OVER the past week, the Netanyahu regime may have succeeded in its endeavours to provoke a wider war. It isn’t difficult to imagine what the Western reaction would have been to, say, Iran, Russia or China booby-trapping an adversary’s communication devices. In the case of Israel, shock is superseded by awe.
Yet even admiration for the technical ingenuity of Mossad has not prevented some commentators from acknowledging the terrorist aspects of a tactical success that qualifies as a war crime under international protocols to which Israel is a signatory. That mass-casualty attack has been supplemented with conventional air strikes that have already claimed hundreds of lives. Hezbollah will almost certainly feel obliged to respond, despite being massively outgunned. The big question is whether Iran will stay aloof.
The US State Department notoriously maintains a list of ‘state sponsors of terrorism’ that currently features Cuba, North Korea, Iran and Syria. Israel has obviously never been included. Nor has Pakistan — although it was previously seen as one of several ‘safe havens’ for militants. But its backing for the Afghan mujahideen in the 1970s-80s, co-sponsored by CIA and the Saudis, was never an issue. Nor its initial nurturing of the Taliban.
Israeli excesses have rarely elicited any objection from Washington, never mind the terrorist antecedents of at least two of its prime ministers, Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, and the indulgent attitude of all other leaders towards international and ‘domestic’ operations by its agencies that qualify as terrorism by any reasonable definition. Quite apart from the terror it routinely perpetrates or sponsors in the occupied Palestinian territories, the Israeli military and its offshoots have also created or encouraged terrorist movements or actions across its neighbourhood. The most egregious instance of this tendency was the Sabra and Shatila massacre in 1982 by Lebanese Falangist militiamen supervised by IDF general Ariel Sharon, who was officially reprimanded, but his bloodlust did not prevent him from becoming PM.
The US has rarely objected to Israeli excesses.
Back then, far-right US president Ronald Reagan ordered Begin to halt the ‘holocaust’ in Beirut. The Israeli PM bristled, but obeyed, perhaps influenced by the fact that many Israelis took a stand against their nation’s horrific conduct in Lebanon. This year’s demonstrators are understandably keen to bring home the hostages Israeli armed forces failed to protect on Oct 7 last year, but all too many of them are keen on the IDF stepping up its genocide in Gaza, and, perhaps, continuing it in the West Bank, even southern Lebanon.
No one bothers to deny that the formidable Israeli war machine has been sponsored by the US for the past half-century or more. A year before his assassination in 1968, Martin Luther King declared “my own government” to be “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today”. That accusation remains valid, but the transcontinental bloodshed conducted by the US has frequently been supplemented by the violence of its local auxiliaries or mercenaries. The very nation that purports to be an arbiter of international disputes and a key to their resolution in fact qualifies as the world’s most formidable perpetrator and sponsor of terrorism through much of the 20th century, and into the 21st.
It is not alone but its record — from the Philippines to Italy, Iran, Guatemala, Congo, Cuba and Indonesia as well as Timor, Vietnam, Chile, Cambodia, Afghanistan and Iraq — is unmatched in modern history. Hubris and hypocrisy are the key defining features of the American empire, which encompasses au-xiliaries such as the UK, Canada and Australia, alongside key European nations and a bunch of hangers-on in the Global South.
It’s favourite adopted child, though, may occasionally be subject to mild, mostly meaningless admonitions, but is always welcome to supplies of the latest lethal weaponry, and liable to be excused whenever it oversteps the mark, which is quite routine.
Unlike almost all of his predecessors, Benjamin Netanyahu does not have a storied military past; his terrorist tendencies have surfaced largely during his extended prime ministerial tenure. His primary motivation at the moment is to stay in power, not least to stave off legal challenges to his record of corruption — which barely intrudes into his moral turpitude as a politician.
It remains to be seen whether Hezbollah or Iran will wisely continue to ignore Israel’s repeated provocations or disastrously trigger some kind of mutual assured destruction. But all bets are off as long as Israel proceeds with the Gaza genocide and the creeping annexation of the West Bank. The US won’t be able to evade culpability unless it conjures up the courage to halt arms shipments to its primary Middle Eastern proxy as it pursues its misanthropic aims.
Published in Dawn, September 25th, 2024
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