As I listen to the debate surrounding the awful events unfolding in Israel Palestine, I can understand how many are fooled by the one-sided pro-Israel propaganda circulated in the mass media and by their refusal to understand the Palestinian viewpoint. The media’s welter of misinformation and knee-jerk support for U.S. policy in the Middle East coupled with their implicit appeals to sentiments of revenge can be confusing even for the well-informed.
To clarify my own thinking, I feel compelled to express in writing what I think about the tragic drama as it unfolds.
So, for what it’s worth, please let me share my tentative conclusions. Perhaps they might help others formulate their own positions which, of course, may differ drastically from mine.
In any case, here are my tentative thoughts distilled into 25 points:
- As a person of faith and a critical thinker, I can NEVER support empire.
- That’s because I’ve come to realize that empire is a system of robbery whereby a militarily stronger nation imposes its will on a weaker nation for purposes of transferring the latter’s resources to the imperial center. That’s criminal.
- Currently, the United States is the planet’s only empire.
- As Martin Luther King said, it is the “world’s greatest purveyor of violence.” As such, it has NO moral right to render any judgments about the immorality of violence. None!
- This means I cannot NEVER support the foreign policy of the United States. With less than 5% of the world’s population, it seeks to control the entire planet by the violence just mentioned as well as by a system of unequal trades, war, sanctions, regime change, and routine support of dictators. Again, all of that is criminal. It makes no moral sense to support U.S. empire.
- By the means just mentioned and ever since the Second Intercapitalist War (WWII), the United States has exercised the same power Adolph Hitler sought in the decades of the ‘30s and ‘40s.
- In that sense, it is a fascist regime that historically has supported fascists throughout the world. It NEVER supports the people its system has impoverished. It is ALWAYS on the side of the rich and powerful and instinctively opposes changes that serve the poor.
- Today, Israel is an instrument of U.S. fascism. It represents the alter ego of the United States in the Middle East facilitating the U.S. control the sea of oil beneath land masses in the region – to benefit the already wealthy in their struggle against the poor majority.
- In fact, Israel represents a colonial regime whose purposes at the local level are the same as imperialism’s at the macro level. [Remember, Israeli Jews are basically European invaders (from Poland, Russia, and other mostly European states housing the Jewish diaspora since their eviction from Palestine in the middle of the second century). European Jews invaded Palestine in 1948 and have since gradually stolen more and more land from the indigenous people of Palestine.]
- This land theft has long been recognized and denounced by the international community, e.g., in UN Resolution 242.
- But Israel (with full support from U.S. imperialists) has refused to obey international law.
- Like its U.S. sponsor, Israel is therefore an international criminal nation.
- It is also a state sponsor of terror within the borders of Palestine. It represents an apartheid regime MUCH WORSE than that of South Africa.
- For nearly 100 years in the process of its land grabs, Israel has killed and maimed thousands of Palestine’s indigenous people including women and children with complete impunity and virtually without coverage by the mainstream media.
- This has made the state of Israel the principal terrorist in the region.
- In the face of its endless list of atrocities, any war crimes allegedly committed by indigenous resistance organizations (such as Hamas) pale by comparison.
- Yes, Hamas represents an indigenous people resisting imperial and colonial oppression.
- International law (e.g., Article 51 of the UN Charter) gives them the right to defend themselves by armed resistance, which necessarily entails killing their oppressors.
- Yet the imperialists and colonialists (masquerading as advocates of non-violence!) predictably adopt the standard imperial practice of labeling as terrorists any who exercise their legal right to armed self-defense.
- Their propaganda persuades the inattentive by isolating or even manufacturing atrocities by indigenous freedom fighters to illustrate the barbarity of the latter as if such acts were not faint shadows of their own greater atrocities committed over decades upon decades.
- It’s all reminiscent of European colonialists in North America who in their “Declaration of Independence” described other indigenous resisters as “merciless Indian savages, whose warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions.”
- I oppose all this not only on the just noted grounds of historical understanding, but on that the Judeo-Christian tradition.
- The latter is not neutral, but always takes the part of the poor and oppressed by exercising the Biblical God’s “preferential option for the poor” and its opposition to imperialism and colonialism.
- This option is clearly demonstrated by the Divine’s incarnation as Yeshua of Nazareth, a poor person who lived under empire and who himself was executed as a terrorist and revolutionary by the Roman Empire).
- None of this means that the current conflict in Israel-Palestine is irresolvable. Historically, both parties have more in common than what allegedly separates them. Both parties are Semites. Both have long histories of persecution by empire. This shared background opens the door to negotiation, resolution, and shared resistance to imperial designs.
I hope that helps.
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