Newsgroup: it.arti.cinema
Titolo: (MO) A Declaration of Independence From Israel

By Chris Hedges
July 2, 2007, Truthdig
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070702_a_declaration_of_independence_from_israel/
Israel, without the United States, would probably not exist.
The country came perilously close to extinction during the
October 1973 war when Egypt, trained and backed by the Soviet
Union, crossed the Suez and the Syrians poured in over the
Golan Heights.  Huge American military transport planes came
to the rescue. They began landing every half-hour to refit the
battered Israeli army, which had lost most of its heavy armor.
By the time the war was over, the United States had given
Israel $2.2 billion in emergency military aid.
The intervention, which enraged the Arab world, triggered the
OPEC oil embargo that for a time wreaked havoc on Western
economies.  This was perhaps the most dramatic example of the
sustained life-support system the United States has provided
to the Jewish state.
Israel was born at midnight May 14, 1948.  The U.S. recognized
the new state 11 minutes later.  The two countries have been
locked in a deadly embrace ever since.
Washington, at the beginning of the relationship, was able to
be a moderating influence.  An incensed President Eisenhower
demanded and got Israel's withdrawal after the Israelis
occupied Gaza in 1956. During the Six-Day War in 1967, Israeli
warplanes bombed the USS Liberty.  The ship, flying the U.S.
flag and stationed 15 miles off the Israeli coast, was
intercepting tactical and strategic communications from both
sides. The Israeli strikes killed 34 U.S. sailors and wounded
171. The deliberate attack froze, for a while, Washington's
enthusiasm for Israel.  But ruptures like this one proved to
be only bumps, soon smoothed out by an increasingly
sophisticated and well- financed Israel lobby that set out to
merge Israeli and American foreign policy in the Middle East.
Israel has reaped tremendous rewards from this alliance.  It
has been given more than $140 billion in U.S. direct economic
and military assistance.  It receives about $3 billion in
direct assistance annually, roughly one-fifth of the U.S.
foreign aid budget.  Although most American foreign aid
packages stipulate that related military purchases have to be
made in the United States, Israel is allowed to use about 25
percent of the money to subsidize its own growing and
profitable defense industry.  It is exempt, unlike other
nations, from accounting for how it spends the aid money.  And
funds are routinely siphoned off to build new Jewish
settlements, bolster the Israeli occupation in the Palestinian
territories and construct the security barrier, which costs an
estimated $1 million a mile.
The barrier weaves its way through the West Bank, creating
isolated pockets of impoverished Palestinians in ringed
ghettos.  By the time the barrier is finished it will probably
in effect seize up to 40 percent of Palestinian land.  This is
the largest land grab by Israel since the 1967 war.  And
although the United States officially opposes settlement
expansion and the barrier, it also funds them.
The U.S. has provided Israel with nearly $3 billion to develop
weapons systems and given Israel access to some of the most
sophisticated items in its own military arsenal, including
Blackhawk attack helicopters and F-16 fighter jets.  The
United States also gives Israel access to intelligence it
denies to its NATO allies. And when Israel refused to sign the
nuclear nonproliferation treaty, the United States stood by
without a word of protest as the Israelis built the region's
first nuclear weapons program.
U.S. foreign policy, especially under the current Bush
administration, has become little more than an extension of
Israeli foreign policy.  The United States since 1982 has
vetoed 32 Security Council resolutions critical of Israel,
more than the total number of vetoes cast by all the other
Security Council members. It refuses to enforce the Security
Council resolutions it claims to support.  These resolutions
call on Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories.
There is now volcanic anger and revulsion by Arabs at this
blatant favoritism.  Few in the Middle East see any
distinction between Israeli and American policies, nor should
they.  And when the Islamic radicals speak of U.S. support of
Israel as a prime reason for their hatred of the United
States, we should listen.  The consequences of this one-sided
relationship are being played out in the disastrous war in
Iraq, growing tension with Iran, and the humanitarian and
political crisis in Gaza.  It is being played out in Lebanon,
where Hezbollah is gearing up for another war with Israel, one
most Middle East analysts say is inevitable.  The U.S. foreign
policy in the Middle East is unraveling.  And it is doing so
because of this special relationship. The eruption of a
regional conflict would usher in a nightmare of catastrophic
proportions.
There were many in the American foreign policy establishment
and State Department who saw this situation coming. The
decision to throw our lot in with Israel in the Middle East
was not initially a popular one with an array of foreign
policy experts, including President Harry Truman's secretary
of state, Gen. George Marshall.  They warned there would be a
backlash.  They knew the cost the United States would pay in
the oil-rich region for this decision, which they feared would
be one of the greatest strategic blunders of the postwar era.
And they were right.  The decision has jeopardized American
and Israeli security and created the kindling for a regional
conflagration.
The alliance, which makes no sense in geopolitical terms, does
makes sense when seen through the lens of domestic politics.
The Israel lobby has become a potent force in the American
political system.  No major candidate, Democrat or Republican,
dares to challenge it.  The lobby successfully purged the
State Department of Arab experts who challenged the notion
that Israeli and American interests were identical. Backers of
Israel have doled out hundreds of millions of dollars to
support U.S. political candidates deemed favorable to Israel.
They have brutally punished those who strayed, including the
first President Bush, who they said was not vigorous enough in
his defense of Israeli interests.  This was a lesson the next
Bush White House did not forget.  George W. Bush did not want
to be a one-term president like his father.
Israel advocated removing Saddam Hussein from power and
currently advocates striking Iran to prevent it from acquiring
nuclear weapons.  Direct Israeli involvement in American
military operations in the Middle East is impossible.  It
would reignite a war between Arab states and Israel.  The
United States, which during the Cold War avoided direct
military involvement in the region, now does the direct
bidding of Israel while Israel watches from the sidelines.
During the 1991 Gulf War, Israel was a spectator, just as it
is in the war with Iraq.
President Bush, facing dwindling support for the war in Iraq,
publicly holds Israel up as a model for what he would like
Iraq to become.  Imagine how this idea plays out on the Arab
street, which views Israel as the Algerians viewed the French
colonizers during the war of liberation.
"In Israel,' Bush said recently, 'terrorists have taken
innocent human life for years in suicide attacks.  The
difference is that Israel is a functioning democracy and it's
not prevented from carrying out its responsibilities.  And
that's a good indicator of success that we're looking for in
Iraq.'
Americans are increasingly isolated and reviled in the world.
They remain blissfully ignorant of their own culpability for
this isolation.  U.S. 'spin' paints the rest of the world as
unreasonable, but Israel, Americans are assured, will always
be on our side.
Israel is reaping economic as well as political rewards from
its lock-down apartheid state.  In the 'gated community'
market it has begun to sell systems and techniques that allow
the nation to cope with terrorism.  Israel, in 2006, exported
$3.4 billion in defense products-well over a billion dollars
more than it received in American military aid.  Israel has
grown into the fourth largest arms dealer in the world.  Most
of this growth has come in the so-called homeland security
sector.
"The key products and services,' as Naomi Klein wrote in The
Nation, 'are hi-tech fences, unmanned drones, biometric IDs,
video and audio surveillance gear, air passenger profiling and
prisoner interrogation systems-precisely the tools and
technologies Israel has used to lock in the occupied
territories.  And that is why the chaos in Gaza and the rest
of the region doesn't threaten the bottom line in Tel Aviv,
and may actually boost it.  Israel has learned to turn endless
war into a brand asset, pitching its uprooting, occupation and
containment of the Palestinian people as a half-century head
start in the ‘global war on terror.' '
The United States, at least officially, does not support the
occupation and calls for a viable Palestinian state.  It is a
global player, with interests that stretch well beyond the
boundaries of the Middle East, and the equation that Israel's
enemies are our enemies is not that simple.
"Terrorism is not a single adversary,' John Mearsheimer and
Stephen Walt wrote in The London Review of Books, 'but a
tactic employed by a wide array of political groups.  The
terrorist organizations that threaten Israel do not threaten
the United States, except when it intervenes against them (as
in Lebanon in 1982). Moreover, Palestinian terrorism is not
random violence directed against Israel or ‘the West'; it is
largely a response to Israel's prolonged campaign to colonize
the West Bank and Gaza Strip.  More important, saying that
Israel and the US are united by a shared terrorist threat has
the causal relationship backwards: the US has a terrorism
problem in good part because it is so closely allied with
Israel, not the other way around.'
Middle Eastern policy is shaped in the United States by those
with very close ties to the Israel lobby.  Those who attempt
to counter the virulent Israeli position, such as former
Secretary of State Colin Powell, are ruthlessly slapped down.
This alliance was true also during the Clinton administration,
with its array of Israel-first Middle East experts, including
special Middle East coordinator Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk,
the former deputy director of the American Israel Public
Affairs Committee, AIPAC, one of the most powerful Israel
lobbying groups in Washington.  But at least people like Indyk
and Ross are sane, willing to consider a Palestinian state,
however unviable, as long as it is palatable to Israel.  The
Bush administration turned to the far-right wing of the Israel
lobby, those who have not a shred of compassion for the
Palestinians or a word of criticism for Israel.  These new
Middle East experts include Elliott Abrams, John Bolton,
Douglas Feith, the disgraced I. Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, Richard
Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and David Wurmser.
Washington was once willing to stay Israel's hand.  It
intervened to thwart some of its most extreme violations of
human rights.  This administration, however, has signed on for
every disastrous Israeli blunder, from building the security
barrier in the West Bank, to sealing off Gaza and triggering a
humanitarian crisis, to the ruinous invasion and saturation
bombing of Lebanon.
The few tepid attempts by the Bush White House to criticize
Israeli actions have all ended in hasty and humiliating
retreats in the face of Israeli pressure. When the Israel
Defense Forces in April 2002 reoccupied the West Bank,
President Bush called on then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to
'halt the incursions and begin withdrawal.' It never happened.
After a week of heavy pressure from the Israel lobby and
Israel's allies in Congress, meaning just about everyone in
Congress, the president gave up, calling Sharon 'a man of
peace.' It was a humiliating moment for the United States, a
clear sign of who pulled the strings.
There were several reasons for the war in Iraq.  The desire
for American control of oil, the belief that Washington could
build puppet states in the region, and a real, if misplaced,
fear of Saddam Hussein played a part in the current disaster.
But it was also strongly shaped by the notion that what is
good for Israel is good for the United States.  Israel wanted
Iraq neutralized.  Israeli intelligence, in the lead-up to the
war, gave faulty information to the U.S. about Iraq's alleged
arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. And when Baghdad was
taken in April 2003, the Israeli government immediately began
to push for an attack on Syria.  The lust for this attack has
waned, in no small part because the Americans don't have
enough troops to hang on in Iraq, much less launch a new
occupation.
Israel is currently lobbying the United States to launch
aerial strikes on Iran, despite the debacle in Lebanon.
Israel's iron determination to forcibly prevent a nuclear Iran
makes it probable that before the end of the Bush
administration an attack on Iran will take place.  The efforts
to halt nuclear development through diplomatic means have
failed.  It does not matter that Iran poses no threat to the
United States.  It does not matter that it does not even pose
a threat to Israel, which has several hundred nuclear weapons
in its arsenal.  It matters only that Israel demands total
military domination of the Middle East.
The alliance between Israel and the United States has
culminated after 50 years in direct U.S. military involvement
in the Middle East.  This involvement, which is not furthering
American interests, is unleashing a geopolitical nightmare.
American soldiers and Marines are dying in droves in a useless
war.  The impotence of the United States in the face of
Israeli pressure is complete.  The White House and the
Congress have become, for perhaps the first time, a direct
extension of Israeli interests.  There is no longer any debate
within the United States.  This is evidenced by the obsequious
nods to Israel by all the current presidential candidates with
the exception of Dennis Kucinich.  The political cost for
those who challenge Israel is too high.
This means there will be no peaceful resolution of the
Palestinian-Israeli conflict.  It means the incidents of
Islamic terrorism against the U.S. and Israel will grow.  It
means that American power and prestige are on a steep,
irreversible decline.  And I fear it also means the ultimate
end of the Jewish experiment in the Middle East.
The weakening of the United States, economically and
militarily, is giving rise to new centers of power. The U.S.
economy, mismanaged and drained by the Iraq war, is
increasingly dependent on Chinese trade imports and on Chinese
holdings of U.S. Treasury securities. China holds dollar
reserves worth $825 billion.  If Beijing decides to abandon
the U.S. bond market, even in part, it would cause a free fall
by the dollar.  It would lead to the collapse of the $7-
trillion U.S. real estate market.  There would be a wave of
U.S. bank failures and huge unemployment.  The growing
dependence on China has been accompanied by aggressive work by
the Chinese to build alliances with many of the world's major
exporters of oil, such as Iran, Nigeria, Sudan and Venezuela.
The Chinese are preparing for the looming worldwide clash over
dwindling resources.
The future is ominous.  Not only do Israel's foreign policy
objectives not coincide with American interests, they actively
hurt them.  The growing belligerence in the Middle East, the
calls for an attack against Iran, the collapse of the imperial
project in Iraq have all given an opening, where there was
none before, to America's rivals.  It is not in Israel's
interests to ignite a regional conflict.  It is not in ours.
But those who have their hands on the wheel seem determined,
in the name of freedom and democracy, to keep the American
ship of state headed at breakneck speed into the cliffs before
us.
Copyright (c) 2007 Truthdig A Progressive Journal of News and
Opinion. Editor, Robert Scheer. Publisher, Zuade Kaufman.
-- 
www.iaciners.org

 Golan Heights. 
AHAHAHAHAHAHA
allora la guerra del 73 non ci sarebbe stata senza URSS
e perche' l'URSS puo' appoggiare l'Egitto e gli USA non si possono 
alleare a Israele?
ma dove li trovi 'sti poveretti che scrivono 'ste cazzate?
N.



Ma perche' perdi tempo dietro al Persivale quando apre questi thread?
Lascia che passi ore al giorno su internet per alimentare il suo odio e il
suo razzismo.
Non ti mettere sul suo piano e pensa ad altro.
Ad esempio come festeggiare il tuo compleanno!
Auguri.

 Ad esempio come festeggiare il tuo compleanno!
Antonello Colonna e un Insistieti del 92
 >Auguri
grazie :)
N.

il cuggino di nico wrote:
corrige:
Intistieti



Non l'avevo mai sentito.
Ho molto da imparare sulla Toscana.
:)

>
studiate la storia, che magari dite meno cazzate

AP wrote:

Israele nacque contro il volere della Gran Bretagna e fino alla meta'
degli anni '50 era uno dei migliori alleati dell'URSS
N.



Applicati meglio, che magari impari a quotare.
Guarda un po'.

 studiate la storia, che magari dite meno cazzate
Persivale, datti tregua, davvero. Te lo dico con simpatia (hai capito chi
sono, vero?). Sei ultralibero di pensarla come vuoi e non c'è neppure
bisogno di dirlo, questo, ma la Storia, anche con l'iniziale minuscola se
preferisci, lasciala stare.
shalom
dR

 Persivale, datti tregua, davvero.
volentieri, anche se non sono io la parte belligerante.
Il fatto e' che posto delle cose interessanti e che vengono anche dalla
sinistra israeliana, dal pacifismo, dalla sinistra e ancora il massimo dei
commenti che mi sento fare e' questo rumore inutile e molto, veramente
molto stupido.
Se c'e' qualche cosa da dire, volentieri, se e' la solita cosa del darmi
del nazista perche' metto in luce le contraddizioni di questa guerra, beh,
connota solo la pochezza mentale di chi le fa'.

 Il fatto e' che posto delle cose interessanti 
Che cosa aspetti ad aprirti un blog?

 Arriveranno i lager e il filo spinato anche per loro.
Chi è che fa commenti idioti?
Chi è che dimostra pochezza mentale?
Chi è che fa rumore inutile?
Ripeto, apriti un blog.
Fosse possibile, pagherei di tasca mia pur di non leggere piu' certe
schifezze su IACine.

 Chi č che fa rumore inutile?
Tu e la tua triste cricca.
Siete l'equivalente di quelli che strappano il microfono di mano, o
lanciano urla da lontano.
Tristi e senza idee.


sembri quello della barzelletta contromano in autostrada
N.
--------------------------------
Inviato via 
http://arianna.libero.it/usenet/

 
Appunto.
Sara' allegro lui. Una vita di fallimenti.