A comment on the Middle East

Someone in Israel complained about the Hizbollah take-over of Lebanon in a discussion group. I made the following comment:

"No country is an island..." and certainly not in the Middle East (and North Africa). 

The only key to understanding the tortuous shifts and tempestuous hostilities there is imperialist interference to grab and safeguard strategic fuel supplies (and profits). First the British and French, now overwhelmingly the US (plus Nato and the EU as bit players). 

It's not just a question of Israel or Syria or Iran (or the bogey-de-jour) in themselves. It's the whole antagonistic system. The reactionary Zionist state of Israel is a bloodthirsty US surrogate, enclave, bridgehead, thug and assassin. A Frankenstein's monster composed of body parts sewn together and galvanized into movement - only Mary Shelley's monster was gentle and cultured. Its corrupt oppressive neighbours are either imperialist creations themselves (like Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and now Iraq) or non-imperialist states based on anti-US(-French-British) popular hatred and surviving because of this (Iran, Syria, Libya, Algeria).

Democracy etc is as irrelevant to the Middle Eastern setup as God, Jehova and Allah are to humanity. And as irrelevant as human rights violations against the Jews, Gypsies, Socialists, Communists, and homosexuals in Nazi Europe. 

The only hope for a resolution of this toxic world-historical tangle is political organization and work to remove foreign and local oppression. Until then chopping individual heads off the hydra will only make things worse. Passive residents of the Middle East are at the mercy of the violence sloshing about, whether they take part in it or not. The more they support the various killers (whether "official" as in the Israeli armed forces, or unofficial, as in Mossad) the less involuntary and arbitrary is their fate. Supporting the killers but pretending the violence is only perpetrated by the Other is acting like an ostrich with its head in the sand waiting for its heads and legs to be scythed off.

If Israelis want to blame anybody for their insecurity and anxiety and guilty consciences they should blame the US and Britain. But they won't so the insecurity and anxiety and guilt will continue until the Zionist utopia is blown away (by the hurricanes of history).

(NB Zionists (and of course Zionists are not all ruthless bloodthirsty reactionaries, although you'd hardly think so these days) may be Jews, but Jews aren't necessarily Zionists.)

So if you live in Israel, or the Middle East in general, you're living in a very turbulent and violent part of the world. Inventing scapegoats and pointing fingers won't help. The class war going on worldwide is open and deadly, and needs to be resolved deep down.

US-backed piracy and murder - Israel rapes the Gaza peace convoy

In response to a long and toothless thread on a discussion group I wrote:


Israel's arguments remind me of nothing so much as the justifications given by the Argentine junta and the South African apartheid racists for their brutal and inhuman actions. And however "sincere" individual South African whites might have been in their support for these arguments that doesn't make the slightest difference to their responsibility for these actions. I don't consider Argentine supporters of the junta to have been sincere in the least. And I think that any sincere Israeli supporters of the Israeli military and those giving them their orders in this murderous act of piracy on the high seas are either wilfully ignorant and indifferent ("they're only Arabs, and anyway they bring it on themselves" - I've heard it first hand) or completely numbed to any sense of proportionality in political interaction including acts of war.

Israel exceeds the vileness of both the apartheid regime, the Argentine junta and (for what it's worth, the old East German regime) for several reasons. The first is the total support in words and actions and arms supplies by the most powerful nation on earth, the US. US support for the junta was less open, and the SA racists were only supported openly by a second-rate imperialist power - Britain. Every brazen Big Lie by Israel is swallowed whole (camels against gnats) by the States, and not a cent is withheld, not a carbine or bulldozer or bomb or helicopter or "adviser". Legions of university-trained, highly experienced, smooth-talking lawyers fill the newspapers and airwaves with sophistical gunk - brains targeting humanity like those of the American war industry, instead of working on solving problems of disease and poverty that kill thousands of people daily. The wall being erected (much of it already in place) between privileged Israeli areas and discriminated Palestinian areas is larger and more jealously guarded than the infamous Berlin Wall, and even than the much bigger wall the British occupying forces erected for similar reasons in Belfast. Oh, and Israel has the Bomb, which neither Argentina, nor racist South Africa (not quite), nor the GDR had.

All this makes me sympathize with those who refer to the rulers of Israel and their supporters as Zionazis. This is not the case, politically or historically - Israel is a very different kettle of rotten fish from Nazi Germany, as Aristotle would be able to tell us if he were around today. But the symptoms of callous degeneracy are there for all to see and ignore at their peril. Israel is the child of imperialism and is allowed to act out its bad boy tantrums by its indulgent parents (and by god I've seen Tantrums on the boardwalk at Coney Island). And all because it's an invaluable fortress for imperialism - locking the Eastern Mediterranean, keeping a lid on popular sentiment in its neighbouring Arab countries (Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan), and constituting a gigantic military base for the US that allows it to threaten the whole of the Middle East by proxy - most recently by howling for a pre-emptive nuclear strike against a US bogeyman de jour, Iran, which the US can distance itself from (plausible deniability) on the basis that it's "just a tantrum". Not to mention the cataracts of pus pumped out by its propaganda machinery. Or the (unmentionable even by Israeli standards, and that's saying something!) deeds of the Israeli secret service Moshad - KGB, Stasi and Securitate eat your hearts out...

And the rot won't stop with a Two-State solution. We need a single, united Palestine, independent, secular, and democratic. But it won't happen given the current balance of power in the world. Divide and rule coupled with military intimidation and a lack of alternatives - too bad Iraq and Saudi don't do the job as well as Israel - will see to that.

And in the meantime, as Pete wrote: 

Voltaire had a word for it:

Cet animal est très méchant,

Quand on l'attaque il se défend.

(This animal is very evil -

Attacked, it fights back like the devil.)

Chops