The partisans of Israel in America are a powerful constituency, as Mearsheimer and Walt pointed out in the London Review of Books.
“The combination of unwavering support for Israel and the related effort to spread ‘democracy’ throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardised not only US security but that of much of the rest of the world. This situation has no equal in American political history.”
Israel‘s lobbyists and partisans are often talking about the democratic elements of Israel‘s governance, its political freedom, and its religious diversity.
The fundamental and overpowering objection to this first claim about democracy is the occupation of the West Bank and the millions of disenfranchised Palestinians living under Israeli control, walled off arbitrarily from enclaves of Jewish settlers who can vote.
The other former “occupied territory,” Gaza, continues to see attacks from Israeli military (and outgoing fire from within it) even though Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert carried out Ariel Sharon’s “unilateral withdrawal” plan in the area. Reuters reports this story about an airstrike on a residence:
“An Israeli air strike destroyed a house in the northern Gaza Strip on Monday after residents said they received two telephone calls from the army, one urging them to leave and a second insisting, ‘This is not a joke.’ An Israeli army spokeswoman said the house had been used by the Islamic Jihad militant group to store weapons. No one was injured in the blast. A person who lived in the house denied any ties to militants.”
So despite any other elements of democracy (Israel has most of them) the occupation and its violations of UN Sec. Council Res. 242 gives lie to the claim of democratic governance.
Religious diversity is tolerated in Israel, with large numbers of Muslims and Druze holding Israeli citizenship. However these groups are widely regarded as low in Israeli society, and no important official in the country hails from one of those sects. Basam Jaber at ynetnews.com writes about the complex situation the ethnic Arabs living in Israel face:
“We do not voice our protests against Nasrallah because the majority of the Arab population in Israel opposes war. We do not oppose a single side, but oppose war itself. Therefore, we demand an immediate ceasefire. We are protesting against the war not against one leader or another. We the Arabs of Israel are witnessing the death of Israeli citizens and soldiers, we are personally experiencing the missiles, but at the same time we are also seeing how Israel is attacking the country of Lebanon we love so dearly, and we are also witnessing how the Israeli Air Force is destroying Lebanon – this is very painful.”
Political freedom is a resource that must be used. And just like Democrats like Joe Lieberman and the dozens of other Democratic senators who voted to authorize the Iraq war, Israel seems to have a useless or “rubber-stamp” opposition. With an air force general as the chief of staff, Israel has pursued a stupid, brutal and useless bombing campaign all over Lebanon while Hizbullah continues to fire rockets into Israel, sometimes over a hundred a day, and most of the world waits for a ceasefire while Condi Rice makes typically stupid comments, this time about “birth pangs.” Juan Cole assaults this nonsense at Informed Comment [includes link from Cole]:
“Condi Rice echoes the old Neocon theory of ‘creative chaos’ when she confuses the Lebanon war with ‘the birth pangs’ of a ‘new’ Middle East. The chief outcome of the ‘war on terror’ has been the proliferation of asymmetrical challengers. Israel‘s assault on the very fabric of the Lebanese state seems likely to weaken or collapse it and further that proliferation. Since asymmetrical challengers often turn to terrorism as a tactic, the ‘war on terror’ has been, at the level of political society below that of high politics and the state, the most efficient engine for the production of terrorism in history.”
The leader of Labour, Amir Peretz, is the defense minister who used to belong to an organization called Peace Now, but then again, read their own words, how dovish do they sound?:
“In Lebanon this situation came to be. But will the war, which as I said is justified, continue to be justified without thought to the amount of force used?”
It is pretty clear already that an absurdly excessive amount of force has been used by Isreal with American-supplied weaponry on all sorts of targets, including “civilian infrastructure.” If this is the range of acceptable political opinion–trying to calibrate just right how much bombing and raids will accomplish while remaining “justified”–what kind of democracy is Israel?
The heinous war goes on, as Reuters reports:
“Israeli aircraft also hit the last coastal crossing on the Litani River between Sidon and Tyre, Lebanon, cutting the main artery for aid supplies to civilians in the southern part of the country, aid agencies said.
‘We must be able to have movement throughout the country to deliver supplies. At this point we can’t do that,’ said the UN humanitarian coordinator for Lebanon, David Shearer. ‘The deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure is a violation of international law.'”
[photo: AP]