{"id":186171,"date":"2019-04-03T06:01:22","date_gmt":"2019-04-03T06:01:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=186171"},"modified":"2019-04-05T07:02:40","modified_gmt":"2019-04-05T07:02:40","slug":"us-grovels-to-israel-the-same-way-supporters-fawned-on-saddam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=186171","title":{"rendered":"US grovels to Israel the same way \u2018supporters\u2019 fawned on Saddam"},"content":{"rendered":"

Robert Fisk \u2013 The Independent March 26, 2019<\/h1>\n
\"\"<\/a>

President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife Sara Netanyahu at the White House, Monday, March 5, 2018, in Washington. (AP Photo\/Evan Vucci)<\/p><\/div>\n

Is there any other country on Earth with which America would dare collude on such a scale? Forget the \u201cspecial relationship\u201d with the crackpots in Britain, or the New World coming to the rescue of the Old World in the Second World War. There\u2019s only one special relationship that matters right now \u2013 and we all know what that is. Having given its blessing to all\u00a0Jerusalem as Israeli property and having now handed Golan to Israel as a possession \u2013 for \u201cto annex\u201d means \u201cto take possession\u201d, does it not? \u2013 Donald Trump has undermined the entire foundation of \u201cland for peace\u201d\u00a0enshrined in Security Council Resolution 242. And Israel is happy. A gift for Benjamin Netanyahu\u2019s re-election, we are told.<\/span><\/p>\n

True, the Middle East \u201cpeace process\u201d died years ago \u2013 if it ever existed, or was meant to work \u2013 but Trump\u2019s ostentatious signature on Israel\u2019s annexation of Golan on Monday tore up the documents, the paragraphs, the very basis for the two-state Israeli-Palestinian settlement which might have ended the longest military occupation of our generation. And the United States has now given its open, public and wholehearted support to Israel\u2019s side in the world\u2019s last colonial war. And if Golan is now part of Israel because of the threat of Iran, then southern Lebanon can become part of Israel. Isn\u2019t Hezbollah\u200b also an Iranian \u201cthreat\u201d? And how quickly will we see the West Bank annexed by Israel with the approval of the United States?<\/span><\/p>\n

Notice two things about the above paragraphs. Firstly, the number of times I have been forced to use quotation marks around verbs and nouns and adjectives which would normally never need them. And secondly, how one word \u2013 Syria \u2013 simply did not occur. Syria\u2019s loss of Golan in 1967 is so long ago and has become so normalised that in a perverse way, its real ownership had ceased to exist; Trump\u2019s recognition of Israel\u2019s own \u201cannexation\u201d \u2013 unrecognised anywhere else in the world \u2013 merely accepted what we\u2019d all secretly gone along with. That the theft of Syria\u2019s land was now perfectly legal. Or \u201clegal\u201d. It was highly instructive that when the BBC website chose to cover the story about Trump\u2019s Golan mischief, it ran a story headlined \u201cWhat it all means\u201d \u2013 but which did not mention Syria until the fifth\u00a0paragraph.<\/span><\/p>\n

The media, in its grovelling, cowardly, craven obeisance to Israel \u2013 and its absolute fear of being cast into the accusatory hell of \u201cantisemitism\u201d \u2013 has a lot to answer for. When Colin Powell told\u00a0the US State Department to instruct its embassies to call the West Bank \u201cdisputed\u201d rather than \u201coccupied\u201d, the American press and television almost at once switched nomenclature. And so when the State Department suddenly referred to Golan a few weeks ago as \u201cIsraeli-controlled\u201d rather than \u201cIsraeli-occupied\u201d, we all knew what was coming. Thank heavens, as I always say, for those brave Israeli journalists \u2013 and preciously few activists and politicians \u2013\u00a0who speak out against these insanities.<\/span><\/p>\n

This verbal transition, however, is neither subtle nor surprising \u2013\u00a0given America\u2019s utter surrender to all things Israeli \u2013 but it is very sinister for the people of the Middle East. I was very struck by something Netanyahu said in response to Trump\u2019s signature on that outrageous Golan document: he said that \u201cthe Jewish people\u2019s roots in the Golan go back thousands of years\u201d. True. But I recalled at once that in 1982, within weeks of Israel\u2019s invasion of Lebanon, Israeli troops and \u201ccivil affairs\u201d officers travelled around the Shia Muslim and Christian villages of the south of Lebanon, handing out questionnaires to the Arabs. I saw them do this. The documents were long and complicated. Were there any Jewish archaeological remains on their lands, the Lebanese were asked? Had any of their older buildings any signs of Jewish habitation in previous decades or centuries? Did any hills or villages have Hebrew names? They were especially interested in the area within the triangle of Tyre, Sidon and Qana.<\/span><\/p>\n

Of course, there were many Jewish remains. Even in the hill villages of the Druze Chouf mountains, I have found the indent of the mezuzah on stone door frames, proving that their ancient owners followed the instructions of the Book of Deuteronomy. The Israelis noted these marks; indeed, some of the inhabitants pointed them out to the initially friendly Israeli soldiers. But of course, it set a precedent. What if \u2013 after the next Lebanon war \u2013 Israel decides that rather than occupy southern Lebanon, it will annex the region because \u201cthe Jewish people\u2019s roots\u201d in the region \u201cgo back thousands of years\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n

Yes, I know that Israel would have to defeat Hezbollah to do this \u2013 an unlikely event since Hezbollah would more likely be heading across the Lebanese border into Israel. But in the 18 years in which it occupied almost all of southern Lebanon, the media never referred to it as \u201cIsraeli-occupied\u201d. It was always called \u201cIsraeli-controlled\u201d and the vast Israeli occupation zone was never called by this name. Instead, it was always referred to as Israel\u2019s \u201csecurity zone\u201d. We journos had already laid the semantic groundwork for the annexation which hasn\u2019t happened \u2013 yet.<\/span><\/p>\n

But this is not a story about Lebanon any more than it is about Trump himself. Indeed, watching the tomfoolery in the mother of parliaments, I find it ever more embarrassing to write about the insanity of the Trump White House. No, this is about the very act of international annexation and the west\u2019s willingness to go along with land theft \u2013 unless, of course, Putin and Russia are involved. And it is about the fact \u2013 let us not haggle like skinflints over definitions \u2013 that the United States, in its foreign policy in the Middle East, is in hock to Israel. As many 20 years ago, I gathered together dozens of US and Israeli government policy statements on the region, jumbled them up \u2013 and asked a colleague to arrange them back in their original order. Readers might try the same test: it was \u2013 and is \u2013 an impossible task.<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019m tired of the utterly false arguments about antisemitism in the United States. The country contains many anti-Jewish, anti-Arab, anti-black racists without de-semanticising the word \u201cantisemitism\u201d by using it against all of Israel\u2019s critics. It doesn\u2019t need new Arab-origin legislators, with their dodgy, unpleasantly revealing remarks and their sloppy grasp of history, to understand that Americans will not and dare not complain about the dual loyalties of their countrymen and countrywomen.<\/span><\/p>\n

Just look at the US congress when Netanyahu addresses it. The representatives of the United States stand up and applaud and sit down and again stand up and applaud and sit down \u2013 29 times in 2011 and 39 times in 2015. I always watch this act of US legislative grovelling with a smile, for it reminds me of the ovations which Saddam Hussein would always receive from his beloved people and which Bashar al-Assad always received \u2013 and still receives \u2013 from his loyal subjects. I can well see why Middle East leaders spot parallels between the Arab world and America.<\/span><\/p>\n

And I could well understand why congress stands to attention so many times on cue when Trump\u2019s vice president, Mike Pence, says, as he did on Monday, that \u201cwe stand with Israel because her cause is our cause, her values are our values, and her fight is our fight\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n

Really? Does the United States, which fought a colonial war against the British, really stand with Israel\u2019s colonial cause \u2013 its colonial expansion and land thievery in the West Bank? Do Americans really \u201cstand with\u201d Israel in its constant, brutal bombardments of Palestinians \u2013 and of Lebanon \u2013 and tolerate and approve those war crimes which all but the Americans acknowledge to be Israel\u2019s responsibility. And if they do, why did Americans bother to go to war with Saddam? Why do we bomb Syria?<\/span><\/p>\n

There\u2019s no point in tracing the putrid history of annexation. Of the US annexation of Hawaii because it needed a naval port in the Pacific (as the Japanese noted) and its annexation of most of New Mexico, Texas and Arizona. I\u2019m not even mentioning Putin and Crimea. Nor do we surely need to drag ourselves through the annexations perpetrated by the little corporal with the moustache \u2013 Jacinda\u00a0Ardern-like, I shall not mention his name<\/a> \u2013 who annexed the Sudetenland and all of Austria, the latter event accompanied by a Times<\/em> editorial comparing it favourably with the 300-year-old union of Scotland and England.<\/span><\/p>\n

No, I\u2019m not comparing annexations. The Israelis are not Nazis and the Americans are not Russians and the Russians are not Israelis. But there are parallels which countries themselves draw when they choose to annex \u2013 or sanctify annexations \u2013 of other people\u2019s land. All of which can be based and in most cases were based on both ethnic roots and military necessity.<\/span><\/p>\n

Today, we must learn again that old phrase \u201cfacts on the ground\u201d. Israel annexed Jerusalem and Golan in 1980 and 1981 \u2013 all the world (and a lot of Israelis) condemned this at the time \u2013 but now Trump has snapped the \u201cland for peace\u201d equation in half. Washington has given its imprimatur to illegal land acquisition, to territorial theft. And why not when congress is in thrall to Israel?<\/span><\/p>\n

Yet why get worked up about this? By recognising Israel\u2019s annexation of Golan, Trump merely recognised that Israel has annexed America.<\/span><\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By recognising Israel\u2019s annexation of Golan, Trump merely recognised that Israel has annexed America<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":138,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[58,37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-186171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-Current_Affairs","category-Israel_Anti-Semitism_Zionism_and_US-UK_allies"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/138"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=186171"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186171\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":186174,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186171\/revisions\/186174"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=186171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=186171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=186171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}