A superb speech delivered at Princeton University by Chris Hedges, a
former Middle East bureau chief of the New York Times.


A DECLARATION OF U.S. INDEPENDENCE FROM ISRAEL
Chris Hedges
Princeton University
May 22, 2008
http://www.charobim.com


Israel, without the United States, would probably not exist. The
country came perilously close to extinction during the October 1973
war when Egypt, trained and backed by the Soviet Union, crossed
the Suez Canal and the Syrians poured in over the Golan Heights.
Huge American military transport planes came to the rescue. They
began landing every half-hour to refit the battered Israeli army,
which had lost most of its heavy armor. By the time the war as
over, the United States had given Israel $2.2 billion in
emergency military aid.

The intervention, which enraged the Arab world, triggered the OPEC
oil embargo that for a time wreaked havoc on Western economies.
This was perhaps the most dramatic example of the sustained life-
support system the United States has provided to the Jewish
state. Israel was born at midnight May 14, 1948. The U.S.
Recognized the new state 11 minutes later. The two countries have
been locked in a deadly embrace ever since.

Washington, at the beginning of the relationship, was able to be a
moderating influence. An incensed President Eisenhower demanded and
got Israel's withdrawal after the Israelis occupied Gaza in
1956. During the Six-Day War in 1967, Israeli warplanes bombed the
USS Liberty. The ship, flying the U.S. Flag and stationed 15
miles off the Israeli coast, was intercepting tactical and
strategic communications from both sides. The Israeli strikes
killed 34 U.S. Sailors and wounded 171. The deliberate attack
froze, for a while, Washington's enthusiasm for Israel. But
ruptures like this one proved to be only bumps, soon smoothed out
by an increasingly sophisticated and well-financed Israel lobby
that set out to merge Israel and American foreign policy in the
Middle East.

Israel has reaped tremendous rewards from this alliance. It has
been given more than $140 billion in U.S. Direct economic and
military assistance. It receives about $3 billion in direct
assistance annually, roughly one-fifth of the U.S. Foreign aid
budget. Although most American foreign aid packages stipulate that
related military purchases have to be made in the United States,
Israel is allowed to use about 25 percent of the money to subsidize
its own growing and profitable defense industry. It is exempt,
unlike other nations, from accounting for how it spends the aid
money. And funds are routinely siphoned off to build new Jewish
settlements, bolster the Israeli occupation in the Palestinian
territories and construct the security barrier, which costs an
estimated $1 million a mile.

The barrier weaves its way through the West Bank, creating
isolated pockets of impoverished Palestinians in ringed ghettos. By
the time the barrier is finished it will probably in effect seize up
to 40 percent of Palestinian land. This is the largest land grab
by Israel since the 1967 war. And although the United States
officially opposes settlement expansion and the barrier, it also
funds them.

The U.S. Has provided Israel with nearly $3 billion to develop
weapons systems and given Israel access to some of the most
sophisticated items in its own military arsenal, including
Blackhawk attack helicopters and F-16 fighter jets. The United
States also gives Israel access to intelligence it denies to its
NATO allies. And when Israel refused to sign the nuclear
nonproliferation treaty, the United States stood by without a word
of protest as the Israelis built the region's first nuclear
weapons program.

U.S. Foreign policy, especially under the current Bush
administration, has become little more than an extension of Israeli
foreign policy. The United States since 1982 has vetoed 32
Security Council resolutions critical of Israel, more than the
total number of vetoes cast by all the other Security Council
members. It refuses to enforce the Security Council resolutions it
claims to support. These resolutions call on Israel to withdraw
from the occupied territories.

There is now volcanic anger and revulsion by Arabs at this blatant
favoritism. Few in the Middle East see any distinction between
Israeli and American policies, nor should they. And when the
Islamic radicals speak of U.S. Support of Israel as a prime
reason for their hatred of the United States, we should listen.
The consequences of this one-sided relationship are being played
out in the disastrous war in Iraq, growing tension with Iran,
and the humanitarian and political crisis in Gaza. It is being
played out in Lebanon, where Hezbollah is gearing up for another
war with Israel, one most Middle East analysts say is inevitable.
The U.S. Foreign policy in the Middle East is unraveling. And it
is doing so because of this special relationship. The eruption of a
regional conflict would usher in a nightmare of catastrophic
proportions.

There were many in the American foreign policy establishment and
State Department who saw this situation coming. The decision to
throw our lot in with Israel in the Middle East was not initially
a popular one with an array of foreign policy experts, including
President Harry Truman's secretary of state, Gen. George Marshall.
They warned there would be a backlash. They knew the cost the
United States would pay in the oil-rich region for this decision,
which they feared would be one of the greatest strategic blunders
of the postwar era. And they were right. The decision has
jeopardized American and Israeli security and created the kindling
for a regional conflagration.

The alliance, which makes no sense in geopolitical terms, does
makes sense when seen through the lens of domestic politics. The
Israel lobby has become a potent force in the American political
system. No major candidate, Democrat or Republican, dares to
challenge it. The lobby successfully purged the State Department of
Arab experts who challenged the notion that Israeli and American
interests were identical. Backers of Israel have doled out
hundreds of millions of dollars to support U.S. political
candidates deemed favorable to Israel. They have brutally punished
those who strayed, including the first President Bush, who they
said was not vigorous enough in his defense of Israeli interests.
This was a lesson the next Bush White House did not forget.
George W. Bush did not want to be a one-term president like his
father. Israel advocated removing Saddam Hussein from power and
currently advocates striking Iran to prevent it from acquiring
nuclear weapons. Direct Israeli involvement in American military
operations in the Middle East is impossible. It would reignite a
war between Arab states and Israel. The United States, which
during the Cold War avoided direct military involvement in the
region, now does the direct bidding of Israel while Israel
watches from the sidelines. During the 1991 Gulf War, Israel was
a spectator, just as it is in the war with Iraq.

President Bush, facing dwindling support for the war in Iraq,
publicly holds Israel up as a model for what he would like Iraq
to become. Imagine how this idea plays out on the Arab street, which
views Israel as the Algerians viewed the French colonizers during
the war of liberation.

'In Israel,' Bush said recently, 'terrorists have taken innocent
human life for years in suicide attacks. The difference is that
Israel is a functioning democracy and it's not prevented from
carrying out its responsibilities. And that's a good indicator of
success that we're looking for in Iraq.' Americans are
increasingly isolated and reviled in the world. They remain
blissfully ignorant of their own culpability for this isolation.
U.S. 'spin' paints the rest of the world as unreasonable, but
Israel, Americans are assured, will always be on our side.

Israel is reaping economic as well as political rewards from its
lock-down apartheid state. In the 'gated community' market it has
begun to sell systems and techniques that allow the nation to cope
with terrorism. Israel, in 2006, exported $3.4 billion in defense
products -- well over a billion dollars more than it received in
American military aid. Israel has grown into the fourth largest
arms dealer in the world. Most of this growth has come in the so-
called homeland security sector.
'The key products and services,' as Naomi Klein wrote in The
Nation, 'are hi-tech fences, unmanned drones, biometric IDs, video
and audio surveillance gear, air passenger profiling and prisoner
interrogation systems-precisely the tools and technologies Israel
has used to lock in the occupied territories. And that is why the
chaos in Gaza and the rest of the region doesn't threaten the
bottom line in Tel Aviv, and may actually boost it. Israel has
learned to turn endless war into a brand asset, pitching its
uprooting, occupation and containment of the Palestinian people as
a half-century head start in the 'global war on terror.' '

The United States, at least officially, does not support the
occupation and calls for a viable Palestinian state. It is a global
player, with interests that stretch well beyond the boundaries of
the Middle East, and the equation that Israel's enemies are our
enemies is not that simple.

'Terrorism is not a single adversary,' John Mearsheimer and Stephen
Walt wrote in The London Review of Books, 'but a tactic employed
by a wide array of political groups. The terrorist organizations
that threaten Israel do not threaten the United States, except
when it intervenes against them (as in Lebanon in 1982).
Moreover, Palestinian terrorism is not random violence directed
against Israel or 'the West'; it is largely a response to
Israel's prolonged campaign to colonize the West Bank and Gaza
Strip. More important, saying that Israel and the US are united by
a shared terrorist threat has the causal relationship backwards:
the US has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so
closely allied with Israel, not the other way around.'

Middle Eastern policy is shaped in the United States by those with
very close ties to the Israel lobby. Those who attempt to counter
the virulent Israeli position, such as former Secretary of State
Colin Powell, are ruthlessly slapped down. This alliance was true
also during the Clinton administration, with its array of Israeli-
first Middle East experts, including special Middle East
coordinator Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk, the former deputy
director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, AIPAC,
one of the most powerful Israel lobbying groups in Washington. But
at least people like Indyk and Ross are sane, willing to consider a
Palestinian state, however unviable, as long as it is palatable to
Israel. The Bush administration turned to the far-right wing of
the Israel lobby, those who have not a shred of compassion for the
Palestinians or a word of criticism for Israel. These new Middle
East experts include Elliott Abrams, John Bolton, Douglas Feith,
the disgraced I. Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, Richard Perle, Paul
Wolfowitz and David Wurmser.

Washington was once willing to stay Israel's hand. It intervened
to thwart some of its most extreme violations of human rights. This
administration, however, has signed on for every disastrous Israeli
blunder, from building the security barrier in the West Bank, to
sealing off Gaza and triggering a humanitarian crisis, to the
ruinous invasion and saturation bombing of Lebanon.

The few tepid attempts by the Bush White House to criticize Israeli
actions have all ended in hasty and humiliating retreats in the
face of Israeli pressure. When the Israel Defense Forces in April
2002 reoccupied the West Bank, President Bush called on then-Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon to 'halt the incursions and begin
withdrawal.' It never happened. After a week of heavy pressure from
the Israel lobby and Israel's allies in Congress, meaning just
about everyone in Congress, the president gave up, calling Sharon 'a
man of peace.' It was a humiliating moment for the United Sates, a
clear sign of who pulled the strings.

There were several reasons for the war in Iraq. The desire for
American control of oil, the belief that Washington could build
puppet states in the region, and a real, if misplaced, fear of
Saddam Hussein played a part in the current disaster. But it was
also strongly shaped by the notion that what is good for Israel
is good for the United States. Israel wanted Iraq neutralized.
Israeli intelligence, in the lead-up to the war, gave faulty
information to the U.S. about Iraq's alleged arsenal of weapons
of mass destruction. And when Baghdad was taken in April 2003, the
Israeli government immediately began to push for an attack on
Syria. The lust for this attack has waned, in no small part because
the Americans don't have enough troops to hang on in Iraq, much
less launch a new occupation.

Israel is currently lobbying the United States to launch aerial
strikes on Iran, despite the debacle in Lebanon. Israel's iron
determination to forcibly prevent a nuclear Iran makes it probable
that before the end of the Bush administration an attack on Iran
will take place. The efforts to halt nuclear development through
diplomatic means have failed. It does not matter that Iran poses
no threat to the United States. It does not matter that it does
not even pose a threat to Israel, which has several hundred
nuclear weapons in its arsenal. It matters only that Israel
demands total military domination of the Middle East.

The alliance between Israel and the United States has culminated
after 50 years in direct U.S. military involvement in the Middle
East. This involvement, which is not furthering American interests,
is unleashing a geopolitical nightmare. American soldiers and
Marines are dying in droves in a useless war. The impotence of the
United States in the face of Israeli pressure is complete. The
White House and the Congress have become, for perhaps the first
time, a direct extension of Israeli interests. There is no longer
any debate within the United States. This is evidenced by the
obsequious nods to Israel by all the current presidential
candidates with the exception of Dennis Kucinich. The political
cost for those who challenge Israel is too high.

This means there will be no peaceful resolution of the Palestinian-
Israeli conflict. It means the incidents of Islamic terrorism
against the U.S. and Israel will grow. It means that American
power and prestige are on a steep, irreversible decline. And I fear
it also means the ultimate end of the Jewish experiment in the
Middle East.

The weakening of the United States, economically and militarily,
is giving rise to new centers of power. The U.S. economy,
mismanaged and drained by the Iraq war, is increasingly dependent
on Chinese trade imports and on Chinese holdings of U.S. Treasury
securities. China holds dollar reserves worth $825 billion. If
Beijing decides to abandon the U.S. bond market, even in part, it
would cause a free fall by the dollar. It would lead to the
collapse of the $7-trillion U.S. real estate market. There would
be a wave of U.S. bank failures and huge unemployment. The growing
dependence on China has been accompanied by aggressive work by the
Chinese to build alliances with many of the world's major exporters
of oil, such as Iran, Nigeria, Sudan and Venezuela. The Chinese
are preparing for the looming worldwide clash over dwindling
resources.

The future is ominous. Not only do Israel's foreign policy
objectives not coincide with American interests, they actively hurt
them. The growing belligerence in the Middle East, the calls for an
attack against Iran, the collapse of the imperial project in Iraq
have all given an opening, where there was none before, to
America's rivals. It is not in Israel's interests to ignite a
regional conflict. It is not in ours. But those who have their
hands on the wheel seem determined, in the name of freedom and
democracy, to keep the American ship of state headed at breakneck
speed into the cliffs before us.

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