United States Archives - Writeside.com

Today’s Israel Should Not Exist

At least, not in its present form.

Before we go any further, please note that this post is most definitely not antisemitic. We have many Jewish friends, both here in the U.S. and overseas, and we treasure them. We salute Jewish achievements in the sciences and the arts, particularly those in literature and music. We would like all Jewish people to live in peace, unthreatened and in harmony with others everywhere. Sadly, though, this does not seem possible.

Antisemitism is very real, of course, and it—especially its horrendous manifestation in the Holocaust—underlies Israel’s foundation. It is also why well-meaning people continue to believe in and support Israel, even today. Yet we would argue that supporting Israel at the close of 2024 is in itself antisemitic. Israel today is antithetical to true Jewish values, and to any value system that incorporates empathy and fair treatment of others. A country run by criminals, and war criminals at that? Its current government and military policies are a blight on the Jewish people. Israel has become a criminal enterprise which imposes apartheid on many of its citizens and war crimes and genocide on the Palestinians within its territory. In the latter part of this year, the American-funded IDF has expanded its genocidal campaign to Lebanon and Syria as well.

Amnesty International concluded, after a nine-month study, that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

The Nakba of 1948, when many Palestinians were forced from their land and/or murdered for it, provided a preview of what was to come. Yet the death of some six million Jews in World War II was still uppermost in world leaders’ minds and it was generally believed the Jewish people deserved a haven, a safe refuge to help atone for all they had suffered. Israel was not established in the most ethical or humane manner, but there was a need for a Jewish homeland, it was felt.

In hindsight, this was obviously the wrong approach. How many peace talks have there been? How many proposed two-state solutions? How many wars?

A further effect of Israel’s steady descent into the monster state it is today has been the complicity it has imposed on its supporters, the U.S. foremost among them. Joe Biden’s legacy will be forever smeared by his total embrace of Israel’s actions, much more so than by his inept loss of political power.

Even at this writing, though, strong criticism of Israel is censored or downplayed. Students voicing their consciences are punished. Mainstream media are mostly silent. To the extent Israel’s atrocities are reported, they are muted to a point where they become background noise. Israel bombed a hospital/refugee camp today, and X people were killed. Ho-hum. The story is buried deep within a section or quickly mouthed in one sentence during broadcasts. “Settlers” murder Palestinians with impunity in the West Bank, and that seems to go completely unreported.

Just today (December 20), the New York Times reported on yet another Israeli bombing on a hospital in northern Gaza. The headline was “‘We Just Want Mercy’: A Gaza Hospital Pleads for a Respite.” Fair enough, as far as it goes. But the story was nowhere to be found on the paper’s home page. It’s become old news, you see.

Kamal Adwan Hospital this month. Credit: Agence France-Press—Getty Images.

America’s involvement with and complicity in Israel’s inhuman behavior will only grow stronger with the incoming administration. This will harm both countries, and many others in the world as well. After all, neither nation is particularly stable these days.

The atrocities Israel continues to perpetrate will eventually lead to its destruction, regardless of how long this may take. Decent Israel citizens should be planning now to seek improved lives elsewhere. Given current circumstances in the United States, there may be better options than here.

A Sick Relationship

The anniversary of the October 7 attack on Israel is rapidly approaching, so this seems an appropriate time to take stock of what, if anything, has changed in the never-ending Mideast horror show. The answer, unfortunately, is not much.

After October 7, there was a rightful condemnation of Hamas for the savagery and scale of its attacks on Israel citizens, and for the taking of Israeli hostages. Some 1,200 Israelis were killed, and around 250 were taken hostage. While some Arab and Muslim-majority countries (and some American college students) blamed Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories as the root cause of the attack, most global observers described the Hamas attack as terrorism.

Enemies of peace—U.S. & Israeli burning flags. — Enemies of peace. Source: independent.co.uk.

Almost immediately, though, Israel returned to the lopsided violence it has displayed from the time of the Nakba. Roughly 41,000 Palestinians have been killed to date, of whom nearly 18,000 were women and children. The actual number is probably higher. These people, mostly innocent civilians, were not just killed, they were killed with a vengeance—2,000-lb. bombs dropped on hospitals and shelters, in a campaign of indiscriminate destruction which has virtually leveled the entire Gazan infrastructure. And now the contagion of Israeli violence has spread to the West Bank, where “settlers” are murdering Palestinians with impunity. It is an old, old story: brutal force prevails. And it is a story in which Americans are strongly complicit.

(Americans, so far, have not been identified as complicit in the exploding pagers incident in Lebanon, a particularly sadistic example of Israeli belligerence.)

There is little doubt that Benjamin Netanyahu and his corrupt, right-wing government are guilty of numerous war crimes. Netanyahu is widely viewed as perpetuating the “war” (an inappropriate term for such a one-sided conflict) to avoid criminal prosecution, with no regard for Israeli hostages (or humanity in general) whatsoever. Regular Israeli citizens have repeatedly protested his government’s actions, to no avail. Netanyahu is doing what he is doing with American-supplied materiel and support, but this is not the only instance of the sick relationship between the two countries.

It is sickening to see Secretary of State Antony Blinken shuffling ineffectually back and forth, mouthing pieties about Israel’s right to self-defense and gently tapping Netanyahu’s wrist for various atrocities. It is sickening to see the elderly President Biden refusing to modify his support of Israel or significantly modify the American flow of weapons to the country, despite growing evidence of genocide in Gaza. And it is sickening to watch U.S. college students being arrested and punished for calling attention to that same genocide.

The U.S. presidential election occurs not long after the Oct. 7 anniversary. A Trump victory would only solidify America’s blind support of Israel. A Harris victory, though, might just tilt the relationship ever so slightly in the direction of justice.

The ultimate goal, as so many have said forever, is a two-state solution, where both nations are free and equal and Israel is no longer an apartheid state and an oppressor. That is the only way that Israel will ever be truly secure. This dream scenario seems as distant as ever, though. But that’s no reason why a new American president can’t nudge things toward the goal, by taking a firmer diplomatic stance with Israel and implementing a more rational policy of support, one which hinges on Israeli behavior.

A Wicked Problem

America is in existential peril. That’s no surprise; media here and abroad—including this blog—have charted the country’s decline for years. But the reason our peril is existential is less frequently noted. It is because there is no clear-cut solution for America’s afflictions, which means we are facing a wicked problem.

As Wikipedia defines it, a wicked problem is a problem “that cannot be fixed, where there is no single solution to the problem; ‘wicked’ denotes reistance to resolution, rather than evil.”

I take issue with the idea there is no evil involved in our present situation, though. To cite just one example, Joe Manchin, a man who places his personal wealth and power above the lives of his fellow citizens, could rationally be viewed as evil. So too could a U.S. president who urges his followers to violently attack the Capitol and overturn a democratic election. It’s likely neither man regards himself as evil, even as his actions produce starkly harmful results.

America’s backward steps have resonated loudly in recent months. Thanks to the far-right Supreme Court alone, the country has:

* Overturned Roe v. Wade—already, a raped 10-year-old has had to travel to another state for an abortion, and her provider has been repeatedly threatened.
* Dramatically expanded gun rights and proliferation, despite mass shootings on a near-weekly basis.
* Handicapped our ability to respond to climate change, even though climate change represents a growing emergency here and around the world.

These and other setbacks have caused the U.S. to drop once again in the annual Democracy Index, published by the Economist Intelligence Unit. Below, you see the top 15 democracies (click to enlarge), ranked by pluralism, civil liberties, functioning of government, political participation and political culture. We are not among them.

2021 Democracy Index, from the Economist Intelligence Unit.

Instead, we come in at #26 and are labeled a flawed democracy, along with Botswana, Slovenia and East Timor. Full democracies have a cumulative score of 8.01-10.00. Flawed democracies score from 6.01-8.00. The U.S. has a score of 7.85; this score has declined with every new index issued since 2006. We were last considered a full democracy in 2015.

So how can we address our wicked problem? That is indeed the question, and it’s one we’ll grapple with this year and next as we head toward a potentially cataclysmic 2024.

Is America Possible?

It’s an urgent question today, and I fear the answer is likely “no,” although I’d love to be persuaded otherwise. This compelling message from Amanda Johnson of the Working Families Party offers some interesting food for thought. I reproduce it here in observance of the Fourth.

July 4th is upon us. We’re all excited to spend time with friends and family grilling at BBQs and watching fireworks.

But as we celebrate our nation’s foundational myth, we owe it to ourselves to grapple with some of the darker parts of our story. The 4th of July in 1776 was a moment of revolution and democracy, but also a moment of colonialism, genocide, and slavery.

This founding tension is still with us today. We do ourselves no favors by closing our eyes to its presence in our lives. If we’re going to live in a country where everyone has the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, we need to have important, difficult conversations about how we build an America that will truly live up to its promise for everyone.

As we gather this July 4th, let’s try to answer the difficult question author Michelle Alexander asked in November: “Is America Possible?”

“In the words of William Faulkner, ‘the past is never dead. It’s not even past.’ What many of us have been attempting to do—build a thriving multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-faith, egalitarian democracy out of the rubble of slavery and genocide—has never been achieved in the history of the world. Some say it can never be done. Is America Possible?”¹

We know these conversations can be difficult to have. Try to approach this conversation from a place of personal connection and shared values, and understand that without this important work, we cannot have real change. We know it’s tough, but it’s worth it.

We’ve made a list of conversation starters to get you going:

What is your experience of freedom? How is your experience of freedom different from other folks? What are things you can do that others can’t?
What kind of America do you want to live in? What’s keeping that America from being possible for everybody?
What can we do to make our neighborhoods and communities safe for people of color? What are you doing to stand up for racial justice? If you’re part of a resistance group, how are you working with groups led by people of color?
How do we build communities where both safety and justice are the norm? How do police interact with different communities? What are alternatives to calling the police?

Having this conversation is a national tradition. On Independence Day in 1852, abolitionist Frederick Douglass said:

“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.”²

The U.S. was built by slaves, immigrants, and working people of all races for a small class of wealthy, white male land owners on land stolen from native peoples. This legacy of slavery, colonization, and exploitation still lingers today—in the shootings of Philando Castile and Charleena Lyles and lack of justice, in the exploitation of migrant labor, in the poverty of Appalachian coal towns and abandoned neighborhoods of post-industrial cities, in the construction of a dangerous pipeline on the lands of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe.

It lingers in our national myths that anyone can secure a prosperous future with enough grit and hard work —never mind the generations of public policies and corporate practices from Jim Crow to redlining to predatory lending to subprime mortgages to “too big to fail” that have put that prospect of security out of reach.

If we’re going to build an America that looks like the one we have in our hearts, we need to get to work today—and that work starts by acknowledging our past and creating a shared vision with one another.

I hope you and your family have a happy July 4th.

Amanda Johnson

Sources:

1. Michelle Alexander, Facebook. Nov. 13, 2016.

2. Frederick Douglass, “The Meaning of July 4th for the Negro.”

Amanda and the Working Families Party ask that you pledge to have a conversation about America with your friends and family.

Of course, the real conversation needs to take place with people who are not your friends and family. Good luck with that.