The Centrality of Israel, and its (Possibly) Diminishing Importance
Biden has made no mention of Israel in any of his SOTU addresses. Those connecting Nazi policies with pandemic should examine Israel's role throughout.
For years now I’ve seen the centrality of Israel as a result of its being the most virulent manifestation of settler colonialism.
In the aftermath of World War II, explicit colonialism largely came to an end. Or seemed to be.
Much of the pretext of European settler colonialism was Christianity and the White Man’s Burden, a Civilizing Mission.
The concept of colonialism should have ended there, but it didn’t.
Part of the reason it didn’t was because Israel kept the thread alive.
Just as explicit colonialism was ending in Africa and much of Asia and Latin America, a form of it went into hyper mode with Israel against the Palestinian people, driving hundreds of thousands of indigenous people from their homes and putting in place European settlers.
Just as the suffering of innocent Jesus was the pretext for depraved European colonialism, so too were atrocities heaped upon Jews the pretext for Zionist crimes.
Passion plays blinded Christians to European colonialism.
And now, charges of “anti-Semitism” are used to shut down criticism of Israel, as with recent moves against Rep. Ilhan Omar. This as the US government both refuses to acknowledge Israel’s ethnic cleansing or its threat of future nuclear weapons use. (And Rep. Omar herself refuses to acknowledge Israel’s nuclear weapons arsenal.)
Israel’s settler colonialism, like that of Europe and the US against Native Americans, has been justified by Biblical mandate as I’ve noted.
However, in recent years, colonialism has branched out and may mean that Israel is less central.
Many criticized the so-called neocons who pushed for the Iraq invasion. I viewed them more as neo-colonialists. They sought to reconstruct imperial delineations, like the US domination of Iraq. This was partly facilitated by the USSR being collapsed.
NATO, instead of ending, found pretexts to wage war and project power in Europe (Yugoslavia, 1999), Asia (Afghanistan, 2001) and Africa (Libya, 2011). And now Ukraine seeks to be “Big Israel”.
Biden made no mention of Israel in his State of the Union Address. In fact, he’s made no mention of Israel in any of his SOTU addresses.
This may reflect the apparent growing distaste for the Zionist project among some in the Democratic base. And it may reflect a desire to ensure that the continuing expansion of Israel proceeds with minimal scrutiny. Or it may reflect that it’s not as central as it once was.
Imperial impulses can be manifested globally in new ways.
(Part of me wonders about former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s recent remarks (which he seems to have somewhat walked back) about NATO members blocking efforts to broker a peace between Russia and Ukraine in its early days. He could well be telling the truth, but this doesn’t seem to be a sufficient explanation for his actions. He could be engaging in a re-branding exercise for Israel, where it’s a “peace maker”. Or he could want to ensure that the imperial project remains focused directly around Israel.)
One of those ways that the imperial project may be morphing may be tied to the pandemic and the power of the World Health Organization. Using “health” as the latest pretext for control and intervention.
A recent production “Never Again” by Children’s Health Defense connects Nazi practices to the British and US eugenics movements and pandemic policies. The featured expert is Vera Sharav, a medical activist and survivor of the Nazi holocaust.
While many a liberal will dismiss such comparisons, that should not be done too hastily. International lawyer Francis Boyle, who was among the first to publicly charge Covid could have lab origin, has charged that vaccine mandates violate the Nuremberg code in his book Resisting Medical Tyranny: Why the COVID-19 Mandates Are Criminal.
I’ll be watching more of the program, but part of what’s striking about it is that while there’s massive mention of Israel in its being highly vaccinated, there is (so far, as much as I can tell) no mention of Israel in terms of its own imposition of apartheid over Palestinians, much less its ethnic cleansing. If we are entering into a state of medical apartheid, with vaccinated and unvaccinated, then other apartheids seems quite relevant to the dynamic.
Boyle for his part says the Israeli oppression against Palestinians can be explained by psychological processes: “Psychoanalysis calls this phenomenon ‘transference.’ Likewise the psychoanalytic phenomenon of ‘displacement’ comes into play: The USA, UK, France would not let the Jews take out their vengeance against Germany and the Germans (e.g., the Morgenthau Plan) because they wanted to use Germany and the Germans against the Soviet Union. So let the Jews take out their vengeance against Palestine and the Palestinians.”
Wow: "The USA, UK, France would not let the Jews take out their vengeance against Germany and the Germans (e.g., the Morgenthau Plan) because they wanted to use Germany and the Germans against the Soviet Union. So let the Jews take out their vengeance against Palestine and the Palestinians.” Incredibly insightful.
If Israel is ethnically cleaning Palestinians why does their population keep growing? Plus which if you knew history you would know that the Jews are indigenous to the Middle East. The Muslim Arabs only to Saudi Arabia. They (the Muslims) have colonized large swaths of land throughout the area where they are not native.