Ending Israel’s Impunity

Hagai Ben-Artzi won his few seconds of fame hurling the “anti-Semitic” jibe at U.S. President Barack Obama. In itself there was nothing novel or radical in the accusation being flung at somebody seen to stand in the way of the illicit territorial aggrandisement of the Zionist state. What set apart this particular episode in regurgitating the world’s oldest political insult, was the kind of family company that its protagonist keeps. Ben-Artzi is Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s brother-in-law.

 A prime minister’s brother-in-law is not constrained by any norm of official protocol, but the moment Ben-Artzi chose was significant. After a visit to Israel by U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden ended in rancour and acrimony, top officials from the Obama administration were demanding that Israel cease its truculence and fall in line. The U.S. media was swept with reports of an unprecedented “crisis” in relations between the two most steadfast allies.

In the context, few were deceived by Netanyahu’s quick disavowal of his brother-in-law’s sentiment. The political company the Israeli Prime Minister has sought and actively nurtured, thrives on a particularly crude variety of chauvinism. Neither is Ben-Artzi’s remark a stray aberration. Since June 2009, when Obama embarked on a tour of the Arab world and Israel to outline his vision for peace in West Asia, posters have been appearing all over Israel’s main cities, depicting him in the kaffiyeh, or Arab head-scarf. Media commentators in Israel routinely refer to him by his middle-name “Hussein”.

If the U.S. is hesitantly and with extreme caution, retreating from its policy of unconditional support for Israel’s continuing abuses of international law, the reason simply is that it can count on few friends in any effort at reconstructing its faltering global hegemony. A recent article in a foreign policy journal speaks of an unprecedented briefing by the commander of U.S. forces in the main war theatres – Afghanistan and Iraq – which warned of a complete collapse of confidence in the U.S. ability to stand up to Israel. Brazen double-standards have been the most salient feature of U.S. policy in the region. But these are soon going to lose it all the friends it needs to retrieve an increasingly perilous situation in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Israel by all accounts, could not care less. It continues to strut the world stage demanding sanctions against Iran and without great subtlety hinting at military action against its nuclear programme. Within the Palestinian territories, it has reimposed harsh closures, ramped up repression and assassinations, and shut off access to Jerusalem’s Al Aqsa mosque, one of Islam’s holiest sites. Political extremists that Netanyahu keeps intimate company with, have stepped up their campaign to claim the site as the exclusive cultural patrimony of the Jewish people. As in the past, Israeli intelligence has planted agent provocateurs among Palestinian protesters, to inject that extra element of extremism that would help keep afloat the bogey of Islamic terrorism.

The U.S. reportedly is willing to press ahead, effecting regime change in Israel if needed. It is unlikely to find any willing accessories for its plans, though. After decades spent influencing the mainstream agenda from the sidelines, the extremists now are firmly in control of Israeli politics.

More than at any point in its history of criminality, Israel today poses the central threat to world peace. It has in the space of just a few months, brushed aside credible accusations of war crimes and crimes against humanity from highly regarded jurists, carried out a cross-border criminal enterprise involving murder and passport fraud , offended its most important regional ally and reduced its friend through thick and thin to hand-wringing despair. In the quickening tempo of its criminality, there are symptoms of a new crisis of identity confronting the Jewish state.

Israel’s role in instigating the invasion of Iraq through its fifth column in the U.S. media and governing establishment, was no secret, though talked about mostly in whispers. The taboo on mentioning this malign influence over U.S. foreign policy was subsequently broken, when the subject was imported into mainstream academia by the political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt.

Where Iran is concerned though, Israel is quite unabashedly leading the charge, showing little inclination to respect usual norms of discretion. The new brazenness was typified in the recent visit of Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu to Moscow, where he demanded Russian endorsement for his plan to impose “crippling” sanctions on Iran.

This diplomatic thrust by Israel coincided with a tour that top officials in the U.S. administration undertook through the Gulf Arab states, seeking their endorsement for a campaign of isolation against Iran . They have by all accounts, had receptive audiences. The Gulf Arabs are keen to bottle up Iran but they have one problem: they would not like to be seen on the same side in this campaign as Israel. Or at the minimum, they would like some visible signs of progress towards meeting the long thwarted rights of the Palestinians, before they take that road.

Clearly, the Pax Americana in West Asia has snagged on Israeli intransigence. Never a constraint in earlier junctures, Israel’s obsessive belief that all of Palestine is itself god-given patrimony, now threatens to take down the political order in the Arab world. And a U.S. that is seeing the world hegemony of its currency eroding before its eyes, an economy mired stubbornly in recession, and a catastrophic collapse of domestic concord and political civility, has to think hard about how far it can take world opinion for granted as it backs up Israel’s relentless efforts at territorial self-aggrandisement.

The report of the Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, commissioned by the U.N. Human Rights Council and authored by the South African jurist Richard Goldstone and an equally distinguished team of three, meanwhile came in, recording in graphic details the sheer depravity of Israeli military tactics during its 20 day offensive in Gaza that began December 27, 2008 .

Just about every war crime under applicable international law – notably the Geneva Conventions – was committed by Israel in the course of this war: from the use of proscribed weapons in civilian areas, to collective punishment, the deliberate targeting of non-combatants, the destruction of cultural symbols, and the use of human shields. Israel refused to cooperate with the mission and clamped down hard on the occupied West Bank, making it virtually impossible for the Palestinian leadership based there to tender evidence. But the conclusions drawn by the Goldstone mission are graphic and horrifying in their portrayal of an arrogant racist State that believes it is accountable to none.

Political cycles in Israel and the U.S. have been out of synch since George Bush’s exit from the White House in January 2009. As the U.S. returned to relative political sobriety, Israel took one more step along the road to extremism, with a coalition taking power in March 2009 that places some of the most rabid racists in pivotal positions. The U.S. may entertain ambitions of effecting regime change in Israel, but the boot could well be on the other foot. As it has done in the past, Israel will seek to deal with the new challenges it faces, by just running out the clock. And if the right-wing, in temporary eclipse since Bush’s exit, makes significant gains in the mid-term elections this November to the U.S. Congress, that would be the assurance of unquestioning devotion that Israel is looking for.
The coalescence of Zionist extremism with Christian evangelism – in an alliance consecrated by the far-right neoconservatives – would then be a fresh security nightmare for the world.