Millennials - And Others - Are Over Israel

Seemingly, I am not the only one who is over America's blind backing of Israel no matter what atrocities the IDF may commit (I got a letter from Senator Mark Warner in reply to my inquires that was just as mealy mouthed and unacceptable as Senator Tim Kaine's earlier in the week). A new Pew Research Center poll shows a huge generational shift in support of Israel so even though Congress has slavishly backed actions by Israel that seem aimed at genocide - several posts have appeared in the Times of Israel calling for out right genocide against Palestinians - , younger voters are not willing to close their eyes to the atrocities.  A piece in Salon looks at Israel's apparent effort to destroy long term American support for that nation.  Here are excepts:

It might seem counterintuitive to make the argument that Israel should no longer count on U.S. support for its policies as assuredly it has in the past.  After all, hasn’t the Senate just passed not one but now two resolutions by unanimous consent declaring its backing of Israel’s deadly attacks on and invasion of Gaza?

Yet even with these unambiguous resolutions emanating from the Senate, we find more and more evidence that support for Israel from the American public is slipping.  A recent report in the Washington Post noted that “A new Pew Research Center poll is the second in the past week to show a huge generational split on the current conflict in Gaza. While all age groups north of 30 years old clearly blame Hamas more than Israel for the current violence, young adults buck the trend in a big way. Among 18 to 29-year olds, 29 percent blame Israel more for the current wave of violence, while 21 percent blame Hamas.”

Clearly there are a number of possible explanations for this; here are three that come to mind.

First, . . . . As much as the world should strongly and unambiguously condemn such acts of anti-Semitism, to focus on a “second Holocaust” is to ignore the actual reason why anti-Semitism has today reared its ugly head again. It is not because of some essential, primordial racism against Jews. It is because of the actions of the state of Israel in staging a brutal, prolonged attack on the Palestinian people that is replete with violations of human rights and international law. That Hamas has also committed attacks on civilians does not erase the fact that Israel’s violence violates basic international humanitarian laws regarding proportionality.

International support for Israel is ebbing because the Holocaust narrative can no longer offer an omnipotent shield against a critique of the second narrative regarding the founding of the state of Israel.  Israel is in fact risking losing the narrative war altogether, as more and more of the global public is asking questions that probe into that history, prompted by the evidence of Israeli’s current efforts to continue and expand Israeli power and land, efforts that are now increasingly regarded not as survival tactics but as violent colonial ones.

More and more younger Americans, growing up well past the postwar era, find the Holocaust narrative to be less than absolutely and unquestionably a good reason to support the horrible killings in Gaza.  And as they learn more, their support will wane further.

Second, the massive attack on Gaza and its obscene civilian death toll is now delivered to a global audience via a variety of media forms that far exceed the mainstream media.  

Younger people are open to these modes of narrative, curious to know more, and morally puzzled and deeply concerned, and they in turn become conveyers of opinion and witnessing, as seen in the Tumblr site, TheWorldStandsWithPalestine which documents the demonstrations taking place around the world by means of uploaded photos from the participants themselves.

The Senate’s criticism of the U.N.’s findings on Gaza thus is immediately made questionable by stories like these and many others that create a cognitive dissonance in our minds between the claim of “equal violations” and the actual, not fabricated, figures that give quantitative weight to the visual images of disproportionate Palestinian death and destruction.

Finally, support for Israel is going to wane because unlike before, those who wish to criticize Israel today have already well-established and well-recognized modes of protest available to them. Most important of course is the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which was established in 2005. 

The fact that more and more younger Americans are increasingly skeptical of supporting Israel’s military efforts is encouraging in the long run.  But we should not lose sight of the tremendous humanitarian crisis we are witnessing today. Change might be coming, but for now action is needed.

Israel may continue to plead and play the role of the victim, but the endless barrage of  photos and video clips that show what is really taking place will increasingly erode support for Israel.  Actions have consequences and the fact that Israel - and the U.S. military for that matter - may have gotten away with committing atrocities in the past no longer guarantees that such will be the case in the future.  Murdering hundreds of children is not what a victim does.  It's that simple. Netanyahu and his fellow henchmen hopefully will figure this out sooner as opposed to later.  Meanwhile, I personally support a 100% cessation of US military aid to Israel.  

Israel: A Study in Alienating Public Opinion and Fueling Anti-Semites

Dead children killed by Israeli forces

Like many others I am growing weary with more images every day of children slaughtered by Israeli military forces in Gaza.  Yet as the carnage continues, some are calling anyone  who criticizes Israel an "anti-Semite."  The leadership in Israel continues to be blind to what the war on Hamas is doing for Israel's moral standing in the world not to mention that the daily murder of children can only result in more and more hard core enemies of Israel among Palestinians.  Just because one can do something militarily, doesn't automatically make it the right or smart thing to do.  It is a lesson America has failed to learn from its own disastrous Middle East policies.   Andrew Sullivan looks at some thoughts as to how Israel my be defeating itself:

In effect, what Israel can do militarily is to kill a lot of people, the majority of which will probably be Hamas members or supporters, but which will do nothing to politically advance Israeli security beyond demonstrating to Palestinians and their supporters that in favorable circumstances Israel can do what it wants with international support.

Yet the Israeli superiority that needs to be demonstrated is political not military; no sane Palestinian believes they can defeat the Israelis in battle. … In the end there will be a cease-fire, and Hamas will have survived by virtue of the campaign they forced Israel to wage, even if every single current Hamas member in Gaza is somehow killed by the IDF. After all, Hamas is already being treated by mediators as an almost equal of Israel while the Palestinian Authority is all but forgotten. At that point what truly will have been accomplished?

It is Netanyahu who proved that the PA’s moderate strategy is futile – since Israel has only rewarded that moderation with more aggressive settlements. It is Netanyahu’s hysterical and belligerent exploitation of the deaths of three Israeli teens that elevated Hamas to a position it would never have achieved on its own. And this awful cycle of extremism from Jerusalem has now forged a unanimous Security Council resolution for an immediate ceasefire. But once the dogs of war have been released, it’s hard to rein them back in:

I can’t help but ask myself, What is this end they’re striving toward? Even if each and every Hamas fighter is taken out, does anyone truly believe that the Palestinian people’s aspiration for national independence will disappear with them?

The Israeli military can win the battles, but peace and quiet for the citizens of Israel will only be achieved through political compromise. But this, according to the patriotic powers running the current war, is something that we’re not supposed to say, because this kind of talk is precisely what’s stopping the I.D.F. from winning. Ultimately, when this operation is over and the tally is taken of the many dead bodies, on our side and theirs, the accusing finger will once again be pointed at us, the saboteurs.

Noting that Israel has carried out over 2,400 airstrikes since the start of the war, Robert Beckhusen explains why Israel’s air power is so ineffective against Hamas:

Whether Israel is justified or not in attacking Hamas, the choice the Israeli military to rely heavily on air power to achieve its objectives has resulted in disproportionate civilian losses compared to the threat Hamas poses. … The result is that either way, Hamas will probably come out of the fight with enough Israeli dead on its hands to claim some kind of victory. Hamas will likely be hurting badly. But Israel’s reliance on air power to destroy Hamas’s rockets will also likely fall short. Without a political solution, the conflict will almost certainly resume again.

Winning the battle sometimes nonetheless results in losing the longer term war.  This message seems lost on Israel's leaders at the moment.   They are creating endless propaganda opportunities for their enemies and losing the support of former supporters.

No Empathy for Others: What Republicans, the Israeli Leadership and Christofascists Have in Common

GRAPHIC PHOTO; I apologize for the horror of this photo, but we need to open our eyes to what Israel is doing.  By Mahmood Bassam/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images.

With brutality running amok in Ukraine and Gaza to name a few "hot spots" of war and Republicans and Christofascists preaching the antithesis of the Gospel message (which both factions claim to honor), one has to wonder how men (and women) can be so cruel to others.  Particularly when religion is a consistent undercurrent behind the war and mayhem and general treatment of those who are different as refuse.  To me, it comes down to a common lack of empathy for others.  If someone looks different, holds a different faith, or is of a different sexual orientation, suddenly they are worthy of being murdered, stripped of their legal rights and subjected to an almost less than human status.  Here in America, we see the Republicans (think Paul Ryan) and the GOP's Christofascist base waging a constant war on the poor, gays and most recently undocumented children and youth from Central America.  Even more horrifically, in Gaza we see Israel we see the Israeli army killing hundreds of Palestinians - many children - while claiming to act in self defense even though the death toll is roughly one Israeli for every 10 Palestinians.  Personally, I am disgusted with the godly folk, their political whores and Israel.  I'm almost to the point of ending all US aid to Israel.  A piece by Noam Sheizaf looks at the horrors unfolding in Gaza:

In The Fog of War, Errol Morris’ excellent documentary, former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara speaks about a certain inability to understand the enemy – one that stems from a lack of empathy.

In the film, McNamara, a brilliant systems analyst, who is today associated more than anything with the Vietnam War, says that part of President Kennedy’s successful management of the Cuban Missile Crisis was his administration’s ability to put itself in the shoes of the Soviets and understand their point of view. “In the case of Vietnam,” he says, “we didn’t know them well enough to empathize.” As a result, each side had a completely different understanding of what the war was about.

This understanding came to McNamara only in 1991, when he visited Vietnam and met with the country’s foreign minister. McNamara asked the foreign minister whether he thought it was possible to reach the same results of the war (independence and uniting the south with the north) without the heavy losses.
“You were fighting to enslave us,” yelled the foreign minister at McNamara, who in turn replied that that is an absurd notion. The two nearly came to blows. But as time passed McNamara understood. “We saw Vietnam as an element of the Cold War,” he says, whereas what the foreign minister was trying to tell him was that for the Vietnamese it was a war of independence. Communism was not the heart of the matter for the Vietnamese. They were willing to make the worst sacrifices because they were fighting for their freedom – not for Marx or Brezhnev.

I’ve exchanged emails with people in Gaza in the past few days. These are people who don’t care much for Hamas in their everyday lives, whether due to its fundamentalist ideology, political oppression or other aspects of its rule. But they do support Hamas in its war against Israel; for them, fighting the siege is their war of independence. Or at least one part of it.

Israelis, both left and right, are wrong to assume that Hamas is a dictatorship fighting Israel against its people’s will. Hamas is indeed a dictatorship, and there are many Palestinians who would gladly see it fall, but not at this moment in time. Right now I have no doubt that most Palestinians support the attacks on IDF soldiers entering Gaza; they support kidnapping as means to release their prisoners (whom they see as prisoners of war) and the unpleasant fact is that most of them, I believe, support firing rockets at Israel.

 For the Palestinians, the choice is between occupation by proxy in the West Bank and a war in Gaza. Both offer no hope, and neither are forms of freedom. The Israeli promise — that an end to armed struggle will bring freedom — is not trustworthy, as the experiences of past years has shown. It simply never happens. The quiet years in the West Bank have not brought the Palestinians any closer to an independent state, while the truce in between wars in Gaza has not brought about a relief from the siege. One can debate the reasons for why this happened, but one cannot debate reality.

Israelis are convinced they are fighting a terror organization driven by a fundamentalist Islamic ideology. Palestinians are convinced Israelis are looking to enslave them, and that as soon as the war is over the siege will be reinforced. Since this is exactly what Israel intends to do, as our government has repeatedly stated, they have no reason to stop fighting.

With every dead Palestinian child Israel is creating more and more ardent enemies.   Moreover, as the murder of children continues, more and more citizens in other nations will come to believe that it is the Israelis, not the Palestinians who are the real terrorists.  I am not anti-Semitic or anti-Israel, but I do have to wonder when the Hell someone in Israel will wake up and realize they are destroying support for Israel.  Come out of the fog of war and realize how others are viewing the conflict.  I'd also add that just because a child is Palestinian, it does not make the less a child or less human.  One would think Israeli would have learned something from the anti-Jewish nightmare of Nazi Germany.  Apparently not.

P.S. I have children of my own and now grandchildren as well.  Anyone responsible for harming any of them would find me to be a life long enemy out for very brutal revenge.  I suspect Palestinians feel precisely the same way.

Israel Continues to Murder Palestinian Children

One of the lucky children who wasn't killed by Israeli forces

At the risk of causing a fire storm I am going to venture some thoughts on the horrors going on between Israel and its Palestinian citizens and neighbors.  The murder of three Israeli teenagers - the spark for the current increased violence - is reprehensible, but the murder of Palestinian youths, children and families does not only serves to undermine support for Israel by decent and moral people.  Ironically, perhaps that is the goal of Hamas.  The other irony is that many Israelis are descendants of those who survived the horrors of World War II and the Nazi Final Solution, yet the leadership in Israel strikes me as being incapable of seeing the humanity of Palestinians as fellow humans.  Indeed, the mindset is akin to that of racists who cannot see the humanity of blacks and other minorities and Christofascists who view gays as less than human.  A piece in The Guardian looks at the latest sad news about the murder of four Palestinian children and the wounding of others by Israeli forces.  Here are highlights:

The first projectile hit the sea wall of Gaza City's little harbour just after four o'clock. As the smoke from the explosion thinned, four figures could be seen running, ragged silhouettes, legs pumping furiously along the wall. Even from a distance of 200 metres, it was obvious that three of them were children.

Jumping off the harbour wall, they turned on to the beach, attempting to cross the short distance to the safety of the Al-Deira hotel, base for many of the journalists covering the Gaza conflict.

They waved and shouted at the watching journalists as they passed a little collection of brightly coloured beach tents, used by bathers in peacetime.

It was there that the second shell hit the beach, those firing apparently adjusting their fire to target the fleeing survivors. As it exploded, journalists standing by the terrace wall shouted: "They are only children."

In the space of 40 seconds, four boys who had been playing hide and seek among fishermen's shacks on the wall were dead. They were aged between seven and 11; two were named Mohammad, one Zakaria and the youngest Ahed. All were members of the extended Bakr family.

Three others who were injured made it to the hotel: Hamad Bakr, aged 13, with shrapnel in his chest; his cousin Motasem, 11, injured in his head and legs, and Mohammad Abu Watfah, 21, who was hit by shrapnel in his stomach.

The Israeli military said it was looking into the incident. The Israel Defence Force told the AFP in a statement: "Based on preliminary results, the target of this strike was Hamas terrorist operatives. The reported civilian casualties from this strike are a tragic outcome."

The Islamist group Hamas, which controls Gaza, on Wednesday formally rejected Egypt's ceasefire proposal that had been accepted by Israel to end the nine-day-old conflict that has left at least 213 Palestinians and one Israeli dead.
Alongside the air strikes, Israel told tens of thousands of residents of the northern town of Beit Lahiya and the Zeitoun and Shujai'iya neighbourhoods of Gaza City– all near the Israel border – to evacuate their homes by 8am. The warnings came by automated phonecalls, texts and leaflets dropped from planes.

The Israeli military said in its message that large numbers of rockets were being launched from these areas and that Israel planned to bomb these locations.

"Whoever disregards these instructions and fails to evacuate immediately endangers their own lives, as well as those of their families," the message said.

Part of me wants to say "a pox on both their houses."  On the other hand, the continued brutality by Israel makes me want to contact my U.S. Senators and demand that they vote to cut off all aid to Israel.  Is that the emotion Israel is seeking to evoke?  I suspect not.

Repealing DADT: Allies' Experience Disproves Christianist Arguments

One aspect of too many Americans that I find frustrating is that they never can look to the experience of other nations for examples of making or changing policies. I do not know if the phenomenon is due to egocentric characteristics, plain stubbornness, or the fear that the experience of others will prove their excuses for bigotry as unfounded. The arguments for continuing Don't Ask, Don't Tell are a case in point. The majority of the USA's allies have allowed gays to openly serve in their military forces for a number of years in some cases and none of the problems trumped up by anti-gay psychos like Elaine Donnelly have come to pass. All of which helps to underscore that the REAL reason for DADT is religious based discrimination and nothing else regardless of what the naysayers whine about. 365gay.com has a good article that looks at the experience of three of the USA's allies and - surprise - gays serving openly has not been a problem. Here are a few highlights:

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(New York) When it comes to dealing with gay personnel in the ranks, the contrasts are stark among some of the world’s proudest, toughest militaries - and these differing approaches are invoked by both sides as Americans renew debate over the Pentagon’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.

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In the United States, more than 12,000 service members have been dismissed since 1994 because it became known they were gay. Current targets for discharge include a West Point graduate and Iraq war veteran, Army National Guard Lt. Dan Choi.

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In Britain, on the other hand, uniformed gay and lesbian service members marched in the annual Pride London parade July 4. Gay Australian soldiers and sailors had their own float in Sydney’s Gay Mardi Gras parade. In Israel, the army magazine earlier this year featured two male soldiers on the cover, hugging one another.

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U.S. Rep. Patrick Murphy, D-Pa., the first Iraq war veteran elected to Congress, has just launched a campaign for a bill to repeal “don’t ask.” He observed British troops in Iraq operating smoothly with a serve-openly policy and bristles at the contention that American forces would suffer morale and recruiting problems if they followed suit. “I take it as a personal affront to our warriors,” he said. “To say that other countries’ soldiers are professional enough to handle this and American soldiers aren’t is really a slap in the face.”

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With such polarized views as a backdrop, Associated Press reporters examined how the militaries of Israel, Britain and Australia have managed with serve-openly policies, and interviewed partisans on both sides of the debate in the United States about the relevance of those experiences.

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For those in the U.S. military community who oppose letting gays serve openly, there’s a widely shared sentiment that America has nothing to learn from the two dozen nations that have no bans.

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“There’s been very little trouble in the nations that lifted their ban,” said professor David Segal, director of the University of Maryland’s Center for Research on Military Organization. “My guess is there will be slightly more in the U.S. - we have a somewhat higher level of intolerance.” However, Segal doubted the change would spur a large exodus or hamper recruitment.