16 April 2008 Philadelphia, PA
The silence that is buying Israelis time to massacre the defenseless, to freeze, starve, and frighten human beings to death, also enables complicit heads of state to exploit the feckless hope that Obama might be an honest and enlightened broker post-inauguration.
Obama will deploy the racist Dennis Ross and the grandiose Samantha Power to create facts on the ground that will enable Israelis and their co-conspirators in the Arab League to attack Iran and reveal the inevitably of a theocratic state in all of historic Palestine in its wake.
Samantha Power Interview: Conversations with History: Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
I don’t think that in any of the cases, a shortage of information is the problem. I actually think in the Palestine – Israel situation, there’s an abundance of information. What we don’t need is some kind of early warning mechanism there, what we need is a willingness to put something on the line in helping the situation. Putting something on the line might mean alienating a domestic constituency of tremendous political and financial import; it may more crucially mean sacrificing — or investing, I think, more than sacrificing — billions of dollars, not in servicing Israel’s military, but actually investing in the new state of Palestine, in investing the billions of dollars it would probably take, also, to support what will have to be a mammoth protection force, not of the old Rwanda kind, but a meaningful military presence. Because it seems to me at this stage (and this is true of actual genocides as well, and not just major human rights abuses, which were seen there), you have to go in as if you’re serious, you have to put something on the line.
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The bit about “investing” in a Palestine state, wherever the change agents feign interest in erecting it, will regretfully be sidelined to urgently fund a “meaningful military presence”, protection for Israelis against the formidable terrorists as America exports its shock and awe industry to Iran.
The Gaza Ghetto Uprising
Joseph Massad, The Electronic Intifada, 4 January 2009
Israel’s services to Arab regimes continue apace. Its 2006 invasion of Lebanon, engineered to destroy Hizballah, was cheered by Arab regimes and neoliberal Arab intellectuals hostile to Hizballah and employed exclusively by Saudi media outlets. Though the massive Israeli destruction of southern Lebanon and south Beirut and the massacres of more than a thousand Lebanese strengthened Hizballah and weakened Israel’s military standing, the invasion was much appreciated by Israel’s Arab allies. Indeed since 2006, Israel’s Arab regime allies as well as neoliberal Arab intellectuals have been openly calling on it to neutralize the so-called Iranian “threat” for its own sake and at their behest as well. The US has seen this as an opportune moment to fully integrate Israel in the region, so much so that it signaled to its Gulf allies to make proposals for a new regional alliance that includes Israel in its midst. The Bahraini foreign minister suggested a few weeks ago that Israel join the Arab League. Many such proposals have already been made in the past few months welcoming the colonial settlement to the regional alliance against Iran.