- Who really is running America's Mideast policy? Last
week, the astounded world saw the grotesque spectacle of President George
W. Bush pleading in vain with Ariel Sharon, leader of a nation of only
6.3 million people which receives almost $5 billion in annual U.S. aid,
to cease laying waste the Occupied West Bank. Ignoring worldwide condemnation
and demands from the UN Security Council, Sharon ordered his armour, much
of it American-supplied, to accelerate shooting up and bulldozing Palestinian
towns, refugee camps and all symbols of Palestinian identity or statehood.
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- Twenty years ago, Sharon invaded Lebanon, "to crush
Palestinian terrorism." His big guns and warplanes blasted Beirut
for three weeks, killing 17,000 civilians. Today, he remains determined
to hold Arab lands Israel conquered in 1967 and to destroy any hopes or
vestiges of a viable Palestinian state. President Bush and senior aides
Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell were left looking weak, indecisive, and
inept. Bush clearly is a political soulmate of ultra-hawk Sharon; they
share a mutual detestation for Yasser Arafat and, it would seem, for Arabs
in general. Bush has been encouraging Sharon's attacks on Palestine for
months. But Israel's invasion of the West Bank - reminiscent of Soviet
tanks crushing Hungary in 1956 - gravely threatened America's Mideast client
regimes, so Bush had to demand Sharon relent. SHEER FARCE In an act of
sheer farce, Powell was sent on a slow boat to Israel, via Madrid and Morocco.
Before Powell even arrived, former Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu summoned
fawning U.S. senators and arrogantly informed them Powell's mission would
fail. While the rest of the world condemned Israel's invasion and destruction
of the Palestinian ghettos, not a peep was heard from the White House,
Congress or America's media about Israel's violation of U.S. law in using
U.S.-supplied armour and warplanes against civilians. Nor about Israel's
violation of the Geneva Conventions and other international laws.
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- There were no protests when Israel's Shimon Peres described
massacres of Palestinian civilians by Israeli soldiers. Nor even a tut-tut
when Sharon named to his cabinet a fanatical right-wing general who advocates
ethnic cleansing of Palestinians - the same crime for which the U.S. pursued
Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic. To be sure, there is deep and justified sympathy
in the U.S. for the frightful suffering Israel has endured at the hands
of suicide bombers, and its need for self-defence. Still, why was America
alone in defending Israel's ruthless punishment of the Palestinians? How
could Bush, only a few weeks ago, still bathing in the bogus glory of a
military "triumph" against a few thousand medieval tribesman
in Afghanistan, be so suddenly made to look foolish and impotent by events
in the Mideast? Simply put, Sharon's right-wing Likud party has come to
dominate U.S. Mideast policy through its powerful American lobby, which
"guides" Congress. Under pressure from the Israel lobby, 89 out
of 100 senators and at least 280 congressmen recently demanded Bush give
Sharon carte blanche to crush Palestine.
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- As the Israeli writer Uri Avnery wryly noted, if the
Israel lobby gave orders to repeal the Ten Commandments, Congress would
vote in favour. America's media is strongly pro-Israel and averse to dissenting
views. A coterie of hawkish, Israel-first neo-conservatives dominates media
opinion-making and the Pentagon, leading the charge for a war against Iraq,
Iran, and Syria. One even helped to write Bush's foolish "axis of
evil" speech. Tight U.S. mid-term elections are approaching. Bush
does not want to anger American Jewish voters who believe Israel is in
mortal danger. GEORGE SR. ROASTED Bush obviously recalls that when his
father sought to pressure Israel to halt building illegal settlements,
Bush Sr. was unfairly roasted by the media as an anti-Semite and forced
to back down. No wonder Sharon can thumb his nose at the White House. Bush
likes to talk tough, but this crisis has shown him to be the exact opposite.
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- In Texas, they'd say, "big hat, no land." Bush
has so far failed to take any real action to halt America's Mideast interests
being undermined by the bloodbath in Palestine and Israel. The best way
to protect Israelis from terror attacks is to withdraw their 200,000 illegal
settlers and end their colonial rule over the West Bank, Gaza and Golan;
divide East Jerusalem into Jewish, Muslim, and Christian sectors, have
NATO troops police peace accords and either normalize relations with the
Arabs, as the Saudis propose, or build a wall to isolate Israel from its
neighbours. This cannot be done so long as settlements remain. Sharon is
dead set against this sensible idea. He needs to be pushed the way Dwight
Eisenhower ordered Israel, in 1956, to get out of the Sinai, which it had
invaded and occupied - or else.
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- Had Bush Eisenhower's integrity or genuine patriotism,
he would compel Sharon to accept the wise Saudi peace plan and forget dreams
of recreating biblical Greater Israel. This would be a boon to Jews and
Arabs alike. But Bush junior is no Eisenhower. His dithering over the Mideast
has made the United States appear both helpless and a tacit supporter of
Israel's West Bank repression - and made America the potential target of
more terrorist attacks from the enraged Arab world.
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- http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/margolis_apr14.html
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