Gaza slaughter exposes Democrats
If your eyes weren’t open to the true role of the Democratic Party, the Israeli military’s slaughter of Palestinian civilians should have snapped them wide open.
As stunning photos and videos of the devastation of Gaza are being watched 24/7 by anyone with a laptop or iPhone, Democratic politicians can’t voice their support for Israel strongly enough.
The first, most shocking move for liberals’ leading lights was the July 18 unanimous Senate resolution backing Israel. It came two days after the New York Times’ July 16 publication of a front-page photo and story about four Palestinian boys who were bombed and killed while playing on a beach.
The Times usually bends over backwards to defend the actions of Israel. This time, there was no hiding the murderous nature of this attack, since it happened near a hotel where journalists from all over the world were staying. The Times’ Tyler Hicks, who won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for photography, wrote his own account: “Children, maybe four feet tall, dressed in summer clothes, running from an explosion, don’t fit the description of Hamas fighters.”
Hicks’ article ran on Wednesday, July 16. On Friday, Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Al Franken (D-Minn.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and every other “liberal” Democrat in the U.S. Senate voted to back this slaughter.
Of course, that was just the first outrage. On July 29 — eleven days later, during which time the Israel Defense Forces killed children in their sleep at the Jabaliya school-turned-shelter, slaughtered civilians in Shujai’iya and increased the overall Palestinian death toll to more than 1,000 — the same body voted 100 to 0 to increase funding to Israel, which already gets $3.5 billion a year from the U.S.
If you think politicians’ morals are being held hostage by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), think again. The backbone of bourgeois support for Israel’s heartless genocide against Palestinians is not the Zionist lobby. It’s the indispensable role Israel plays for U.S. imperialism in the Middle East.
Alexander Haig, Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state in the 1980s, famously said, “Israel is the largest American aircraft carrier in the world that cannot be sunk, does not carry even one American soldier, and is located in a critical region for American national security.” In 1981, Israel bombed Iraq’s Osirak nuclear power plant.
Then there’s the latest revelation by journalist Glenn Greenwald, who uses newly disclosed top-secret National Security Agency documents to expose the cooperation between Israel and U.S. intelligence agencies.
An NSA document dated April 19, 2103, states, “The mutually agreed upon geographic [threats] include the countries of North Africa, the Middle East, the Persian Gulf, South Asia, and the Islamic republics of the former Soviet Union.”
One of the “key priorities” of this cooperation is “the Iranian nuclear development program, followed by Syrian nuclear efforts, Lebanese Hizbullah plans and intentions, Palestinian terrorism [sic], and Global Jihad.” The paper talks about “targeting and exploiting” these.
Greenwald concludes, “The new Snowden documents illustrate a crucial fact: Israeli aggression would be impossible without the constant, lavish support and protection of the U.S. government.” (informationclearinghouse.info, Aug. 4)
“The relationship has, on at least one occasion, entailed the covert payment of a large amount of cash to Israeli operatives,” Greenwald writes. This has the character of making sure that someone who is doing your bidding has enough resources to do it.
The Palestinian cause has the sympathy of the Arab masses, who are kept down in U.S.-backed dictatorships from Jordan to Egypt to Bahrain. U.S. imperialism will never allow Palestinians to do anything that would truly inspire the region. The consequences would be revolutionary and end the oil industrial complex’s neverending flow of profits.
It was easy and felt good to be anti-war and anti-George W. Bush. He was a dopey conservative who couldn’t pronounce “nuclear” and lied about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction.
Yet while literate, liberal President Barack Obama says all the right things about some social liberal issues — and may even bemoan Palestinian casualties here and there — he is backing Israel’s genocide to the hilt.
Put your faith in the mobilized working class. It is the only force on Earth that can stop war.
