Time to End the “Special Relationship”

As expected, reaction to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Washington DC Congressional address broke pretty much  along party lines, both in Israel and the United States.  Those already susceptible to Netanyahu’s war fever heard a compelling, irrefutable case against any nuclear deal with Iran.  Those familiar with Netanyahu’s “boy who cried wolf” routine weren’t persuaded. In Israel, Netanyahu’s expected election numbers remained virtually unchanged following the speech, while in the United States, the bipartisan neocon cabal in Washington and its media claimed “leadership envy” (Elisabeth Hasselbeck, R-Fox News), using the speech as a tool with which to bludgeon their supposedly weak President.

Most sane Americans knew what Netanyahu’s US tour was all about even before he arrived: More war. That’s why they largely opposed it. Americans didn’t need Netanyahu in Washington to explain his position — they’re already well aware of it because he’s been trumpeting the same dire warnings for decades. Americans also have their own Netanyahu worker bees scattered throughout Congress, a sizeable bunch of US-based Zionists who adopt Netanyahu’s murderous ideology wholesale. It is an ideology that sees diplomacy as a last resort and is well-funded by the strong-arm of AIPAC — the Israeli war propaganda machine operating in Washington. One need only look to their work to learn what Israeli warmongers want.

So while more discussion and new information are normally welcomed before war is waged, Netanyahu’s antics gave us neither. His Congressional hosts will use his address to bolster their calls for the continued American war state, which is waged as much by the Israeli state as the American one. Yes, Israeli foreign policy is regarded throughout the world as an extension of America’s, and rightfully so. Stolen taxpayer loot funds Israel to the tune of several billion dollars annually. For a small country, Israel is both armed to the teeth and simultaneously able to lock down an entire Palestinian-Arab population. This is what American foreign aid, paid for by you, spent by Washington, achieves.

The growing disconnect between the US government’s staunch support of Israel and the American public’s disagreement with that support is best explained by Lysander Spooner’s No Treason No. 6, in which Spooner says of Congress, “these pretended agents of the people are really the agents of nobody.” For if members of Congress were legitimately acting as our agents, we would be “responsible for all acts done within the limits of the power entrusted to [Congress].” That constituents are not held legally responsible for the actions of their Congressional “representatives” says much about the purported agency, or lack thereof.

Applying a Spoonerite analysis to the American-Israeli “special relationship” exposes their respective governments’ war machines as classes unto themselves, entities separate and apart from their populations, on their own quest for financial and political power. As with all large, bureaucratic institutions, be they governments or corporations, they exist purely for the people running the institutions. The sooner we treat them as such, the more likely we are to lessen their body counts.

The Center for a Stateless Society (www.c4ss.org) is a media center working to build awareness of the market anarchist alternative