Israel and the Triple Standard

With the benefit of four decades of hindsight, we can now reflect on how dangerously delusional was the thinking behind that phrase. Even at the time, with the smoking hulk of the USS Liberty as visible evidence, it must have been hard to entertain the notion that the country's relationship to the Jewish State was, or ever could be, basically similar to that of the central government's relationship to Vermont, or Montana, or even Puerto Rico.

The barest acquaintance with current events suggests far more persuasively that the relationship of the United States to Israel is that of a colony to a predatory imperial power. No, not the reverse of that, as trendy leftist philosophes like Noam Chomsky somewhat hypocritically maintain. Implausible as it would seem to an observer from Mars, a tiny country of 5.8 million Jewish inhabitants [1] has the dominant role in its relationship with a continental superpower of 300 million.

Carefully hedged with weasel words as they have been, the publications of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have empirically demonstrated the power of the Israel Lobby to control U.S. foreign policy. Their works are sufficiently well known that there is no need to rehash them here. Suffice it to say that the vilification imposed on the two professors (and anyone else who supports their position) has served as a kind of logical proof of the truth of their hypothesis: "The Israel Lobby is not powerful," American Zionists state in effect, "and anyone who says otherwise will be silenced!"

Two very recent events serve only to drive home Mearsheimer's and Walt's point beyond any possibility of contradiction.

With the dawn of the new year, the 111th Congress convened. On Congress's docket was the minor fact that the country was undergoing the most severe financial crisis in 80 years, in addition to being mired in two no-win wars on the Eurasian landmass. Legislators faced a baseline deficit for 2009 of $1.2 trillion, that is, even before paying for the so-called stimulus package and the second 2009 installment on the (partially Zionist inspired) war in Iraq.

So what was the first legislative act of the new Congress? It wasn't emergency aid to the unemployed, or foreclosure mitigation, or aid to the domestic auto industry (the previous Congress had just refused to do that). No, it was separate House and Senate resolutions extravagantly praising Israel's military assault on Gaza, a large, walled, open-air concentration camp. While the resolutions were purely hortatory, that is not to say they will not have consequences. In publicly tying the United States even closer to Israel's predations and war crimes the resolutions will further alienate from this country what Thomas Jefferson called the decent opinion of mankind.

The second highly suggestive incident occurred when Israeli President Ehud Olmert allegedly telephoned President Bush to force the United States to abstain from a United Nations resolution on Gaza that the U.S. itself had had a hand in fashioning. In Olmert's florid retelling for the benefit of an Israeli audience, [2] he pulled Bush away from the podium while the latter was making a speech, and berated him about the content of the resolution. Bush, in turn, telephoned Secretary of State Rice at the United Nations and directed her to have the U.N. ambassador abstain. This, according to Olmert, "embarrassed" Rice and vindicated Olmert's influence.

Subsequent news articles have contained the usual pro forma denials that this incident took place, and one may certainly be allowed to assume that Olmert, a hack politician of demonstrable corruption, may have exaggerated the atmospherics of the incident to the benefit of his own aggrandizement. But the facts speak for themselves: the United States did change its vote on a resolution which it had previously promoted, and Olmert believed it was in his interest to present the story as an example of how he humiliated the United States government.

What other foreign government ostensibly allied with the United States, especially one purportedly bound to us with a "special relationship," would go out of its way to publicly present itself as having humiliated the United States? If the power relationship were that of a supplicant foreign state to an all-powerful United States, it would make no sense purely from the standpoint of self interest: the powerful patron might after all be offended and withdraw its favors. Somehow Olmert calculated that this would not be the case. And as for both governments' retrospective massaging of the facts, we should take heed of George Orwell's wise admonition: never believe anything until it is officially denied.

These incidents subsume into a larger truth about the peculiar relationship between the United States and Israel. For much of its post-World War II existence, the United States has operated, in practice if not in declaration, under the Leninist "who-whom" principle. [3] The Soviet Union's violent barging into Czechoslovakia or Hungary were an abomination; by contrast, the U.S. overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran, or Arbenz in Guatemala, or the assassinations of Trujillo in Santo Domingo or Lumumba in the Congo were morally unexceptional, enlightened actually, if you looked at them in the right way.

So it has continued, more or less unto the present day. Russia's actions in Georgia are blatant aggression. The U.S. invasion of Iraq, by contrast, was justified in the same manner as a homicide defendant's rationale in an Alabama court: "we wuz jest pertectin' ourselfs in advance. Anyways, he needed killin'."

This sort of moral idiocy is thoroughly bound up with America's origins as a dogmatically religious and militant settler nation (much like Israel), and finds its pseudo-intellectual expression in imbecile pronouncements about American Exceptionalism, as if the United States is somehow exempt from the normal social graces, chief of which is not to violently trespass on your neighbor's property.

Yet, even with this thick mental fog of a hypocritical double standard, there are outrages against which most of the American public will instinctively rebel. We can invade Iraq, to be sure — accompanied by implausible visions of mushroom clouds over New York or Washington if we don't act — but an incident like Abu Ghraib will instill the intuitive feeling more than the consciously held belief that something is wrong. If Blackwater "guards" shoot and kill 17 innocent Iraqi civilians in broad daylight with no provocation, it becomes too much. Even rationalizations about regrettable collateral damage become threadbare. Most Americans at this moment probably believe Iraq is a morally bankrupt quagmire, despite the happy talk about the Surge.

Yet when one pulls Israel into the equation, it appears that the double standard is overlaid with a triple standard. Even as the United States is permitted to do most of the things that the rest of the world is not permitted to do, Israel is permitted things which even the United States cannot do. It is a hypothetical, but one doubts that the American public would stand for a no-holds-barred U.S. military assault on a densely packed urban area whose inhabitants have no opportunity to flee (much as the Warsaw Ghetto), or calculated attacks on U.N. compounds, ambulances, or hospitals. [4]

This triple standard is one of the wonders of the world. While the mainstream press has copiously denounced Abu Ghraib and Blackwater mercenaries, there is no similar condemnation of Israel's indiscriminate use of phosphorous munitions or GBU 39s over an urban area as densely packed as Hong Kong. Instead, our local fish wrapper, the Washington Post, often features not one but two daily op-eds justifying Israel's action.

Israel has become a predatory gangster state. Leave aside the military aggression and abominable treatment of minority groups. It is at the center of the illicit drug trade in Ecstasy. [5] It is a leading covert arms dealer. [6] It is at the forefront of computer hacking. [7] Even the trafficking in women, a practice that usually elicits universal condemnation, provokes no more than an embarrassed coughing behind the hand when Israel does it. [8] Such nice playmates our congressmen have worshipfully chosen as their idols!

That is a brief description of Eretz Israel, The Light unto the Gentiles. Citizens of the United States (or are they native subjects?) should reflect on the billions of dollars per year that they give to a country with a longer life expectancy than the United States. [9] Maybe that helps explain why Detroit and Cleveland are beginning to resemble Gaza without the bombs.

* Werther is the pen name of a Northern Virginia-based defense analyst.

[1] The roughly 1.4 million Arab citizens of Israel don't count. They recently had their political parties banned by The Only Real Democracy in the Middle East, as America's Zionists call the government of Israel.

[2] "Israel's Olmert: Rice embarrassed over UN vote," Washington Post, January 12, 2009.

[3] Kto kogo: the moral rightness or wrongness of an action inheres not in the rightness or wrongness of the act itself, but who is doing what to whom. Therefore, repressive measures by the Tsarist government against the Bolsheviks were morally abhorrent, but mass executions by Bolsheviks of enemies of the state were morally unexceptional.

[4] The bombing of a U.N. compound where hundreds of refugees were huddling was conveniently timed to coincide with the U.N. Secretary General's visit to the area in search of a cease-fire. It sent the message, "yes, it's brutal, but there's nothing you can do about it."

[5] "Israelis at center of ecstasy drug trade," Haaretz, June 4, 2003.

[6] "Amnesty: Two thirds of Israeli arms — for exports," Ynet News, October 2, 2006.

[7] "Israeli Hacker Known as 'The Analyzer' Suspected of Hacking Again," Wired Blog Network, September 5, 2008.

[8] "Trafficking in women a worldwide epidemic," Jewish Tribune, March 30, 2006.

[9] Wikipedia, List of countries by life expectancy.