ISRAELI EXCEPTIONALISM

Many politicians, particularly from the United States, have portrayed Sharon as a “peacemaker” who gave concessions on Jewish settlements in Palestinian territory to pursue peace with the Palestinians. President Barack Obama issued a statement on Sharon’s death where he stressed the United States’ “unshakable commitment to Israel’s security” and at the same time said the U.S. would “strive for lasting peace.”

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Sharon “surprised many in his pursuit of peace,” and even praised Sharon’s “lifelong convictions” for a peace process. United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon praised Sharon’s “political courage and determination” in his “painful and historic decision to withdraw Israeli settlers and troops from the Gaza Strip.” Tony Blair claimed Sharon “didn’t think of peace as a dreamer, but did dream of peace” and “sought peace with…iron determination.”

These shibboleths cannot disguise the truth. Since the 1970s, Sharon was one of the chief architects of the Israeli settlement of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights region. He was given the moniker “father of the settlements.”

The nonpartisan research network found that 73 percent of Lebanese citizens oppose the agreements made between Israel and the UAE and Bahrain, and 79 percent oppose the Israeli peace agreement with Morocco, according to their Lebanon 2021 Country Report.

GREG MAYBURY—This “mythos” of Israel is further sustained by emotional blackmail, psychological projection, cultural subversion, and a singularly impressive, all-embracing web of political manipulation, corruption, influence peddling, coercion, espionage, and extortion that reaches the highest levels of our governments and the various institutions which form the fabric of the Western body politic. If one likes, demonstrating a preternatural predisposition for biting the hand that feeds one!

The one factor common to the “desired ends” mentioned earlier, and the first in the ‘queue’ for Israel, is the measure of how this will serve Israel’s interests. The interests of its chief patron are, if included in the calculus at all, more often than not secondary, and perfunctorily considered.

Behind the apparently impermeable veil of this “mythos” is an appalling, disturbing, well-documented history of torture, ethnic cleansing, material expropriation, land dispossession, racism, genocide, assassination, bloodshed, chauvinism, extremism, terrorism, colonial-style exploitation and tyranny, ethnocentrism, and an overweening disdain for international law

ERIC ZUESSE—Iran, because of its populism, is strongly supportive of the Palestinians. Therefore, it is ideologically at war against Israel — not because of its Judaism, but because of its ethnic-cleansing of fellow-Muslims. Israel — not Judaism — is what Iran is opposed to. Iran, because of Iran’s past long history of being exploited by, first, British, and then American, imperialism, is passionately anti-Rhodesist. Consequently, the U.S. and UK regimes want to destroy Iran — and Israel is their chosen Rhodesist entity that fronts this U.S./UK/Israel operation.

GREG MAYBURY—If anti-Semitism is more pernicious, or for that matter more prevalent, than any other form of racial, ethnic or religious bigotry, intolerance, prejudice and/or animus (and this writer is not inclined to this view), then right-thinking, fair-minded Jewish folks—in particular those with a strong sense of individual morality and common decency towards those not just of their own ethnic, racial, cultural or religious persuasion, but to the people who’ve been mercilessly and relentlessly hounded out of their homes and homelands and upon whom extraordinarily vile, hideous and inhumane injustices have been perpetrated and atrocities visited in their name—ethnic cleansing bordering on genocide—have an inarguable obligation to stand up and be counted.