Fruit of the Vine

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a blog called, “U.S. and Israel”. It was written in response to the incident involving the Freedom Flotilla which attempted to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza. In the blog I suggested that the U.S. could have addressed our own geo-political designs and advanced the interests of peace and the two-state solution in the Middle East by having our U.N. Security Council representative join with the other fourteen members of the Council and make the vote of condemnation against the Israeli action unanimous. Subsequent events have articulated my reasoning better than my words.

Recently Israel has lifted the ban on many non-military and non-lethal items and sundry materials as drywall, food, candy, musical instruments, and shampoo, which had been denied as punishment on the population of Gaza for not accepting and then resisting Israeli hegemony over any and all disputed territory they wish to unilaterally define as Israel. The only weapon arrayed against Israel to force this concession was world opinion. One would have to be a moral contortionist of the first order to twist into objection of this development. My question is what could have been the benefit to the U.S. if it had at least feigned a decent respect for the opinion of mankind and got on the “right” side of this issue? Could our wise, highly educated, and experienced diplomats not have anticipated the righteous anger of the rest of the world when the sordid details of the Israeli blockade were forced onto the brightly lit public stage by the Freedom Flotilla debacle?

I have no objection to friendship, and even alliance with Israel, but when judged by geo-political norms we have more than a “special relationship” with Israel. We treat Israel as if it were “special”. What I mean is that when the U.S. serially takes such pained, uncomfortable, lonely, and illogical positions to stand in support of Israel, contrary to the vast preponderance of world judgment, as after the Goldstone Report and the recent incident for example, the variance with practical global diplomacy and our own broad selfish interests, seems to infer a glaringly atypical and anomalous geo-political stratagem, and a singular compartmentalized Weltansicht reserved for only the “Jewish” state, rather than the political entity of Israel. What other conclusion can be drawn from a side-by-side comparison of the modern, rich, technologically advanced, military powerful, nuclear, first-world nation of Israel, and the weak, impoverished, divided and demilitarized third world indigenous populations of Gaza and the West Bank, whom in the Weltanschauung encouraged in dialectally deprived American minds, somehow threaten the existence of Israel, instead of the other way round? In a particularly Orwellian transposition, this is presented to us by our supposedly “unbiased media” as “moral equivalence”. And after decades of rhythmic repetition this perverted depiction of reality is mostly unquestioned by the American public at large.

So, what if the U.S. had stood with the other members of the Security Council and virtually all of the General Assembly, to oppose a blockade which was acknowledged as immoral, once called under world scrutiny, by it being terminated? I suggest it was an easy call. We would have gained political and moral credibility amongst those who have ceased to hope for fairness and evenhandedness in our Middle East policy. And that could only be a benefit should we seek to find friends instead of simply inheriting Israel’s enemies.