[Peace-discuss] Avnery on Obama

[David Green]

(Avnery) "The more I think about this wondrous phenomenon, the stronger becomes my conviction (about which I have already written in the past) that what really matters is the similarity between the American enterprise and the Zionist one, both in the spiritual and the practical sphere. Israel is a small America, the USA is a huge Israel."
  ________
   
  There is also a more specific, recent, pragmatic geopolitical perspective. An alliance with the U.S. (as opposed to peaceful co-existence with the Arab world) was central to David Ben-Gurion's vision of Israel as a European outpost in the Middle East. Due to strategic considerations, it took a while (until the 60s) to achieve. If not for oil and antipathy to Arab nationalism, there would be no alliance based on spiritual/practical affinity or anything else. 
   
  Nevertheless, it's important to note the incredibly well-funded, elaborate, dense, institutionalized, fake scholarly propaganda insitutions, both lobbying and think tanks (same thing, really, look at the program for AIPAC break-out sessions) that join American neoconservative ideology with Zionist ideology, and provide a bridge between neoconservative and neoliberal ideologies--read Thomas Friedman's column in yesterday's New York Times. Our opinion-makers project their fantasies onto Israel, and with incredible amounts of military aid and other investment make Israel into a no-holds-barred laboratory for what they would like to see America become, dispensing with quaint notions of rights and equality.
   
  (An unrelated and perhaps ironic footnote would be to point out that at an economic/technological level, Israel's "success" has also had a lot to do with the immigration of 1 million Russians in the 1980s, many not technically Jewish, who were well-educated by the Soviet system.)
   
  DG

       
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.chambana.net/mailman/archive/peace-discuss/attachments/20080609/62d9f9d5/attachment.htm