15 December 2023 12:01 am Views - 956
Palestinians react amid the rubble of destroyed buildings following an Israeli bombardment yesterday in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip. (Pic by Mahmud Hams/AFP)
While calls for a Gaza ceasefire intensify, with more than 18,500 civilians, mostly women and children, killed, a rift is brewing between the United States and its staunchest ally, Israel. This
Rift or no rift, the US and Israel are inseparable allies and will be so until US public opinion remains religiously pro-Israel.
To stop the Gaza genocide, the Joe Biden administration is unlikely to take any drastic steps, such as the non-use of vetoes in the United Nations Security Council. At most, the Biden administration will apply behind-the-scenes pressure on Israel. Nothing more.
On Tuesday, the day on which the UN member states overwhelmingly voted for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza in what was seen as a diplomatic slap on the US, President Biden warned Israel that it was fast losing international support for its campaign against Hamas. Addressing a fundraising event in Washington, Biden said Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu needed to alter his approach.
“I think he has to change, and with this government, this government in Israel is making it very difficult for him to move,” Biden said in a pointed reference to Israeli ministers who hold genocidal thoughts.
Biden’s remarks were met with Israel’s defiance. Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi said, “We respect and cherish the President of the United States, Joe Biden, who went out of his way during the most difficult period of the State of Israel. This is true friendship. But we live here; this is our country. The historical property of our ancestors. There will be no Palestinian state here. We will never allow another state to be established between Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea.”
Unverified reports said that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also retorted to Biden’s comment when the two had a phone conversation. To Biden’s concern about the civilian
Biden is in a dilemma. Although US public opinion favours Israel, the younger generation is veering away from the religious foundation that has kept most Americans zealously loyal to Israel. This is a cause for concern for Biden. In a tight presidential race next year, most likely with Republican frontrunner Donald Trump, every vote counts. His pro-war policy has distanced Muslim voters and progressive youths away from him.
Biden’s pro-Israeli credentials are undisputed. As a young senator, Biden supported Israel’s disproportionate wars and held the view that killing children and civilians was part of warfare in defence of the motherland. The proof was a 1982 speech he made when Israel’s then Prime Minister Menachem Begin appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee after Israel’s Lebanon war.
This is how the New York Times reported Begin’s reaction to the speech: “A young senator rose and delivered a very impassioned speech—I must say that it’s been a while since I’ve heard such a talented speaker—and he actually supported Operation Peace for the Galilee {the Lebanon war},” Begin told Israeli reporters after he returned to Jerusalem. “The senator—Biden — said he would go even further than Israel, adding that he’d forcefully fend off anyone who sought to invade his country, even if that meant killing women or children.”
However, to be fair to Biden, he opposes Israel’s settlement-building activities in occupied Palestinian territories and promotes a two-state solution.
As US politics remains heavily religionized, Israel is held holy, with the US president performing the role of the high priest and even facilitating human slaughters at the altar of Zionism—by yesterday more than 18,500 Gazans, including some 10,000 children, according to Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor.
Ten thousand children dying in a conflict in two months will make even the Pharaoh in Moses’ story look more humane. By refusing to support an immediate ceasefire and arming Israel to carry on with its baby killings, the Biden administration has become complicit in the war crime. But who will hold them accountable? The International Criminal Court and the United Nations Human Rights Council flex their muscles largely against weak or anti-West nations.
What we see as war crimes is seen in the US as legitimate action by Israel to ensure its security. Why is US public opinion strongly pro-Israel? Harry Truman, the US president at the time of the partition of Palestine in 1947, was a Zionist; so have all US presidents since then and a majority of the people. Pro-Jewishness is pervasive in the American psyche.
In an essay published in Foreign Affairs magazine, Walter Russell Mead, a Henry Kissinger Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, delves deeper into the question of why Gentile Americans back the Jewish state. He traces the history of this pro-Jewishness to the presidency of John Adams, the second president of the United States (1797–1801).
Mead says more than the Jewish lobby, the Jewish money power, and the Jewish vote base, which is minuscule, what makes Americans side with Israel, come hell or high water, is their religious conviction to support the Jews.
Mead divides this support into two categories: prophetic gentile Zionism and progressive gentile Zionism. The Prophetic Zionists saw the return of the Jews to the ‘Promised Land’ as the realisation of a literal interpretation of biblical prophecy, often connected to the return of Christ and the end of the world, the apocalypse.
Progressive Zionists hold the view that the democratic and (relatively) egalitarian United States is both an example of the new world God is making and a powerful instrument to further his grand design. Some American Protestants believed that God was moving to restore what they considered the degraded and oppressed Jews of the world to the Promised Land, just as God was uplifting and improving the lives of other ignorant and unbelieving people through the advance of Protestant and liberal principles.
According to Mead, for centuries, the American imagination has been steeped in the Hebrew Scriptures, mainly the Old Testament. Moreover, the Americans see a parallel between the Jews’ return to Palestine and the European Christians’ arrival in America, God’s new Canaan. The ethical side of this pro-Jewishness also stems from the guilt factor that they did nothing to save millions of Jews when the Nazis exterminated them.
For America’s gentile Zionists, Israel’s 1967 war victory in six days against three Arab states was a divine sign of the fulfilment of the prophecy. When the Jews return to Palestine and build the temple in Jerusalem, it is time for Christ’s second coming, which will see Jews who had rejected him accept him as their saviour.
However, young Americans are beginning to hear the Palestinian side of the story. With Christmas in Palestine’s Bethlehem on low key due to the Palestinian suffering, the question for the pro-Israeli Americans is: If Jesus Christ returns today, on whose side will he be—on the side of the oppressor Israel or the oppressed Palestinians?