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The
U.S. corporate media usually report on Israeli military assaults in
occupied Palestine as if the United States is an innocent neutral
party to the conflict. In fact, a large majority of Americans have
told pollsters for decades that they want the United States to be
neutral
in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
But
U.S. media and politicians betray their lack of neutrality by blaming
Palestinians for nearly all the violence and framing flagrantly
disproportionate, indiscriminate and therefore illegal Israeli
attacks as a justifiable response to Palestinian actions. The classic
formulation from
U.S. officials
and commentators is that “Israel has the right to defend
itself,” never “Palestinians have the right to defend
themselves,” even as the Israelis massacre hundreds of
Palestinian civilians, destroy thousands of Palestinian homes and
seize ever more Palestinian land.
The
disparity in casualties in Israeli assaults on Gaza speaks for
itself.
At
the time of writing, the current Israeli assault on Gaza has killed
at least 200 people, including 59 children and 35 women, while
rockets fired from Gaza have killed 10 people in Israel, including 2
children.
In
response to largely peaceful “March
of Return”
protests at the Israel-Gaza border in 2018, Israeli snipers killed
183 Palestinians and wounded over 6,100, including 122 that required
amputations, 21 paralyzed by spinal cord injuries and 9 permanently
blinded.
As
with the Saudi-led war on Yemen and other serious foreign policy
problems, biased and distorted news coverage by U.S. corporate media
leaves many Americans not knowing what to think. Many simply give up
trying to sort out the rights and wrongs of what is happening and
instead blame both sides, and then focus their attention closer to
home, where the problems of society impact them more directly and are
easier to understand and do something about.
So
how should Americans respond to horrific images of bleeding, dying
children and homes reduced to rubble in Gaza? The tragic relevance of
this crisis for Americans is that, behind the fog of war, propaganda
and commercialized, biased media coverage, the United States bears an
overwhelming share of responsibility for the carnage taking place in
Palestine.
U.S.
policy has perpetuated the crisis and atrocities of the Israeli
occupation by unconditionally supporting Israel in three distinct
ways: militarily, diplomatically and politically.
On
the military front, since the creation of the Israeli state, the
United States has provided
$146 billion
in foreign aid, nearly all of it military-related. It currently
provides
$3.8 billion
per year in military aid to Israel.
In
addition, the United States is the largest seller of weapons to
Israel, whose military arsenal now includes 362 U.S.-built
F-16 warplanes
and 100 other U.S. military aircraft, including a growing fleet of
the new F-35s; at least 45 Apache attack helicopters; 600
M-109 howitzers
and 64
M270 rocket-launchers.
At this very moment, Israel is using many of these U.S.-supplied
weapons in its devastating bombardment of Gaza.
The
U.S. military alliance with Israel also involves joint military
exercises and joint production of Arrow missiles and other weapons
systems. The U.S. and Israeli militaries have collaborated
on
drone technologies tested by the Israelis in Gaza. In 2004, the
United States
called on
Israeli forces with experience in the Occupied Territories to give
tactical training to U.S. Special Operations Forces as they
confronted popular resistance to the United States’ hostile
military occupation of Iraq.
The
U.S. military also maintains a $1.8 billion stockpile of weapons at
six locations in Israel, pre-positioned for use in future U.S. wars
in the Middle East. During the Israeli assault on Gaza in 2014, even
as the U.S. Congress suspended some weapons deliveries to Israel, it
approved
handing over
stocks of 120mm mortar shells and 40mm grenade launcher ammunition
from the U.S. stockpile for Israel to use against Palestinians in
Gaza.
Diplomatically,
the United States has exercised its veto in the UN Security Council
82
times,
and 44 of those
vetoes
have been to shield Israel from accountability for war crimes or
human rights violations. In every single case, the United States has
been the lone vote against the resolution, although a few other
countries have occasionally abstained.
It
is only the United States’ privileged position as a
veto-wielding Permanent Member of the Security Council, and its
willingness to abuse that privilege to shield its ally Israel, that
gives it this unique power to stymie international efforts to hold
the Israeli government accountable for its actions under
international law.
The
result of this unconditional U.S. diplomatic shielding of Israel has
been to encourage increasingly barbaric Israeli treatment of the
Palestinians. With the United States blocking any accountability in
the Security Council, Israel has seized ever more Palestinian land in
the West Bank and East Jerusalem, uprooted more and more Palestinians
from their homes and responded to the resistance of largely unarmed
people with ever-increasing violence, detentions and restrictions on
day-to-day life.
Thirdly,
on the political front, despite most Americans
supporting neutrality
in the conflict,
AIPAC
and other pro-Israel lobbying groups have exercised an extraordinary
role in bribing and intimidating U.S. politicians to provide
unconditional support for Israel.
The
roles of campaign contributors and lobbyists in the corrupt U.S.
political system make the United States uniquely vulnerable to this
kind of influence peddling and intimidation, whether it is by
monopolistic corporations and industry groups like the
Military-Industrial Complex and Big Pharma, or well-funded interest
groups like the NRA, AIPAC and, in recent years,
lobbyists for
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
On
April 22, just weeks before this latest assault on Gaza, the
overwhelming majority of congresspeople, 330 out of 435, signed
a letter
to the chair and ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee
opposing any reduction or conditioning of US monies to Israel. The
letter represented a show of force from AIPAC and a repudiation of
calls from some progressives in the Democratic Party to condition or
otherwise restrict aid to Israel.
President
Joe Biden, who has a long
history
of supporting Israeli crimes, responded to the latest massacre by
insisting on Israel’s “right to defend itself” and
inanely
hoping that “this will be closing down sooner than later.”
His UN ambassador also shamefully blocked a call for a ceasefire at
the UN Security Council.
The
silence and worse from President Biden and most of our
representatives in Congress at the massacre of civilians and mass
destruction of Gaza is unconscionable. The independent voices
speaking out forcefully for Palestinians, including
Senator Sanders
and
Representatives
Tlaib, Omar and Ocasio-Cortez, show us what real democracy looks
like, as do the massive protests that have filled U.S. streets all
over the country.
US
policy must be reversed to reflect international law and the shifting
US opinion
in favor of Palestinian rights. Every Member of Congress must be
pushed to sign the bill
introduced
by Rep. Betty McCollum insisting that US funds to Israel are not used
“to support the military detention of Palestinian children, the
unlawful seizure, appropriation, and destruction of Palestinian
property and forcible transfer of civilians in the West Bank, or
further annexation of Palestinian land in violation of international
law.”
Congress
must also be pressured to quickly enforce the Arms Export Control Act
and the Leahy Laws to stop supplying any more U.S. weapons to Israel
until it stops using them to attack and kill civilians.
The
United States has played a vital and instrumental role in the
decades-long catastrophe that has engulfed the people of Palestine.
U.S. leaders and politicians must now confront their country’s
and, in many cases, their own personal complicity in this
catastrophe, and act urgently and decisively to reverse U.S. policy
to support full human rights for all Palestinians.
This commentary was originally
published by LA
Progressive
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