By Carl Davidson
LeftLinks Weekly April 5, 2024
President Biden's recent phone call with Israel's Netanyahu brings two metaphors to mind: a 'can of worms' and 'Pandora's box.'
The first is largely about the past and the second is about the future. Both are highly problematic.
For starters, both Biden and Bibi have presided over prolonged carnage. Biden backed George W. Bush in immediately declaring 'war' in 2001 when 9/11 was more accurately a 'crime against humanity' than a ‘war.’ Crashing two planes into the Twin Towers were criminal deeds by non-state actors, and those who carried out the actions all perished in doing so. However, the U.S. failed to pursue it as a crime, and use the help of Interpol as well as others, to arrest and bring those responsible to a court of justice. Instead, the result was 20 years of war against two countries that had nothing or very little to do with the actual deed. Hundreds of thousands are dead, and at war's end, Iraq is governed by allies of Iran. Afghanistan has the Taliban back in power. Plus the remnant of ISIS, created by the invasion of Iraq, remains an unwelcome presence back in remote areas of Afghanistan.
As for Israel, under the false banner of claiming 'a land without people for a people without land,' its various governments have been waging war with the Palestinian people living there, and in varying degrees, with their neighboring Arab allies, ever since 1948. The current Likud government, in practice, has been reasserting the original goal of making it a land for one people only, Jews from anywhere in the world, while killing, imprisoning, or 'transferring out' the indigenous population.
On Oct 7, 2023, Hamas launched an operation to enter Israel for several hours to kill 1200 Jews and capture just over 200 hostages. After unexplained hours of delay, Bibi declared 'war' rather than a crime, and vowed to liquidate Hamas. The result? Over 30,000 have died in Gaza so far, mostly children, and the population of Gaza faces a genocidal famine and the destruction of nearly all their homes and means of survival. Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law, has even suggested driving everyone from Gaza, then using bulldozers to level anything still standing, and commencing to building sea-front resorts and condos for Israelis.
So much for the can of worms. What about Pandora's box? Israel faces the same dialectic the U.S. faced in Vietnam and elsewhere. The more armed insurgents it kills, the more new insurgents will join the fight in more than a simple multiple of one. Hamas had about 30% approval in Gaza before Oct 7. It now has about 70% in the West Bank, where it had even less than 30% before. What does Netanyahu think all the surviving brothers, sisters, and cousins of all the children killed are going to think about Israel five or ten years from now?
In continuing to arm Israel, the U.S. has found itself utterly isolated in the world. Why does it cling to Israel? We know, or we should know by now, about all the imperialist and economic reasons the U.S. offered in the past for backing Israel in the first place. It was supposed to be our 'aircraft carrier on land' to protect U.S. interests in an oil-rich region while exercising hegemony over all the countries there who had turned or might turn to the USSR.
Now, the USSR is gone, and the Arab oil-producing countries have formed alliances of their own in a wider, nonaligned Global South. Still there are deeper reasons, going back to the can of worms. The U.S. and Israel are both settler states suppressing indigenous peoples. Due to numbers, technology, and military might, the U.S. won its 'Indian Wars,' even if much-reduced Native American survivors continued to resist. But the territory of Israel is about half Jewish and half Palestinian, about 6 million each. And as Israel discovered in 1948, not all of them, by far, are going to be pushed out at the point of a gun. Neither side is going anywhere. So now it faces the ironic contents of Pandora's box: the earlier victims of a terrible genocide are now themselves engaged in genocide.
Here in the U.S. we also face the dilemma of the two boxes. On one hand, we face those who want to 'Make America Great Again.' On the other hand, we see others proclaiming 'We have always been great, and still are. We are the United States of America.'
But who has the better claim? In fact, there has always been 'Two Americas' on a common terrain. In a sheer time, the MAGA people can claim dominance in over 200 of 250 years since 1776. The anti-MAGA people can claim some top status in about 50 of them. These were the years of multiracial democracy that pushed up from below, the Three Reconstructions--the first during and after the Civil War, the second from 1955 to 1975, and now the third beginning in 2008, but still vacillating.
What does this mean today? Both the U.S. and Israel face the common task of redefinition and reconstruction. To survive, Israel has to become a bi-national region with a state, federated or unitary, with equal rights for all peoples and religions. For the U.S. to survive becoming a fascist country with more wars on the horizon, the America of popular democracy has to defeat the Neo-confederacy of Trump, the America of war, slavery, and empire.
Neither of these is easy or guaranteed. But it's worth recalling the last item in Pandora's box after all the nasty Devils flew out: the Angel of Hope. When combined with optimism of the will, it might just see our third reconstruction go through to a new and much better order.
Good one Carl, well said, well written,