Tuesday, April 18, 2006
Suicide Attack in Israel
Another Palestinian suicide bomber struck yesterday, killing 9 and injuring many more in Tel Aviv.
It made the front pages of USA Today and The New York Times, of course. As before, I question if the Israeli reprisal will.
Israel is a nation of 6 million people. My own city of Chicago has three million people. The murder rate in Chicago has remained relatively stable for many years: about 600 victims of murder die in Chicago every year. In the last intifada 1,000 Israelis perished, compared to about 3,000 Palestinians. The intifada lasted for several years.
Extrapolate the City of Chicago to six million people and you will get 1,200 murders a year, or 3,600 over three years.
I think you understand where I’m going with this argument.
Israeli’s murder problem gets a lot of press in the United States. Israel has said for many years that it will not return the lands it conquered in 1967 until suicide bombing stops.
Of course, Israel’s governments have always said, for forty years now, that they will never return all of the land they took.
But even beyond that there have been many years over the last fifteen or so in which Israel both has been recognized by the Arab and Palestinian governments and in which suicide bombs have been very rare, years in which there was no active intifada. Israel still hasn’t ceded the land.
Not that any of that is relevant. Arguing that because your opponents are behaving lawlessly you have the right to behave lawlessly is a pathetic Tu Quoque argument that I tire of even having to refute. It’s like vigilante police arguing in court that because they’re fighting criminals, they have the right to beat up suspects in interrogation rooms.
But Israel doesn’t need to use good arguments because she has more guns than her neighbors, courtesy of the United States. Israel hasn’t moved off the land in 40 years, all the while making one bad argument after another. The arguments have never sold in the UN or in the international community. The guns have made a difference.
Israel has long been an American military base in the middle of Arab lands. Her lobby in this country is impressive, but it takes more than a single lobby to control the US government. The US defends Israel because it is in our national interests to do so. Of course, our “national interests” have been defined by successive presidents who saw geopolitical power as more important than human rights, common decency, or international law. These presidents thought Vietnam was a war worth fighting. These presidents thought the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua was worth supporting, as was the Hassan II monarchy in Morocco, as was Suharto in Indonesia.
If the people of the United States could actually hold presidents and congresses accountable to make them actually respond to the will of the people and our real national interests Israel would cease to be so brave in the face of the condemnation of the world.
This prospect, though unlikely for decades, is very possible. As long as Americans remain ignorant to the situation in the Middle East our politicians will continue to “Behave like wolves,” as our founding fathers said of political leaders who rule over ignorant people.
Americans, sadly enough, have never taken the time to care. Even when terrorism put Israel at the heart of the press attention of the western world on a regular basis in the 1970s and 1980s America still didn’t reexamine its relationship.
It might change American opinion if newspapers covered IDF strikes as assiduously as they cover the victims of suicide bombers. It might help if honest editorials were written. I can’t think of any city outside of New York where a newspaper honestly has to pander to regional interests in covering suicide attacks and ignoring reprisals to sell newspapers.
US governments have shown in the past that they will behave horribly in a very public way right up until people in the United States start demanding change. The Vietnam War was one example of that. So was segregation. Further back in our history, women’s right to vote was another. These positive changes didn’t come from far-sighted and mysteriously beneficent leaders making changes: these changes came from pressure from the bottom up, from protest, from votes, from letters.
Unfortunately, Israel is a different case. Those previous examples were about people living in the United States protesting conditions they had to live under, things that directly affected their lives, like the immigrant protests recently: the foreign policy of a foreign government is not one of those things.
At least, it wasn’t until September 11th. Instead of shedding our troublesome alliance with Israel and the despotisms of the Middle East the United States invaded two countries and is now rattling its sabre at a third. This is not responsible foreign policy.
# posted by BitterHarvest @ 5:24 PM 
