Israel Is A Discredit To America

Guest Post by Paul Craig Roberts

The Israel Lobby tries to prevent reports and criticism of Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians by branding every critic of every policy of the extreme right-wing Israeli government an “anti-semite.” In other words, if you object to Israeli armed forces shooting down Palestinian children in the streets and then bombing the funerals of the kids the Israelis have already murdered, you hate Jews and are an anti-semite.

The success that the Israel Lobby has enjoyed in imposing this twisted logic on Congress, the White House, the media, the universities and the insouciant American public is astonishing. As a consequence, Americans are no longer answerable to Christian morality but to the evil that the Israel Lobby represents.

Americans have become accomplices to genocide, lies, and unspeakable evils.

Jeffrey St. Clair, one of the few remaining Western journalists with a moral conscience, describes the latest Israeli horror to which we are all accomplices.

Meet the Real Israeli Defense Force: the US Congress

by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

It started as a rather melancholy Friday afternoon in the West Bank. Nothing unusual. Just another funeral for a promising young man who died much too young. Under the implacable shadow of the Wall and in the rifle sights of Israeli soldiers, more than 200 mourners walked down the cobbled street toward the old cemetery in the village of Beit Ummar. Some shouted angrily at the soldiers, condemning Israel for yet another senseless death.

The funeral was for a college student, Jafaar Awad, who slipped into a coma and died only two months after being released from an Israeli prison, where his serious illness had festered untreated for months. Awad was only 22 when he died, as have so many other Palestinian prisoners, from medical neglect at the hands of Israeli jailers. [No Magnitsky Act for Israel]

As his family huddled around his grave, the IDF launched a dozen tear gas canisters toward the mourners, scattering the stunned grouping. Then automatic weapons fire strafed the crowd, bullets hitting more than a dozen people, including Jafaar’s cousin Ziad Awad. Ziad was struck in the back, the bullet piercing his spine. He was rushed to the Al Ahli Hospital in Hebron, where he died of his wounds.

Ziad was only 28.

A few hours after Ziad’s murder at the hands of Israeli snipers, the IDF issued a terse statement saying that Israeli soldiers fired on the crowd of mourners after people where seen throwing stones.

I’m surprised the IDF even felt compelled to issue a justification for a kind of killing that has become routine: kids were throwing stones, skipping rocks, jumping rope, blowing bubbles, tossing dirt on an open grave. The Israeli snipers had no option but to shoot.

The Palestinians have no redress for these daily acts of butchery: no court to go to judge the legitimacy of shootings, no venue to seek compensation for medical bills, pain and suffering or lost work days, no avenue to find a measure of justice for the slain. How much loss, misery and humiliation are one people expected to endure?

The Israeli state has never been more violent, the blood toll of Palestinian civilians never so high. In 2014, the Israeli military and security forces killed more than 2,300 Palestinians and wounded another 17,000. That’s the worst carnage since 1967, when the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza intensified in the wake of the Six Day War. During the height of the last Israeli rampage in Gaza last summer, more than 500,000 Palestinians were displaced from their homes. And, according to a recent UN Report titled Fractured Lives, more than 100,000 of them remain homeless. Detentions of Palestinians inside Israeli prisons are also on the rise. As of the end of February of this year, more than 6,600 Palestinians were being held in Israeli prisons and IDF detention centers, the most in five years. So the gears of the killing machine grind on with impunity, each slaughter only serving to embolden more killing.

Who will stop them? Certainly not the Israeli state’s principle financial investor [the American people]. The most vigorous Israeli Defense Force, unblinking in its vigilance, unfaltering in its loyalty, is the U.S. Congress. There is a savage synchronicity to an alliance between one nation that drone strikes weddings and another that shoots ups funerals.

Each year Congress drops a cool $3 billion on Israel. Even in chambers ruled by fiscal tightwads the only real debate is whether this lavish dispensation, which accounts for more than half of all U.S. military aid worldwide, is enough to satiate Israel’s thirst for new weaponry. Even as Israel repeatedly sabotages U.S. policy across the region, Obama has described the U.S. aid package as “sacrosanct.”

In this light the annual US tribute to Israel, which totals about a third of the Israeli arms budget, begins to look less like a subsidy to a client state than protection money paid to a gangster organization.

It should come as no surprise that two of Benjamin Netanyahu’s most fervid American disciples, Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton, both graduated from Harvard Law, where they incubated in the Zionist hothouse of Alan Dershowitz. Yet, Cruz and Cotton aren’t outliers. Indeed, there is scarcely a micron of daylight between the positions of Ted Cruz and Elizabeth Warren, the Athena (to HRC’s Medea, I suppose) of the progressives, when it comes to defending the scandalous behavior of Israel. Indeed Warren, like many other liberals, seems to work overtime to demonstrate her unrivaled fealty to the Jewish state.

The vaunted Israel Lobby scarcely even needs a lobbyist anymore. These days the new members of congress arrived pre-conditioned to demonstrate their devotion to the Israeli cause. They don’t need to be bribed with PAC money, courted with hookers or blackmailed with indiscrete cell-phone photos. When Israel assassinates an Iranian scientist, uses chemical weapons in Gaza, tortures prisoners, murders a young American peace activist, enfilades a burial party, [shoots up the USS Liberty] or is caught spying on the American president, the congress will leap in unison to its defense–no questions asked, no questions answered–and dispatch another check to Tel Aviv.
In the face of the world’s longest running war crime, the American capital stands inert, an ethical void, its halls packed with the political equivalent of GMOs. Pass the Round-Up.

Jeffrey St. Clair is editor of CounterPunch. Original article published here: http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/05/22/israeli-gears/

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12 Comments
kokoda
kokoda
May 27, 2015 12:46 pm

Well Paul, maybe you think the U.S., ISIS, Ukraine Gov’t, China are such humanitarians that we should shove Israel under the bus.

Mark
Mark
May 27, 2015 12:51 pm

Say what you will about Israel . One thing they’re not is dumb.

Any chance the Palestinians or Arabs could get to kill every Jew they would.

The issue of the U.S. involvement or what should be the US involvement is another separate issue.

Stucky
Stucky
May 27, 2015 1:21 pm

Amerika is a discredit to America.

There. Fixed it for ya.

bb
bb
May 27, 2015 1:43 pm

Don’t worry about Israel . China just declared war with US is near.Didn’t say how near.Just near.

Overthecliff
Overthecliff
May 27, 2015 2:05 pm

Another Israeli crime against Palestinians yesterday. They fired rockets into Gaza.

Oh,no,wait!

Westcoaster
Westcoaster
May 27, 2015 2:13 pm

Makes you wonder the depth and breadth of the “control files” Massad has on each and every American politico.
I say it’s high time we switched sides and take up the cause of the oppressed Palestinians. Stop bombing the shit out of them and stealing their land, or we cut off everything!

Persnickety
Persnickety
May 27, 2015 2:30 pm

It’s high time we realized that all the nations in the mideast, Israel included, are permanently and horrifyingly evil. There are no good guys in the mideast.

B
B
May 27, 2015 4:03 pm

I see some are still drinking the Zionist Kool Aid.

Zarathustra
Zarathustra
May 27, 2015 5:08 pm

Overthecliff says:

Another Israeli crime against Palestinians yesterday. They fired rockets into Gaza.
_____________________________________

The answer to Gazans primitive, unguided rockets is simple. Give them better weapons.

yahsure
yahsure
May 27, 2015 5:50 pm

Visions of people giving Nazi salutes as i read that shit. The money we spend(pretend money) and the problems we have with all these groups of tribes that hate each other. It is a tough neighborhood.
Throw in Bible prophecy and get a massive headache thinking about it.
Soon we will have an economic collapse and senile fuktards like John McCain trying to start ww3 with the Russians at the same time. Our own government is our worse enemy.

Erasmus Le Dolt
Erasmus Le Dolt
May 28, 2015 4:41 am

Either Princeton or MIT just came out with a report that confirmed that Congress no longer represents the interest of U.S. Citizens. A big player in that result has been AIPAC…and we, through our tax dollars, paid for it.

daddysteve
daddysteve
May 28, 2015 12:14 pm

Lebensraum is bound to work better for the Zionists than it did for the Nazis.