USA: America's coming Nakba

Is the US reaping the effects of its military domination of the Middle East and unconditional support for Israel, asks William Cook

"From the moment we took on a role that included the permanent military domination of the world, we were on our own -- feared, hated, corrupt and corrupting, maintaining 'order' through state terrorism and bribery, and given to megalomaniac rhetoric and sophistries that virtually invited the rest of the world to unite against us. We had mounted the Napoleonic tiger. The question was, would we -- and could we -- ever dismount?" -- US author Chalmers Johnson in The Sorrows of Empire.

Johnson's prescient observations, made years ago, erupted in full view of the world community recently as Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and US President Barack Obama attempted to control the tiger unleashed by the creation of the state of Israel in the midst of the Arab world -- by deceit, theft, terrorism and military might -- faced now with the Arab Spring rising from the ashes of fallen dictators.

Coercion, bribery and military might created an illusion of peaceful stability as long as agreements providing billions of dollars for security police, military training by the US and technical and ordnance support secured these dictators in power. But with America forced to do the bidding of its adopted child by the "corpocracy" that governs the empire and its unending need for wars to sustain its economic growth, it finds itself woefully weak as its forces futilely attempt to contain terrorism throughout the Middle East.

Now, America finds itself bereft of power, bereft of resources and bereft of friends, manipulated by Zionists like Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert and Netanyahu who disdain America's weakness, holding its Congress prisoner by coercion, bribery and deceit -- the very strategies that Israel has used against the people of the Middle East to create the illusion of peace.

Ironically, as Obama lectured AIPAC and Netanyahu in recent weeks, he drew a demographic map that forces both Israel and the world community to take notice of what the Israeli Likud Party really stands for, even as it declares that "peace is a primary objective of the state of Israel."

The Palestinian population in historic Palestine will equal the Jewish population before 2014 (Palestine Bureau of Statistics). That "fact on the ground" makes the land west of the Jordan River have a Palestinian majority, and the irony rests in a little-noticed Likud statement that "the government of Israel flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan River."

Not only is this declaration a total rejection of a Palestinian state by the Israeli government (comparable, indeed, to that of Hamas in the latter's denial of the Israeli state), it does so even when confronted by the inevitable reality that Jews will be a minority in Palestine. Denial of a Palestinian state will result in Israel becoming a minority-controlled apartheid, non- democratic state like South Africa was decades ago.

But Obama's lecture went beyond population figures. He attempted to teach the Israelis that walls and chain-link fences cannot contain the projected 6.1 million population even with rolled-up barbed wire, watchtowers and sophisticated technology. How can Israel manage to contain a population greater than its own on approximately 15 per cent of historic Palestine, while its own population occupies 85 per cent? How can the world community grapple with the injustice of such a situation, especially since these figures do not include the 5.6 million refugees living in various Arab lands?

Under international law, these people have a right to return, and many of them would have a right to return to land now claimed by Israel. Obama is suggesting that it would behoove Israel to accept a settlement that would provide adequate land and resources for the Palestinians, or face the inevitable dissolution of the Jewish state as a one-state solution becomes a de facto reality. In 2002, Saudi Arabia proffered a peace plan based on the 1967 borders and carrying with it full recognition of the state of Israel by all Arab countries. Israel and the US rejected it out of hand.

While Obama did not spell out what the Israeli government must do, he did note that "the times they are a changin'". No longer will it be possible, Obama implied, to cull out of an elite few those who can be bribed into a pseudo-peace agreement with Israel, like those that existed in Egypt and Jordan, or force into play oil deals with Muammar Gaddafi look-alikes, or invade illegally a nation that has done nothing against the US, as happened in Iraq and Afghanistan, installing thereby a complacent leader who will do the US's will.

No, the times have changed. Today, Arabs are aware of America's depleted resources, understand its economic crisis and towering debt, realise the vice being turned by Palestinian population growth on the Israelis, realise that justice demands equality for themselves and the Palestinians, and have the knowledge to force this awareness on the international community through the United Nations General Assembly.

Obama knows all too well how little power he possesses as president of the United States. He knows that the representatives of the American people are owned by corporate power and the Israeli lobbies. This means that Obama cannot pass any legislation, foreign or domestic, if he confronts the Zionists that control the US government, nor can he expect re-election. He is a shackled man, subservient to his overseers. But he also knows that America is threatened by this subservience, that its soldiers are being used by a foreign power, and that hatred of Americans festers in those occupied by Israeli troops.

Journalist Mark Perry has described an unprecedented bombshell briefing with US Admiral Mike Mullen, in which the views of senior Arab leaders that the US administration was ineffectual and incapable of standing up to Israel were conveyed, as were those of US General Petraeus, who sees the so- called "special relationship" with Israel as putting American lives and interests at risk.

This January 2010 briefing was unprecedented. No previous CENTCOM commander had ever expressed himself on what is essentially a political issue, which is why the briefers were careful to tell Mullen that their conclusions followed from a December 2009 tour of the region where, on Petraeus's instructions, they had spoken to senior Arab leaders.

"Everywhere they went, the message was pretty humbling," a Pentagon officer familiar with the briefing said. "America was not only viewed as weak, but its military posture in the region was eroding."

The following is taken from Petraeus's statement before the US Senate Armed Services Committee in March 2010: "the enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbours present distinct challenges to our ability to advance our interests in the AOR [area of responsibility]. Israeli-Palestinian tensions often flare into violence and large-scale armed confrontations. The conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of US favouritism for Israel."

"Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of US partnerships with governments and peoples in the AOR and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world. Meanwhile, Al-Qaeda and other militant groups exploit that anger to mobilise support. The conflict also gives Iran influence in the Arab world through its clients, Lebanese Hizbullah and Hamas."

Obama understood the implications of the rebirth of desires for political change on the part of the peoples of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordan, Iran and even Palestine, most especially Palestine, as the latter desires overflowed onto the desks of the United Nations representatives demanding recognition of the besieged and occupied citizens of Palestine.

With action expected in September, when the countries of South America, Asia, most of Europe and the whole of the Arab world are likely to accept into membership of the UN the state of Palestine on the 1967 borders, the long ordeal of the Palestinian people, 63 years of aborted peace initiatives by the state of Israel, will be ended.

The vote will cast Israel into an untenable position, since it will require of the United States that it abandon its position as protector of this state that has defied the UN for all these years, making the very intention of the UN irrelevant and the desires of the world community moot. Obama's speeches before the US Congress and AIPAC will either force Netanyahu to capitulate to peace negotiations that establish a viable Palestinian state, or have the United Nations and not the US serve as broker to make the Palestinian state a reality, something Israel fears.

Yet, the truth is that the state of Israel itself was accepted into the United Nations by a vote of the General Assembly in 1949, thereby making moot a similar vote on behalf of the Palestinians. Only by having the UN intervene in establishing legitimate borders for both countries, thus creating equality at the outset, can the potential for a true and just peace be made possible.

Netanyahu, by contrast, has ignored these implications and attempted to defend the megalomaniac rhetoric of the Israeli state. This is a rhetoric that decries the threat inherent in the Hamas Charter not to recognise the Israeli state, but fails to tell the world of its own Likud Platform that flatly rejects the existence of a Palestinian state. It is a rhetoric that bemoans the 1967 borders as indefensible for Israel, while remaining silent on the massacres inflicted on the Palestinians before and after the implementation of the UN partition plan that resulted in the confiscation of 21,000 dunams of land in Galilee, Al-Muthalath and Negev.

This is a rhetoric that declares the settlements must remain in the West Bank together with the apartheid highways that only Jews may use, despite the fact that there are upwards of 517,774 Jews spotted throughout the West Bank, making a viable Palestine state impossible, while an additional 1,496 dunams of land have been confiscated to construct the Expansion and Annexation Wall for the expanded settlements.

It is a rhetoric that demands that the Palestinians recognise Israel as a democratic and Jewish state, even though that by definition is an oxymoron and in practice makes Arab-Israelis second-class citizens, while Israel rejects the idea that a Palestinian state can exist west of the Jordan River. It is a rhetoric that demands that the Palestinians reject violence, even though it is Israel that occupies their land illegally, together with Syrian and Lebanese land, and has exercised the unrestrained slaughter of Palestinians since its inception, a fact recorded in countless UN resolutions.

In this season of remembrances, it is incumbent upon the people of the United States to reflect on the role they played in the birth of the state of Israel and the catastrophe inflicted upon the people of Palestine. Ironically, most Americans can recall neither the Israeli declaration of independence nor the Palestinian Nakba, yet in 2011, the Israelis' existence economically, politically and internationally grows from the decades of unconditional support the US government has provided to the terrorist state of Israel.

Ironically, as Obama has implied in his reactions to the changing conditions in the Middle East, America's "unshaken support" for the state of Israel has brought upon it the world's condemnation as a nation that has lost any semblance of justice for the humiliated and defenseless, becoming thereby a nation that is distrusted, dishonoured and dismissed.

Perhaps this is the catastrophe of American power policy that seeks the domination of the world for the American corporate elite.

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William Cook is professor of English at the University of La Verne in southern California. The Plight of the Palestinians was published last year by Macmillan.