[Peace-discuss] Racism in the liberal media

[C. G. Estabrook]

    Marty Peretz and the American political consensus on Israel

    The New Republic Editor-in-Chief expresses anti-Arab hatred
    in the starkest terms possible, but are his policy views
    towards Israel any different from the standard American position?

    Glenn Greenwald
    Dec. 28, 2008 |
    (updated below - Update II)

Opinions about the Israeli-Palestinian dispute are so entrenched that any single
outbreak of violence is automatically evaluated through a pre-existing lens,
shaped by one's typically immovable beliefs about which side bears most of the
blame for the conflict generally or "who started it."  Still, any minimally
decent human being -- even those who view the world through the most blindingly
pro-Israeli lens possible, the ones who justify anything and everything Israel
does, and who discuss these events with a bottomless emphasis on the primitive
(though dangerous) rockets lobbed by Hamas into Southern Israel but without even
mentioning the ongoing four-decades brutal occupation or the recent, grotesquely
inhumane blockade of Gaza -- would find the slaughter of scores of innocent
Palestinians to be a horrible and deeply lamentable event.

But not The New Republic's Marty Peretz.  Here is his uniquely despicable view
of the events of the last couple of days:


"So at 11:30 on Saturday morning, according to both the Jerusalem Post and
Ha'aretz, as well as the New York Times, 50 fighter jets and attack helicopters
demolished some 40 to 50 sites in just about three minutes, maybe five. Message:
do not fuck with the Jews."


"Do not fuck with the Jews."  And what of the several hundred Palestinian dead
-- including numerous children -- and many hundreds more seriously wounded?


"Israeli intelligence reported 225 people dead, mostly Hamas military leaders
with some functionaries, besides, and perhaps 400 wounded. The Palestinians
announced 300 dead, probably as a reflex in order to begin their whining about
disproportionate Israeli acts of war. And 600 wounded."


Objections to the Israeli attack are just "whining."  Those are the words of a
psychopath.  And what to do now?


"Frankly, I am up to my gullet with this reflex criticism of Israel as going
beyond proportionality in its responses to war waged against its population with
the undisguised intention of putting an end to the political expression of the
Jewish nation...

"The current warfare will go on a bit longer. If there is a pause and if I were
giving advice to the Israelis, this is what I would say to Hamas and to the
people of Gaza: 'If a rocket or missile is launched against us, if you take
captive one of our soldiers (as you have held one for two and a half years), if
you raise a new Intifada against us, there will be an immediate response. And it
will be very disproportionate. Proportion does not work.'"


This super-tough-guy warrior -- whose prime accomplishment in life was marrying
an heiress and then using her family's money to buy himself The New Republic --
beats his chest and threatens that even a single Palestinian act in response to
this bombing campaign will provoke still more massive retaliation in the form of
collective punishment (which, not that anyone cares, happens to be a clear
violation of the Geneva Conventions, as are Hamas' far less harmful rocket
attacks on Israeli civilians).

It may be true that, as Eric Alterman put it in his seminal article on Marty
Pertez (quoting Ezra Klein), "Peretz is rarely held to account, largely because
there's an odd, tacit understanding that he's a cartoonish character and
everyone knows it."  But how unusual are Peretz's views, revolting as they are,
in the American political mainstream?  He certainly expresses anti-Arab hatred
and bigotry more bluntly than most, but this reflexive support for anything and
everything Israel does is anything but unique in our political debates.

Here, as but one illustrative example, is Caroline Kennedy -- who, in order to
win her Senate seat, is self-consciously trying to turn herself into a Barack
Obama clone -- responding recently to a question about Israel from Politico:


QUESTION 8: Do you think Israel should negotiate with Hamas? Do you agree with
Israel's Gaza Strip embargo? Would you support an Israeli airstrike on Iran if
they felt Tehran's nuclear program represented a threat to their survival?

ANSWER: "Caroline Kennedy strongly supports a safe and secure Israel. She
believe Israel's security decisions should be left to Israel."


What could be more absurd than that?  Apparently, not only should we continue to
feed Israel billions of dollars a year of American taxpayer money and massive
amounts of weapons -- thereby ensuring that the world, quite accurately,
perceives their actions as American actions -- but we should then take the
position that they are free to do anything they want with it, no matter how
extreme or destructive to our interests, and our only view on all of it should
be that we blindly support whatever they do.  Or, as Clinton aide Ann Lewis put
it during the primaries, in response to Obama's observation that he needn't have
a "Likud view in order to be pro-Israel":


"The role of the president of the United States is to support the decisions that
are made by the people of Israel. It is not up to us to pick and choose from
among the political parties."


Yesterday, the Bush administration applied this mindset, naturally, by
expressing unequivocal support for Israel and heaped all blame on Hamas.  And,
needless to say, Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi echoed the
administration's view:


"Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi issued a statement
concerning the Israeli operation in Gaza in which she wrote that 'When Israel is
attacked, the United States must continue to stand strongly with its friend and
democratic ally.'

"According to Pelosi, 'Peace between Israelis and Palestinians cannot result
from daily barrages of rocket and mortar fire from Hamas-controlled Gaza. Hamas
and its supporters must understand that Gaza cannot and will not be allowed to
be a sanctuary for attacks on Israel.'"


Not a word of condemnation of the Israeli blockade -- which has caused extreme
suffering and deprivation in Gaza -- or of the massively disproportionate
response or the ongoing and ever-expanding Israeli occupation.  It is all
one-sided support for whatever Israel does from our political class, and
one-sided condemnation of Israel's enemies (who are, ipso facto, American
enemies) -- all of it, as usual, sharply divergent from the consensus in much of
the rest of the world.

It would be nice if U.S. citizens weren't connected to and responsible for every
Israeli military action, so that we really could and should take the attitude
that what the Israeli Government does -- or what is done to it -- is not our
responsibility.  That's how it should be.

Instead, since we fund a huge bulk of it and supply the weapons used for much of
it and use our veto power at the U.N. to enable all of it, we are connected to
it -- intimately -- and bear responsibility for all of Israel's various wars,
including the current overwhelming assault on Gaza, as much as Israelis
themselves.  Blind support for whatever they do -- the consensus view in
American political life in both parties -- is therefore a total abdication of
our responsibility.

It remains to be seen if Barack Obama intends to deviate even a small amount
from what has been decades of excessively loyal U.S. support for Israel --
which, over the last eight years, transformed into truly blind and absolute
support for anything they do.  It's impossible to know for sure until Obama is
inaugurated, but the bipartisan, purely "pro-Israel" statements issued by his
allies -- such as Caroline Kennedy and Nancy Pelosi -- don't bode well, nor do
the statements which Obama himself made during the campaign, as compiled
yesterday by Salon's Mark Schone:

"The first job of any nation state is to protect its citizens. And so I can
assure you that if -- I don't even care if I was a politician -- if somebody was
sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I'm going
to do everything in my power to stop that. And I would expect Israelis to do the
same thing."

Can't the exact same mentality be deployed to justify everything Hamas has done
and is doing, to wit:  "if a foreign power were brutally occupying my country
for four decades -- or blockading my country and denying my children medical
needs and nutrition and the ability even to exit -- I'm going to do everything
in my power to stop that.  And I would expect Palestinians to do the same
thing"?  But the last thing that our political class ever extends is reciprocal,
two-sided analysis to this dispute.

The suffocating bipartisan orthodoxies in the U.S. regarding Israel thus make
virtually impossible what the new Jewish-American group, J Street -- in
condemning the attack (even while calling it "justifiable") because it "will
deepen the cycle of violence in the region" -- urges:  "immediate, strong
diplomatic intervention by the United States, the Quartet and allies in the
region to negotiate a resumption of the ceasefire."  Most of our political
elites know enough to avoid the ugly language of Marty Peretz, but the ultimate
policy positions aren't much different.


UPDATE:  Without necessarily endorsing all of it, I want to recommend very
highly this column by Israeli Gideon Levy in Haaretz, entitled "The neighborhood
bully strikes again."  What's most striking about it is that this scathing
criticism of Israel's behavior can -- and does -- appear in one of Israel's
leading newspapers, but not a paragraph of it could ever be uttered by any
American politician, in either party, of any national prominence.


UPDATE II:  Here's Rep. Howard Berman, Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs
Committee, and a Democrat, echoing Nancy Pelosi, George Bush and virtually every
other key American political official:

"Israel has a right, indeed a duty, to defend itself in response to the hundreds
of rockets and mortars fired from Gaza over the past week. No government in the
world would sit by and allow its citizens to be subjected to this kind of
indiscriminate bombardment. The loss of innocent life is a terrible tragedy, and
the blame for that tragedy lies with Hamas."

One can travel from the farthest right fringe of the GOP to the heart of the
Democratic Party leadership and hear exactly the same thing:  Israel is always
right.  Israel must not be criticized.  Israel never bears any blame.  Any
action taken by Israel is justified.  No matter the situation, that just gets
repeated over and over like some hypnotic bipartisan mantra.  Meanwhile,
American citizens overwhelmingly -- 71% -- want their Government to be
"even-handed" in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  Yet that view is simply
ignored, disregarded, not even viable for any American mainstream political
leader to express.

-- Glenn Greenwald

Original article, with links, at <http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/>.