Saving Israel from itself

The US and UK are trying, but getting only ingratitude and trouble

The deep state in the US knows that the future of the state of Israel was put in jeopardy by the al-Qassam Brigades’ Operation al-Aqsa Flood on 7 October last year. That is why it is trying to come to its rescue through diplomatic channels before it is too late. But Israel’s rulers are too arrogant and conceited to admit this. They have started insolently attacking their American benefactors for not robotically rubber-stamping all their policies, views, and wars in their efforts to save Israel from itself.

The mere mention by the US administration of a demilitarised Palestinian paper-state drove the Israelis into a frenzy of rage at the thought that that the US may have started to shift ever so slightly from it position of unquestioning support. Even the ultra-Zionist President Joe Biden was not spared.

On Sunday, the chair of the Knesset’s national security committee, Tzvika Foghel, fulminated on the semi-official Channel 12 TV channel: “We are not under British mandate or the 51st star on the American flag. We are in the State of Israel, which was granted to the Jewish people.” He continued: “All that Biden and the British foreign minister David Cameron have been saying about a Palestinian state is a threat to the existence of the Jewish state.”

Cameron, also a self-declared Zionist, was subjected to an even harsher telling-off for crossing Israeli red lines, possibly for the first time since the occupation state was founded. He had suggested that Israel was no longer capable of protecting its citizens, and that a solution was needed involving the establishment of demilitarised and Hamas-free Palestinian state.

Most Zionists inside Israel and many parts of the world would agree with him. But it was unforgivable for the foreign secretary of the UK, ‘Great Britain’, to identify the failure and reality that the Israelis refuse to admit: that the Qassam Brigades succeeded, for the first time since the start of the conflict, in carrying out a major well-planned operation in the Israeli-occupied interior and killing, injuring, or capturing a large number of soldiers and settlers. Israel had thought it had a monopoly on killing and destruction. But its army – ranked the fourth most powerful in the world – lost its power to deter and intimidate. The state proved incapable of maintaining its security and stability and sustaining its strong economy or protecting its colonists when confronted on multiple fronts in Gaza, the West Bank, and South Lebanon.

The ingratitude of Foghel and his ilk is breath-taking. They have always been under British mandate and the 51st star on the US flag. It is these two colonial powers — not the Lord Almighty — that granted Palestine to the Zionist movement to create a Jewish state, and sustained and protected it for 75 years. They fully deserve this insolent reward.

Biden has sent his top aides numerous times to talk to the Israelis over the past four months, not just to save them from themselves, but to save the US from impending calamitous defeat in the region as a consequence of Israel’s assault on Gaza. It is already getting embroiled in Iraq and Yemen and its ships and bases have become targets for the drones and missiles of the resistance forces in both countries.

The US sent giant B-52 bombers to pummel Popular Mobilisation Brigades targets in Iraq to avenge the killing of three US troops in a drone strike on one of its bases in Jordan. That caused the death of 25 Iraqis and the injury of dozens more.

Has Biden — who was one of the keenest supporters of the invasion, occupation, and dismemberment of Iraq and the looting of its resources — forgotten that his country killed more than two million Iraqis with depleted-uranium bombing and sanctions-induced starvation? Why can the US avenge the death of three of its troops, but the Iraqis cannot avenge the death of two million of their compatriots?

The US was strongly opposed to any expansion of the war on Gaza. Now it is doing exactly what it opposed and warned against by opening up several new fronts with its airstrikes and killings and turning the entire Middle East into a warzone. All for the sake of Israel and supporting its genocide and ethnic cleansing in the Gaza Strip and West Bank, in a show of contempt for Arabs and Muslims everywhere.

These Arabs and Muslims cannot forget the US’ “creative chaos” in Iraq and Afghanistan, its ravaging of Syria, Libya, and Yemen at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives, or its turning of most Arab countries into failed states mired in corruption and debt and made hostage to the IMF.

I have no trust at all in any solutions or proposals put forward by he US under the rubric of pausing fighting and exchanging captives. Nor am I deceived by any talk of disputes between the US and Israel. If they do exist, I wish they would worsen. But Tel Aviv is in control in the US right now, via its extensions which direct its president and are embedded in its administration and institutions. Much the same can be said about weary old Britain.

The US is being derided by Netanyahu and his allies after sending it 2,000 marines and billions of dollars and establishing an airlift to supply its forces with missiles and bombs after they were humiliated by resistance fighters. Israel was beaten and is dragging the US into an even bigger defeat at the hands of resistance fighters in Yemen, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria.

Saving Israel from itself