influence peddling? Nothing but a just cause, and in the power structure in Washington, that counts little more than spit.

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY STEPHEN POLLARD IN THE TELEGRAPH

“So why has the US done nothing except pressurise the Israelis over settlements for the past two years?”

That seems an extremely naive question besides being factually an inaccurate description.

The only way to get a fair peace in the Mideast is with pressure on Israel. After all, Israel literally holds all the cards, occupying the land, controlling the people, regularly stealing bits of the property of others with no effective opposition, and being militarily a Frankenstein monster compared to the Palestinians, a military monster which regularly strikes out killing and maiming large numbers.

Israel has also managed to quash every outside effort to reach peace, as with the Oslo Accords. And Obama started out right, for the first time being a little tough on Israel rather than the usual complaisant attitude.

Still, anyone viewing the last two years objectively would hardly say he has seriously pressured Israel. But, in fact, he has now turned quite around. Why?

The answer is obvious: serious local electoral troubles plus the tireless efforts of the Israeli Lobby.

That is precisely the formula which got Israel recognized as a nation in the first place.

President Truman was under tremendous political pressure in his reelection bid.

He had no intention originally of recognizing Ben-Gurion’s self-declared state. There was no good argument for doing so.

But then Truman was literally inundated by lobbyists and apologists for Israel. His life was almost made a misery by platoons of special pleaders.

So he agreed to recognize Israel, and he was reelected.

Clearly those two things do not constitute cause and effect, but money is the mother’s milk of American politics and, undoubtedly, large campaign funding pledges plus promises of press support were made between the two events.

Obama went into office with a balanced and reasonably fair attitude towards Mideast peace, the first modern president to do so.

But he too was met by a wall of pressure – influential delegation after influential delegation.

His name also became widely hated in Israel, as his assistant, Rahm Emanuel, unhappily discovered on a visit to Israel with his family.

At the same time, his reelection prospects have turned around dramatically owing to the ongoing poor economy in the United States and to Obama’s widespread perception as an elitist serving the interests of bankers and corporations.

So now he has quietly backed off all of his original Mideast positions.

He has also made some dramatic efforts, in light of his new political weakness, to placate Israelis and American Jews – e.g., signing a ten-year arms gift agreement with Israel, supplying Israel with some new weapons technology, and offering Netanyahu a ridiculously extravagant bribe for a few months of cessation of settlements.

Obama’s getting ready to run as a less-than-heroic figure, and he needs all the help he can secure, so he has abandoned any pretence of fairness or the much-required pressure on Israel for a fair peace.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY PETER OBORNE IN THE TELEGRAPH

Absolutely, it’s the only way we’ll ever see a just peace.

Israel has no motivation for what the world calls peace or justice.

Israel’s motivation has always been to absorb more of other people’s property minus the inhabitants.

It does this in a slow-motion way, so that there is never an intense crisis raised. Its slow method also assures that the people whose homes it steals can be absorbed elsewhere, rather than suddenly producing millions of refugees.

The entire motivation for the Six Day War was to put Israel in a position to be able to do this.

Slow or not, what has been going on for decades is nothing less than ethnic cleansing, and the governments of the U.S. and Britain have tolerated it, along with a brutal occupation of more than forty years which has created vast human misery, and deliberately so to give the unwanted people reason to leave.

Obama made the right sounds originally, but he has been totally silenced by the Israel Lobby at a time when his party’s weakness requires all the campaign contributions it can get. It was exactly that kind of pressure on Harry Truman that got Israel its initial recognition, recognition he had been reluctant to grant.

Readers may enjoy my old piece, still relevant, “The Paradoxes of Israel”:

http://chuckmanwords.wordpress…/

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY MICHAEL HERZOG IN THE TELEGRAPH

Back channel, front channel – it’s all the same when you do not want peace on anything but your own extremely narrow terms.

There’s no room for negotiations when you have Israel’s point of view.

Besides, Israel, through countless acts of brutality and abuse, has the Palestinians pretty much where it is comfortable: you could call it Israeli peace.

And that is why Israel will never seek genuine peace talks nor will it ever participate in any with an open attitude without immense pressure from her chief subsidy-payer.

But look what happened to Obama, the first politician in decades to say the right things at the start.

I guess Israel showed him who is running American foreign policy.

By the way, can someone define Israel? It’s the only country I know with moving borders.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED COMMENT TO AN EDITORIAL IN THE TELEGRAPH

‘Well the Jews were there 3,000 years ago, 1,600 years before Islam even existed.’

That is typical of the kind of uninformed statements repeated over and over in defense of Israel’s current brutish behavior.

First, there is no history of Jews in Israel 3000 years ago. At that time, they were likely still part of ancient Mesopotamia, lands we today call Iraq, the place where they are thought to have originated.

But even more importantly, when people write about Israel’s additional territorial claims in terms of Hebrew Scripture, for most of the world’s people it makes as much sense as modern Greece claiming Turkey owing to the stories in the Iliad, Homer by the way actually going back about 3000 years and singing of still earlier events.

If you can quote Scripture as authority in Middle East affairs, you can justify literally anything, including killing all non-Jewish residents, for that is what the Biblical Hebrews were enjoined to do, over and over, supposedly by God but actually by their own prophets assuming the authority of God.

Many countries could have a claim on the territory we call Israel if this cloudcuckooland approach were valid, including the Egyptians who long, long ago ruled there, the Lebanese, viewed as the descendants of the ancient Phoenicians who also ruled there, and perhaps even the Iraqis, whose antecedents conquered the territory.

Go back far enough, and you can claim the territory we call Israel for the decedents of the early people who migrated out of Africa many tens of thousands of years ago.

The silliness of this ancient-writing-based claim is made even greater by the important research of an Israeli scholar who says that the Palestinians are, for the most part, the actual descendants of the ancient Israelis.

When Rome conquered territories, it typically did not remove the inhabitants, and it did not interfere with their religion, so long as they accepted Roman rule. Just because, after two turbulent millennia of history, most of the Palestinians are Muslim does not invalidate this concept. Moreover, DNA testing is tending to support this view.

So what we are really talking about with Israel’s modern activities is removing the descendants of ancient Israel who have lived there countless centuries in favor of new immigrants from New York or London. If that isn’t imperialism, I don’t know what is.

On still another level, Biblical claims must be rejected simply because they are dangerous and de-stabilizing. Greater Israel as it has been defined by Zionist scholars – and mind you, there are no maps in the Bible – includes the West Bank and Gaza and pieces of Syria and Lebanon. Does claiming that, or any portion of it, resemble anything but a certain formula for endless war and unrest?

Personal religious views and 2,500 year-old books have no place in international affairs.

In the end, if Israel wishes to be regarded as a state like any other state, then it must behave as we expect other states to behave, and that does not include undefined borders which constantly ooze out over the property of others.