COMMENT Israel's path to total
war By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
One of the most malignant aspects of the
new chapter in the Arab-Israeli conflict is the
myth of Israel as the assaulted party, lavishly
propagated by the White House and the infinite
pro-Israel pundits in the US media, including the
editors of the New York Times, who have labeled
Israel's blatant aggression against the nation of
Lebanon as "legally and morally justified".
Never mind that the rest of the world,
including the European Union, does not share this
perception of who is mainly at fault for the
deadly cycle of violence that has gripped the
Middle East again. The irony is that one can
detect greater voices of dissent and opposition to
Israel's massive, disproportionate response to the
token kidnapping of a few of its soldiers than is
the case in
the
"pluralistic" US media, nowadays sheepishly toeing
the official line.
This line was expressed
by President George W Bush in his press conference
alongside President Vladimir Putin on Sunday when
he stated firmly, "In my judgment, the best way to
stop the violence is to understand why the
violence occurred in the first place. And that's
because Hezbollah has been launching rocket
attacks out of Lebanon into Israel."
Sure,
Hezbollah conducted a raid across the border and
kidnapped two Israeli soldiers, and that as a show
of solidarity with the much-repressed
Palestinians, but the rocket attacks on Israel
were in response to Israel's massive bombardment
clearly pre-planned to attain the dual objective
of defanging Hezbollah and creating a regime
change in Lebanon, perhaps as a prelude to a wider
war on Syria and Iran.
Gideon Levy in the
liberal Israeli paper Haaretz has put it cogently:
"In Gaza, a soldier is abducted from the army of a
state that frequently abducts civilians from their
homes and locks them up for years with or without
a trial - but only we're allowed to do that. And
only we're allowed to bomb civilian population
centers."
The White House-led masterly
mischaracterization of the chronology of events
culminating in the widening war show how nicely
adapted are the standards of public relations that
serve the Israeli war machine, currently pressing
hard to pave the road for a future attack on Iran,
by either the US or Israel itself, without the
fear of any retaliation through Lebanon, thus
depriving Iran of one of its multiple lines of
defense.
Little wonder, then, that the
pro-Israeli pundits in Washington are wasting no
time in pushing for an attack on Iran. "Why wait?"
asks William Kristol of the Standard Weekly,
rationalizing his warmongering bid in the form of
"It is our war, too."
But of course,
assuming that the script for war on Iran began
with the one-ton bombs on Gaza residential
neighborhoods a few weeks ago, propelling
Hezbollah inevitably into action, and the specter
of wider war getting more and more imminent as we
witness the ever-expanding list of "targets" by
Israel, now including government buildings in both
Gaza and Lebanon.
Ze'ev Schiff, considered
a top Israeli military analysts, penned an article
titled "Invitation for escalation: Take note of
what hasn't been hit" arguing that the Israeli air
raids were deliberately selective, sparing the
Lebanese government and army and focusing on
Hezbollah strongholds. But wire reports of
"colossal damage" to Beirut in retaliation for the
Hezbollah rocket attacks on Haifa tell a
distinctly different story, that is, a spiraling
conflict that is fast turning the capital city of
a sovereign nation to rubble.
Not to be
outdone by the Israeli apologists, New York Times
columnist David Brooks disingenuously penned an
opinion article in the Sunday paper titled "As
Israel withdraws, its enemies go berserk".
Putting the discourse of Israel as the
aggrieved party to full throttle, Brooks and other
like-minded pundits are busy cultivating an
ill-informed American public, as there is no
serious attempt by the US media to bring home the
Palestinians' sufferings to Americans. There are
not even half-decent reports on their plight after
the recent barrage of lethal Israel attacks
throwing Gaza into "semi-feudalism", other than a
passing reference in the New York Times that there
is no electricity or adequate running water,
causing the beginning of a massive health
epidemic. As Arnold Toynbee once wrote in A
Study of History, "The absent are always in
the wrong."
A war to create Pax
Israelica? A disconcerting truth, revealed
recently by two prominent Jewish American
political scientists, about the extraordinary
control of United States' foreign policy by the
pro-Israel forces, has now been fully confirmed by
the empirical realities of this brutal war.
Despite dire warnings by certain US
politicians, such as Senator John Warner, the Bush
administration has failed to call on Israel to
halt its offensive, opting instead to focus on
Syria and Iran - reminding one of the Vietnam War
when Moscow or Peking (Beijing) were often blamed
for the efforts of the North Vietnamese.
History unfortunately repeats itself more
often on the tragic side, for otherwise we would
not be witnessing such concerted scapegoating of
Syria and Iran for the two-pronged warfare Israel
has deliberately ignited. On the one hand, this is
to dismantle the Palestinian Authority and return
the Palestinians to the status quo ante, somewhat
similar to the millet system in the old Ottoman
Empire (in the best-case scenario). And on the
other hand, seeking the "implementation of the UN
resolution" calling for the disarming of Lebanese
militias.
Of course, from an observer's
point of view, it is ironic that Israel has no
qualms about disregarding other relevant United
Nations resolutions, above all 242 and 338, which
call for the restoration of rights of
Palestinians, focusing selectively on a resolution
pertaining to a sovereign nation.
As the
tide of war intensifies, it is increasingly
obvious that Israel's hidden objective is to
inflict such mortal wounds on the weak nation of
Lebanon as to bring it to its knees and thus take
a giant step toward its grandiose objective of a
Pax Israelica.
A big regional superpower,
bounded in a small physical space and bloody,
ill-defined borders, Israel's warmongering is not
a result of its absence of policy, as claimed by
The Nation's recent editorial. Rather, it is the
result of a sedimented power dynamism better
understood from the prism of the (Michel)
Foucaultian theoretical framework, which shows how
the operation of (sacred) knowledge/power of
Zionist ideology has now manifested itself in the
deadly form of military regression that Israel has
opted for in Lebanon and the occupied territories.
Indeed, Gideon Levy and other Israeli
liberals currently bemoaning Israel's "war of
choice" miss this crucial point that long ago was
articulated by the likes of Maxime Rodinson in his
writings on Israel as a post-colonialist,
expansionist state, for the very motif of this
state militates against anything short of a
"Greater Israel".
The key question is, of
course, if the present architects of this state
will ever settle for the less-than-grandiose
notion of a tiny Jewish state in a sea of Arabs.
Looking back, at Israel's masterly use of
preemptive warfare, most vividly demonstrated in
the course of the 1967 war, and its clever
maneuvers of taking half-steps toward the
fulfillment of a "two-state" solution, such as the
Oslo Agreements, only somehow to nullify those
measures under one excuse or another, then their
breach of peace with Lebanon and the Palestinian
people is anything but surprising.
Rather,
Israel's actions today fully conform with its
prior history, and its cyclical pattern of warfare
with its Arab subjects and neighbors. Israel's
strategy of provoking the "hostile other", eg, by
assassination of a Hamas chief on June 8 and its
"mistaken" shelling of Gaza, killing scores of
civilians, without venturing a word of apology to
the innocent victims, is indeed quite familiar in
the annals of Arab-Israeli conflict, as is its
strategy of massive, overwhelming response to a
token breach from Lebanon.
A more
penetrating vision may, no doubt, discern some
underlying, disconcerting realities, about the
nature of world politics, role of power and the
premature post-Cold War predictions of the world's
passage beyond the old paradigm known as
"realism". The military logic of action by Israel,
discarding all peaceful options with the
Palestinian people, is indicative of a Leviathan
running rampant, in a world supposedly led by the
US "unipolar moment".
Yet that moment is
increasingly turning a different color, that is,
as the appendage of a much smaller state, whose
supporters "wield political power disproportionate
to their number", to paraphrase Toynbee. To add to
Toynbee's insight, as the biased interpretations
of the present conflict cited above clearly show,
wielding media power is a key as to how this
political power has come to such heights that
bedevil and mesmerizes those who study it today.
Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the
author of After Khomeini: New Directions in
Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and
co-author of "Negotiating Iran's Nuclear
Populism", Brown Journal of World Affairs, Volume
XII, Issue 2, Summer 2005, with Mustafa Kibaroglu.
He also wrote "Keeping Iran's nuclear potential
latent", Harvard International Review. He is
author of Iran's Nuclear
Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction.
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