“I can only assume he [incoming Defense Secretary Robert Gates] has yet to get to grips with the understandings that exist between us [the Israelis] and the Americans.”
So
spoke a retired Israeli diplomat to a Reuters reporter on condition of anonymity.
The condescending implication is that former CIA chief Robert Gates—leaving his post as Texas A&M University President and holding a Ph.D. in Russian and Soviet history from Georgetown University plus a L.H.D. from William & Mary—has never been tutored in the finer points of U.S.-Israeli relations.
The occasion of the snotty assessment was Gates’ having mentioned Israel’s unmentionables—her nuclear arsenal—during his confirmation hearings yesterday. He did this while doing something that has probably never been done before, at least not in prime time: offer a hint of an explanation for why Iran might think it needs nuclear weapons. Here are the offending words:
They [the Iranians] are surrounded by powers with nuclear weapons, Pakistan to their east, the Russians to the north, the Israelis to the west and us in the Persian Gulf.
So Israel has nuclear weapons. So what? Conveniently, former President Jimmy Carter offers an answer.
In an op-ed piece for today’s
Los Angeles Times he discusses the reaction, including stony silence, to his latest book,
Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid. According to its author the book
describes the abominable oppression and persecution in the occupied Palestinian territories, with a rigid system of required passes and strict segregation between Palestine's citizens and Jewish settlers in the West Bank. An enormous imprisonment wall is now under construction, snaking through what is left of Palestine to encompass more and more land for Israeli settlers. In many ways, this is more oppressive than what blacks lived under in South Africa during apartheid. I have made it clear that the motivation is not racism but the desire of a minority of Israelis to confiscate and colonize choice sites in Palestine, and then to forcefully suppress any objections from the displaced citizens.
As for racism not being a motivation: Zionism is a settler movement, and settling Jews has meant displacing Arabs. It’s hard to displace by force people who enjoy equal dignity with yourself. It’s usually necessary to dehumanize those whom you would systematically mistreat. To spell out Gates’ implicit point (
not his own political commitments, I hasten to stress): if the Iranians regard Zionists as proven Muslim-dehumanizers with nukes, they might very well conclude that they need nukes of their own to neutralize the Israelis'.
Everyone understands such reasoning, even if not everyone condones it. But you’re not only not supposed to talk about it, you’re not supposed to say anything that might draw attention to it. But Gates let the cat out of the bag, and the major media will now dutifully shepherd it back in.
Anyway, it’s one thing for a leftist intellectual to shine a klieg light on the Hell that Israelis have made for Palestinians. It’s quite another for a former President to do so. And when one of them does, he can forget about receiving the customary deference shown to members of his elite club.
Before
Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid even hit the stands, for instance, incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi clarified that Carter “does not speak for the Democratic Party on Israel,” although he once did. What happened since those days?
The New Republic chief editor Martin Peretz exuded his usual Zionist elegance,
calling the book "tendentious, dishonest and stupid."
In a major American newspaper and with the candor shown recently by certain tenured Ivy League professors, also beloved of Mr. Peretz, Carter observed that
It would be almost politically suicidal for members of Congress to espouse a balanced position between Israel and Palestine, to suggest that Israel comply with international law or to speak in defense of justice or human rights for Palestinians. Very few would ever deign to visit the Palestinian cities of Ramallah, Nablus, Hebron, Gaza City or even Bethlehem and talk to the beleaguered residents.
What is even more difficult to comprehend is why the editorial pages of the major newspapers and magazines in the United States exercise similar self-restraint, quite contrary to private assessments expressed quite forcefully by their correspondents in the Holy Land.
Since those for whom support of Israel has the force of religious duty control those pages, however, it is not difficult to comprehend. Carter should press his implicit question: just why does Zionist-compliant behavior enjoy privileged status in America's media and corridors of power? Other than Zionist control, what are possible explanations for the united front of silence that has greeted his book?
This week, twice, the establishment spilled a few beans in front of the American people. Will they seize upon it and start snapping out of their thralldom to the Zionist enterprise headquartered in Washington?
Probably not. They’re too busy wishing everyone a Merry Christmas and Peace on Earth while paying with their taxes for nukes and segregation in the land of Bethlehem, Nazareth, and Galilee.
