Zionism needs Israeli Jews to feel frightened
The following is the text of an in-depth interview Koroush Ziabari conducted with me.
In your recent article “Zionism and Peace are Incompatible” you reach a point where you state “if it is the case that American presidents are frightened of provoking Israel, the conclusion would have to be that the Zionist state is a monster beyond control and that all efforts for peace are doomed to failure.” Is it really the case that Israel possesses an uncontrollable, disproportionate power which enables it to violate the international law and enjoy immunity from being held accountable before the international community? What’s the source of this unwarrantable power and influence?
Let’s start with Reality Number One. There are two sets of rules for the behavior of nations, one for all the countries of the world minus Israel, the other exclusively for Israel. This double-standard is the mother and father of Arab and other Muslim hurt, humiliation and anger. Put another way, this double-standard is the best recruiting sergeant for violent Islamic fundamentalism.
In the story of the conflict in and over Palestine that became Israel as I tell it fully documented in my latest book, Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, the moment when the major powers created the double-standard can be more or less pinpointed. In the immediate aftermath of the 1967 war, and because it was a war of Israeli aggression not self-defense, the major powers, through the UN Security Council, should have said to Israel something like the following: “You are not to build any settlements on newly occupied Arab land. If you do, you’ll be demonstrating your contempt for international law. In this event the international community will declare Israel to be an outlaw state and subject it to sanctions.”
If something like that riot act had been read to Israel, there probably would have been peace many, many years ago. For background let me briefly explain why.
The pragmatic Arafat was reluctantly reconciled to the reality of Israel’s existence inside its pre-1967 borders as far back as 1969. In his gun and olive branch address to the UN General Assembly on 13 November 1974 he said so by obvious implication. Thereafter he put his credibility with his leadership colleagues and his people, and his life, on the line to get a mandate for unthinkable compromise with Israel. He got the mandate at the end of 1979 when the Palestine National Council, then the highest decision-making body on the Palestinian side, voted by 296 votes to 4 to endorse his two-state policy – a solution which any rational Israeli government and people would have accepted with relief. What Arafat needed thereafter was an Israeli partner for peace. He eventually got a probable one, Yitzhak Rabin, but he was assassinated by a Zionist fanatic who knew exactly what he was doing – killing the peace process. The more it became clear that Israel’s leaders were not interested in a genuine two-state solution for which Arafat had prepared the ground on his side, the more his credibility with his own people suffered.
Eisenhower was the first and the last American president to contain Zionism. After Israel had secretly colluded with France and Britain in the 1956 invasion of Eygpt to overthrow Nasser and take back the Suez Canal which he had nationalized, Israel’s leaders tried to insist on conditions for Israel’s withdrawal from the Sinai. Eisenhower confronted them by going over the heads of Congress in an address to the nation. In the course of it he said this:
“Israel insists on firm guarantees as a condition to withdrawing its forces of invasion. If we agree that armed attack can properly achieve the purposes of the assailant, then I fear we will have turned back the clock of international order. We will have countenanced the use of force as a means of settling international differences and gaining national advantage… If the UN once admits that international disputes can be settled using force, then we will have destroyed the very foundation of the organization and our best hope for establishing a real world order.”
As I note in a chapter of my book titled Goodbye to the Security Council’s Integrity, after the 1967 war there simply was not the Eisenhower-like political will to oblige Israel to behave like a normal state – i.e. in accordance with international law and its obligations as a member of the UN.
What, really, explains this lack of political will – in 1967 and still today?
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