by Caitlin Johnstone - 3 Sep 2024
It’s wild when you realize that nobody can actually articulate a reason why Israel should be supported that is both logically coherent and morally defensible.
Westerners grow up being indoctrinated with the understanding that this tiny country in the middle east is super duper important and needs to be supported and defended at all cost, but if you examine the reasons given for why this is so as an adult, you find that none of them really hold water.
“Israel is the only place where Jews can be safe!”
This is clearly false. A Jewish person in New York City is self-evidently much, much safer than a Jewish person in Tel Aviv. Forcefully creating a brand new apartheid ethnostate dropped on top of a pre-existing civilization naturally means that Israel can only ever exist in perpetual violence, which places everyone who lives there in danger.
“The Jews deserve a homeland!”
Why? Why does any religion deserve to have a country of their own where members of that religion are in charge of everyone else and receive preferential treatment? There are more Mormons in the world than Jews, and they don’t have their own country. There are more Sikhs in the world than Jews, and they don’t have their own country. There’s no logically coherent reason why every religion should have its own nation state, and there’s no logically coherent reason why such a principle should apply to Jews but not to Scientologists.
“Israel is the only liberal democracy in the middle east.”
This one’s just silly. A genocidal apartheid regime which actively disenfranchises and abuses the Palestinian population is the exact opposite of “liberal” and “democratic”. But even if that was not the case, there is no logically coherent and morally defensible reason why any given region should have a representative of a particular political ideology in it, no matter how many people need to be murdered and oppressed to make it so.
“I support Israel’s existence but I oppose the mistreatment of Palestinians.”
This one is quite popular with the liberals, but it’s nonsensical and self-contradictory. Israel has been abusive to Palestinians throughout the entirety of its existence from its very inception; only in the imaginary fairy tales of liberal Zionists has it ever existed without tyranny, theft and murder, and only in their imaginary fairy tales can a Jewish ethnostate be dropped on top of a civilization of non-Jews in a way that could ever be without nonstop tyranny, theft and murder.
The only choices are a two-state solution which Israel is openly doing everything it can to prevent, and a one-state solution where everyone has equal rights which would per definition not be a Jewish state. Liberal Zionists pretend they live in a fairy fantasyland alternate timeline where this is not the reality. This is how liberals try to square the circle of supporting Israel when it’s morally indefensible; they simply invent an imaginary world in which it is moral, and pretend it’s a real possibility.
“Israel is essential for protecting our interests in the region.”
This one is logically coherent from a certain point of view, but it’s certainly not morally defensible.
There’s not even any logically coherent reason for any normal westerner to say that Israel protects “our” interests in the middle east. It is only logically coherent for the managers of the western empire to say that helping Israel wage the nonstop violent force necessary for its existence helps sow the chaos, tyranny, destabilization and division necessary to ensure their geostrategic domination of a resource-rich region and keep middle eastern nations from uniting into a superpower bloc who use their resources to advance their own interests around the world.
Contrary to what some people believe, Israel isn’t responsible for the existence of western warmongering — western warmongering is responsible for the existence of Israel. If there wasn’t an Israel they’d just invent another excuse to maintain a military presence in the middle east and keep sowing violence and chaos. Biden himself has acknowledged this, saying “Were there not an Israel the United States would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region.”
So from that perspective it does make logical sense to say that the western empire would have a harder time advancing its unipolarist objectives on the world stage without a destabilizing agent whose existence is wholly dependent upon constant western backing. And if you really want to go whole hog in siding with the imperialists’ reasoning for supporting Israel, you can also argue that Israel provides the perfect narrative cover for maintaining a military presence in the middle east.
For many years the final debate-ending argument against western military withdrawal from the middle east has been that it would ensure Israel’s destruction, because Israel’s neighbors would simply eliminate it without the deterrence of the US war machine there to protect it.
And if you take it as a given that Israel must continue to exist in its present iteration, it really is a debate-ending argument. If you take it as a given that Israel must be permitted to exist as an apartheid ethnostate which was artificially forced into existence in the mid-20th century, then of course there is no way it can exist without nonstop violence, and of course there is no way it can come out on the winning side of all that violence without the backing of the US-centralized empire.
What this means is that if you accept that Israel must continue to exist as it presently exists, you are necessarily accepting that the US and its western allies must retain a military stranglehold on the middle east. There is no way to maintain this artificially created astroturf state without nonstop violence, so you have to remain in a position to help inflict that violence at all times.
Which is mighty convenient for the US-centralized power structure, to say the least. But it is, of course, not morally defensible. It is not morally defensible to keep killing middle easterners year after year, decade after decade, in order to rule the world. It might be logically coherent, but it is also profoundly evil.
All arguments for supporting Israel fail either logically, morally, or both. Which is why so much propaganda goes into manipulating us into supporting this murderous regime, and why voices who oppose it are getting increasingly suppressed by establishment power structures.
It’s why the mass media have been demonstrably wildly biased toward the advancement of Israeli information interests in their reporting, and it’s why critics of Israeli atrocities like Richard Medhurst, Sarah Wilkinson and Mary Kostakidis have been outrageously persecuted in the UK and Australia.
They have no argument, so they are increasingly resorting to the blunt instrument.
When you peel away the layers, the arguments for keeping the Israel project going are all about domination and control, which is why more and more domination and control is being used to protect that project from scrutiny.
Israel, ultimately, is nothing but a nonstop war. And, like all wars, its existence depends on hiding the truth from the public.
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