It’s a rogue state, but it’s our rogue state
(Mondoweiss) -- by Philip Weiss --
Yesterday in Ha'aretz, Zvi Ba'rel wrote wisely that the siege of Gaza has become a siege of Israel: that the destruction of Palestinian freedom is causing Israel to become a besieged state in world opinion.
It's true that unlike Gaza's inhabitants Israelis are still free to leave the state, to import and export goods and even to go abroad to study. But the siege is setting in. It isn't just the boycott.... It is the sense that Israel is increasingly isolating itself within its righteousness, magnifying the genuine and the imaginary threats, once again using the military language that speaks of the "high" or "low" probability of war, no longer confident of the U.S. position toward it and seeing most European states as political rivals.This is true. You cannot destroy people's lives and freedom, as Israel does in the occupied territories including Gaza, and escape the consequences.
And the question naturally arises: Why did the United States allow its closest ally to do this?
And part of the answer is that even rightwing American officials knew this was a crazy policy, and could not stop it.
I would turn to the latest revelation from Wikileaks. In 2006, three months after Hamas stunned the world by winning parliamentary elections for the Palestinian Authority, Stuart Levey, the U.S. Under Secretary of Treasury whose job it was to block int'l funds for terrorism, traveled to Israel to discuss the country's strategy visavis Hamas. And when the Israelis said they were going to begin a "financial siege" of Hamas, Levey repeatedly expressed concerns about the strategy.
You will see in the cable excerpt below, from May 2006, that even Stuart Levey-- who as a student at Harvard was an ardent Zionist working at the knee of Marty Peretz and trying to save Israel from rightwing extremists (I'll be getting to this in days to come)-- is freaked out by the Israeli attitudes and concerned about their potential to create havoc...
What this document demonstrates is that even in the neoconservative Bush administration, where Israel could do no wrong, smart people understood that Israel was out of control. And they could do nothing to stop it from proceeding on a hellbent course.
In 2008, the US Embassy in Israel would send a worried cable to Washington saying that Israel was starving the Gazan economy with the purpose of putting Gaza "on the brink of collapse." The US Embassy was obviously disturbed by this trend:
Embassy Tel Aviv has encouraged the GOI to review its policy on Gaza liquidity, as requested by the Office of the Quartet Representative and the PA.But again, Israel did what it wanted. And the Americans fell into line...MORE...LINK
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