The other side of US-Israel ties

The tide is rising steadily against the policies of the extreme rightist Israeli government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu notorious for his flop-flop stances in negotiating with the Palestinians who have been waiting for 48 years now to establish their state in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Arab East Jerusalem and the Israeli-besieged Gaza Strip.

Over 600,000 Israeli settlers have illegally moved into the occupied territories.

What has been amazing lately has been the growing criticism of Israel on the Internet, host to several US websites that are blasting Israel’s policies, unlike the traditional American media which is usually friendly to it.

A case in point this week was that of The New York Times correspondent Jodi Rudoren who has been criticised by the popular Mondoweiss.net for “act[ing] as a stenographer for an Israeli government report that whitewashes the military of war crimes in last summer’s invasion of Gaza, in an article titled ‘Israeli Report Backs Tactics by Military in Gaza War’.”

In a review of Max Blumenthal’s book titled “The 51-day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza”, Rod Such writes that the book “will not be well received by US corporate media [because] the reasons are apparent in the very title”.

Such, a former editor for World Book and Encarta encyclopaedias, maintains that “it is a 51-day war, not a 50-day war as The New York Times and other corporate media repeatedly say. For the Times, 50 days means the war started on July 8, when Hamas military wing fired rockets into southern Israel, not on July 7, when Israel, as even some Israeli media acknowledged, broke its ceasefire agreement with Hamas by killing seven of its members in an air strike”. 

He explained that “the difference of a day is the difference between portraying Hamas as the aggressor and Israel as acting in self-defence or acknowledging that Israel was the aggressor and Hamas acted in self-defence”.

The United Nations General Assembly last Monday unanimously elected Denmark’s former parliament speaker Mogens Lykketoft as president of its 70th anniversary session, during which he said he wanted leaders gathering for the anniversary in late September “to focus on the road ahead for peace, security and human rights”.

Haaretz, the liberal Israeli daily, recalled that “last year, when visiting the region in his capacity as the Danish parliament’s speaker, Israel criticised him for only meeting Palestinian officials in Gaza and the West Bank, but not Israeli ones”, an action which the paper saw as a “snub”.

In a column titled “How Obama abandoned Israel”, which appeared last Tuesday in The Wall Street Journal, former Israeli ambassador to the United States Michael Oren accused President Barack Obama of abandoning Israel since coming to the White House in 2008.

Oren argued that Obama and Netanyahu made mistakes that damaged the ties between the two countries, and charged that the US president did so “deliberately”.

He claimed, reported Haaretz, that Obama has forsaken the two key principles in the ties between Israel and the US: avoiding public discord and the commitment on the part of both sides not to surprise each other with policy changes.

In a most startling commentary that appeared in The Washington Post this week, Walter Pincus, a prominent columnist, began his daily column saying: “What if Israel suddenly changed course and announced it was prepared to sign the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and work toward establishment of a Middle East nuclear-free zone.”

Pincus quickly added: “I’m not saying this is in the works. Far from it.”

The significance of the column is that it is the first to raise this issue in a major US newspaper.

The so-called P5+1 powers (US, Russia, Britain, France, China and the United Nations), have the end of this month as a deadline to reach an agreement with Iran, which is likely to happen.

Pincus’ argument makes sense. He added: “So the best way to remove Iran nuclear threat is to create a Middle nuclear-free zone. 

“It has been on the UN agenda since the 1960s and the subject of several General Assembly resolutions promoted by Egypt and Iran.”

If this does not work, he concluded, sharing the opinion of Israeli columnist Ari Shavit, the issue “will become the biggest threat facing Israel. It might turn the lives of Israelis into a nightmare”.

The writer is a Washington-based columnist.