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Israel and the
Triple Standard

By Werther*

During the late 1960s, just after the Six-Day War in the Middle East, there
arose in the United States a nonce phrase allegedly intended to describe the
U.S. relationship with Israel. Sometimes spoken facetiously, sometimes as a half truth, it nevertheless conveyed something of the naive
mindset of the time. Israel, so the saying went, was "the
51st state."

With the benefit of four decades of hindsight, we can now reflect on how
dangerously delusional was the thinking behind that phrase. Even at the time, with
the smoking hulk of the USS Liberty as visible evidence, it must have
been hard to entertain the notion that the country's relationship to the Jewish
State was, or ever could be, basically similar to that of the central
government's relationship to Vermont, or Montana, or even Puerto Rico.

The barest acquaintance with current events suggests far more persuasively
that the relationship of the United States to Israel is that of a colony to a
predatory imperial power. No, not the reverse of that, as trendy leftist philosophes
like Noam Chomsky somewhat hypocritically maintain. Implausible as it would
seem to an observer from Mars, a tiny country of 5.8
million Jewish inhabitants [1] has the dominant role in its relationship with a
continental superpower of 300 million.

Carefully hedged with weasel words as they have been, the publications of
John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have empirically
demonstrated the power of the Israel Lobby to control U.S. foreign policy.
Their works are sufficiently well known that there is no need to rehash them
here. Suffice it to say that the vilification imposed on the two professors
(and anyone else who supports their position) has served as a kind of logical
proof of the truth of their hypothesis: "The
Israel Lobby is not powerful," American Zionists state in effect,
"and anyone who says otherwise will be silenced!"

Two very recent events serve only to drive home Mearsheimer's
and Walt's point beyond any possibility of contradiction.

With the dawn of the new year, the 111th Congress
convened. On Congress's docket was the minor fact that the country was
undergoing the most severe financial crisis in 80 years, in addition to being
mired in two no-win wars on the Eurasian landmass. Legislators faced a baseline
deficit for 2009 of $1.2 trillion, that is, even before paying for the
so-called stimulus package and the second 2009 installment on the (partially
Zionist inspired) war in Iraq.

So what was the first legislative act of the new
Congress? It wasn't emergency aid to the unemployed, or foreclosure
mitigation, or aid to the domestic auto industry (the previous Congress had
just refused to do that). No, it was separate House and
Senate resolutions extravagantly praising Israel's military assault on Gaza, a
large, walled, open-air concentration camp. While the resolutions were
purely hortatory, that is not to say they will not have consequences. In
publicly tying the United States even closer to Israel's predations and war
crimes the resolutions will further alienate from this country what Thomas
Jefferson called the decent opinion of mankind.

The second highly suggestive incident occurred when Israeli President Ehud
Olmert allegedly telephoned President Bush to force the United States to
abstain from a United Nations resolution on Gaza that the U.S. itself had had a
hand in fashioning. In Olmert's florid retelling for the benefit of an Israeli
audience, [2] he pulled Bush away from the podium while the latter was making a
speech, and berated him about the content of the resolution. Bush, in turn,
telephoned Secretary of State Rice at the United Nations and directed her to
have the U.N. ambassador abstain. This, according to Olmert,
"embarrassed" Rice and vindicated Olmert's influence.

Subsequent news articles have contained the usual pro forma denials
that this incident took place, and one may certainly be allowed to assume that Olmert, a hack politician of demonstrable corruption, may have exaggerated the atmospherics of the incident
to the benefit of his own aggrandizement. But
the facts speak for themselves: the United States did
change its vote on a resolution which it had previously promoted, and
Olmert believed it was in his interest to present the story as an example of
how he humiliated the United States government.

What other foreign government ostensibly allied with the United States,
especially one purportedly bound to us with a "special relationship,"
would go out of its way to publicly present itself as having humiliated the
United States? If the power relationship were that of a supplicant foreign
state to an all-powerful United States, it would make no sense purely from the
standpoint of self interest: the powerful patron
might after all be offended and withdraw its favors. Somehow Olmert calculated
that this would not be the case. And as for both governments' retrospective
massaging of the facts, we should take heed of George Orwell's wise admonition:
never believe anything until it is officially denied.

These incidents subsume into a larger truth about the peculiar relationship
between the United States and Israel. For much of its post-World War II
existence, the United States has operated, in practice if not in declaration,
under the Leninist "who-whom" principle. [3] The Soviet Union's
violent barging into Czechoslovakia or Hungary were an abomination; by contrast, the U.S. overthrow of Mossadegh
in Iran, or Arbenz in Guatemala, or the
assassinations of Trujillo in Santo Domingo or Lumumba in the Congo were
morally unexceptional, enlightened actually, if you looked at them in the right
way.

So it has continued, more or less unto the present day. Russia's actions in
Georgia are blatant aggression. The U.S. invasion of Iraq, by contrast, was
justified in the same manner as a homicide defendant's rationale in an Alabama
court: "we wuz jest pertectin'
ourselfs in advance. Anyways, he needed killin'."

This sort of moral idiocy is thoroughly bound up with America's origins as a
dogmatically religious and militant settler nation
(much like Israel), and finds its pseudo-intellectual expression in
imbecile pronouncements about American Exceptionalism,
as if the United States is somehow exempt from the normal social graces, chief
of which is not to violently trespass on your neighbor's property.

Yet, even with this thick mental fog of a hypocritical double standard,
there are outrages against which most of the American public will instinctively
rebel. We can invade Iraq, to be sure — accompanied by implausible visions of
mushroom clouds over New York or Washington if we don't act — but an incident
like Abu Ghraib will instill the intuitive feeling more than the consciously
held belief that something is wrong. If Blackwater "guards" shoot and
kill 17 innocent Iraqi civilians in broad daylight with no provocation, it
becomes too much. Even rationalizations about regrettable collateral damage
become threadbare. Most Americans at this moment probably believe Iraq is a
morally bankrupt quagmire, despite the happy talk about the Surge.

Yet when one pulls Israel into the equation, it appears that the double
standard is overlaid with a triple standard.
Even as (2) the United States is permitted to do most of the things that (3)
the rest of the world is not permitted to do, (1) Israel is permitted things
which even the United States cannot do. It is a hypothetical, but one doubts
that the American public would stand for a no-holds-barred U.S. military
assault on a densely packed urban area whose inhabitants have no opportunity to
flee (much as the Warsaw Ghetto), or calculated attacks on U.N. compounds,
ambulances, or hospitals. [4]

This triple standard is one of the wonders of the
world. While the mainstream press has copiously denounced Abu Ghraib and
Blackwater mercenaries, there is no similar condemnation of Israel's
indiscriminate use of phosphorous munitions or GBU 39s over an urban area as
densely packed as Hong Kong. Instead, our local fish wrapper, the Washington
Post, often features not one but two daily op-eds justifying Israel's
action.

Israel has become a predatory gangster state. Leave aside the military
aggression and abominable treatment of minority groups. It is at the center of
the illicit drug trade in Ecstasy. [5] It is a leading covert arms dealer. [6]
It is at the forefront of computer hacking. [7] Even the trafficking in women, a
practice that usually elicits universal condemnation, provokes no more than an
embarrassed coughing behind the hand when Israel does it. [8] Such nice
playmates our congressmen have worshipfully chosen as their idols!

That is a brief description of Eretz
Israel, The Light unto the Gentiles. Citizens of the United States (or
are they native subjects?) should reflect on the billions of dollars per year
that they give to a country with a longer life expectancy than the United
States. [9] Maybe that helps explain why Detroit and Cleveland are beginning to
resemble Gaza without the bombs.

* Werther is the pen name of a Northern
Virginia-based defense analyst.

[1] The roughly 1.4 million Arab citizens of Israel don't count. They recently
had their political parties banned by The Only Real Democracy in the Middle
East, as America's Zionists call the government of Israel.

[2] "Israel's
Olmert: Rice embarrassed over UN vote," Washington Post,
January 12, 2009.

[3] Kto kogo: the moral
rightness or wrongness of an action inheres not in the rightness or wrongness
of the act itself, but who is doing what to whom. Therefore, repressive
measures by the Tsarist government against the Bolsheviks were morally
abhorrent, but mass executions by Bolsheviks of enemies of the state were
morally unexceptional.

[4] The bombing of a U.N. compound where hundreds of refugees were huddling
was conveniently timed to coincide with the U.N. Secretary General's visit to
the area in search of a cease-fire. It sent the message, "yes, it's
brutal, but there's nothing you can do about it."

[5] "Israelis
at center of ecstasy drug trade," Haaretz,
June 4, 2003.

[6] "Amnesty:
Two thirds of Israeli arms — for exports," Ynet
News, October 2, 2006.

[7] "Israeli
Hacker Known as 'The Analyzer' Suspected of Hacking Again," Wired
Blog Network, September 5, 2008.

[8] "Trafficking
in women a worldwide epidemic," Jewish Tribune, March 30, 2006.

[9] Wikipedia, List of
countries by life expectancy.

Posted by Werther on January 18, 2009 3:26 PM