ISRAEL A STATE TOO LATE ?

ISRAEL A STATE TOO LATE ?

Patrick Henningsen and Andrew McKillop

Original version: http://21stcenturywire.com/2011/06/02/netanyahu-defends-the-state-too-late/

Israel’s prime minister Netanyahu was highly predictable in furiously rejecting US President Barack Obama’s proposal to use the 1967 borders as the basis for a two-state solution, in the wondrously long-running, vicious, costly and ultimately useless Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For Netanyahu, any agreement on that basis would leave Israel with frontiers that are “utterly indefensible”.

This carefully avoids facing rality. Israel’s nuclear bombmaking facilities at Dimona have made Israel fundamentally impossible to defend and sharply reveals Israel for what it is: a colonial implant within 19th century colonial-style borders. Netanyahu, of course, would brush aside this argument with contempt, as he and his antiquated political friends shrink back, laager style into their 1914-1918 Big Bertha military philosophy with Maginot lines and a cozy white colonial state inside secure borders.

HIGH TECH OLDE WORLD

In addition to Big Bertha first world war-type weapons – tanks and artillery – Israel also has modern hi-tech weapons at its disposal, thanks to American taxpayers and generations of American and European politicians giving knee-jerk support to a derisory remake of the Crusades. With Israeli-made drones, paid by US taxes and at the behest of the same Anglo-American and European elites who drew its borders, Israel can take out almost unarmed rebels in its happy time shooting grounds in Yemen. The liberal bourgeois press of the West will reliably whoop with delight at these showcase killings.

Why today’s Holy Wars will be abandoned as surely as those of long ago is however as simple as why Israel will abandon its colonial conquests. The Crusader Holy Wars generated no serious war booty or peace dividend to enthral and enrich the European masses. The same is true today, with Israel playing the stalking horse and advanced outpost as an outdated Gendarme of the Middle East.

Israel’s “net present worth” in today’s version of that game is zero.

Israel, as a state, was a completely classic 19th century European-style nation-building concept. Other examples include almost all existing European and African countries of today, with a few exceptions like Spain, Portugal, France and England, and the USA which can claim a much older, or slightly older pedigree. The big difference is these states, at their time of founding, had totally different social, cultural, ideological, economic and demographic conditions, relative to the real world of today.

Like so many nation states of today, Israel is simply dysfunctional within a globalized economy. Israel is no different, it only came later to the party.

HOLY SPRAWL IN THE HOLY LANDS

From Dan to Beersheba and a lot further, is how we might put the way Israeli maximalists of the 19th and 20th centuries interpreted where their ‘national heartland’ extends. Their present Land of David, thanks to the Goliath of US taxpayers funds, is of course impressive space-wise, but it unhappily possesses small amounts of real resources, like water, good soil or oil relative to the dreamtime land grab of fundamentalist Israeli maximalists.

Among these, with no possible error, we can identify Benyamin Netanyahu.

Netanyahu, the son of Zeev Jabotinski, a renowned historian who was considered by some to be founder of the Zionist right, absorbed from childhood his father’s interpretation of Jewish history as a series of tragedies and treacheries. The lesson was simple: gentiles cannot be trusted. In this narrative, Jewish history is one of constant betrayal by white anti-semites, where the only remedy is for all Jews to return to the Biblical Land of Israel. Its Arab neighbors can also never be trusted, as Jabotinski preached, so the new Israeli nation must erect a Maginot Line of Jewish military power to deter its enemies forever.

This is exactly what we have today in 2011.

The Biblical Land of Israel was imaginatively interpreted – the same way that 19th century European nation builders did when they planned and executed their own land grabs. The “historical” but entirely imaginary territory called Eretz Yisrael extended from the Nile in Egypt, and ranged generously across the Arabian Peninsula, extending far north into today’s Turkey, Armenia and the southern Russian Caucasian republics, and east into today’s Iraq. The sweep and reach was breathtaking, very much like Kurd imperialist folk ideas of Greater Kurdistan, and the oil-spawned invention by Europeans and Americans, of 1932, called Saudi Arabia.

STATE TOO LATE

The real Israel was not founded until 1948: by then the window of opportunity for creating European-style nation states almost anyplace outside Europe – in Africa, Latin America and Asia – was closing. The colonial model no longer applied. Populations had grown too much and too fast, weapons technology was spreading at the same time as democratic notions. The world’s economy – even in 1948 – was beginning to globalize, and nuclear power was soon going to be developed.

It was the start of a long downhill run for 19th century-style colonial land grab nations. In terms of mainstream consensus pseudo- reality, however, this fact is in no way officially recognized today.

Sadly, the myth of supreme military power and its 19th century land-grabbing racist modus operandi, called Eminent Domain, are still riding high in the small mental space of today’s great leaders, huddled together in G8 and G20 meetings. Therefore it is unsurprising, to say the least, that most European and American leaders approve and support Israel. Their hands are washed with the second-hand blood of colonial conquest, they also know they have no moral right to dominate and destroy.

They blithely mouth the lebensraum philosophy of colonial conquest, unaware that nuclear reactors and and similar high-tech Doomsday Machines, like pesticide factories and other Seveso-type industrial centres on their home territory, have destroyed their vaunted invulnerability.

Israel has no real defence from attack by a rising number of potential enemies able to take out its nuclear installations using missile attack– or any other attack – and will be a victim of its own small-sized colonial aggression unless it snaps out of ots 19th century laager-type mindest very fast.

NUKES ARE POWER – NUKES ARE A LIABILITY

Israeli power elites will wax lyrical at the touch of the talk button about Israel’s military strength and its permanent exposure to terrorist threat. More important and real, Israel’s exposure to conventional military attack on its nuclear facilities and installations using totally conventional ballistic missiles should wise up these atavistic dreamers, Israel’s so called ‘defence’ is grossly compromised to the point that it is as virtual, today, as the notion of a cozy “Jewish homeland” with a right of return, to a country you never lived in, on the back of expropriated Palestinians who have lived in the same lands – their lands – for 2000 years. Talk your way around that one !

Missiles owned by Iran and many other nations can easily reach Israel’s supposedly secret, supposedly forgotten, supposedly impregnable atom bomb factories in the rural, tourism-oriented areas near Dimona, west of the Dead Sea and near the Jordanian border. Its plutonium brewing reactors, reprocessing centres, fuel rod ponds and bomb fabrication workshops, stored weapons, nuclear wastes and fissile materials- once the ultimate proof of Israeli military superiority- are all open to attack.

If this Doomsday atack happened, Israel would receive a Fukushima-times-five kick into the trashcan of history, at the flick of a missile launch switch. To be sure, not only Israel would be wiped out, but a large chunk of eastern Egypt, all of Palestine, the west of Jordan, most of Lebanon and much of southern Syria – depending on wind and weather.

Under a worst-credible ballistic missile attack on Israel’s Dimona nuclear production sites, at least 500 times the radiation of the Hiroshima atom bomb of 1945 would be released, and thrown to the rains and winds.

WHO IS LISTENING ?

Israel’s military elite are deaf to reality and almost indistinguishable from the ruling political elite, because Israel is permanently war ready. Israeli propaganda tells Israelis to be immensely proud of their kill-and-forget hi-tech inventions like drones. National pride swells at the idea of Israel’s Depleted Uranium (DU) munitions, its wide range of anti-personnel, that is anti-civilian weapons, and a host of other joyous morale-boosting state-of-the-art death tech.

But whenever Israel is moved by fundamentalist Eminent Domain urgings, and when it simply has to invade Lebanon or Palestine to punish, waste and destroy, it wheels out its 1914-1918 style tanks and artillery.

Military obsession makes it sure the maybe-or-never Palestinian state would almost certainly be, by definition, demilitarized. The Israeli army would necessarily “sit along the Jordan river” and occupy hundreds of isolated settlements spread amidst a hostile Palestinian population – supposedly for strategic reasons. Like the invasion and occupation of Golan the costs can only be high, for US taxpapyers of course, and the economic benefits can only be low, again needing generous civil and military aid from the US.

Netanyahu should study the lessons of the 1973 Yom Kippur war on the Golan Heights before denouncing Obama’s idea. At the time, long-term trends making Israel the “State Too Late” were already at work. When the war started, the first action of the Israeli army command was the forced evacuation of the area’s settlements and their inhabitants, because Israel’s generals knew they would quickly become a burden and an obstacle to maneuver, for their troops and tanks.

The net result was simple: it left Israel with even less defensible and more erratic borders than the supposedly “indefensible” 1967 lines. Since that time, this problem has proliferated – as much as ballistic missile and civil nuclear power technology over 44 years.

Genuine will on the part of Israel and the US to create a Palestinian state can always be hoped or imagined, but skeptics ask why it has not already happened by now. The reality is simple: it hasn’t happened, and will never happen so long as Israel’s 24-7 warfare state is allowed to dominate its political scene. When Israel understands it is impossible to defend and can be taken out and destroyed overnight, things migh change.

MOVING FORWARD

Today, Israel can only be frightened by the collapse of friendly dictators in the region, starting with Tunisia’s Ben Ali and Egypt’s Mubarak, and threats to known and controllable dictators such as Syria’s Bashr al Assad and the Yemenite “good dictator” Saleh.

For Israel’s borders to be defensible, they first need to be legitimate and internationally recognized. Unfortunately, Israeli paranoia seeps out of Netanyahu, who does not trust the gentiles to supply ironclad international recognition of Israel’s borders, and fears that the America under Hopey Changey Obama is increasingly unreliable as its international sponsor.

Probably impossible – or extremely unlikely = the real solution for Israel would be to firstly accept that it is a State Too Late. Negotiation with its Arab neighbours, all of which face their own and real problems of legitimacy and popular support, could fast forward to a vastly more secure and productive set of community based solutions. In its favour, Israel has a democracy framework, it has an economy that even without massive infusions from the USA and Europe might survive, especially if its population falls as the State Too Late shrinks to a more-realistic size, composition and structure.

For such pipe dreams to have any potential of becoming real, however, Israel’s current political and corporate warfare state leadership elites must entirely disappear – along with similar war-happy leaderships in its Arab neighbouring countries, and in Europe, the USA, and elsewhere.

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