I'll Scratch Your Bank...

[Classical_Liberal]

I'll Scratch Your Bank...


Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun: a magazine of progressive Jews, author of Healing Israel/Palestine (North Atlantic Books, 2003), and rabbi of Beyt Tikkun Synagogue in San Francisco.

When George Bush met with Ariel Sharon in the White House on April 14, each leader did his best to confer legitimacy on the other's failed policies of occupation.

Ariel Sharon boosted Bush's plummeting popularity when he helped the U.S. president reframe our current war against the people of Iraq as a struggle against terrorism. For 37 years, Israeli governments have used that approach to justify their own occupation of the West Bank and Gaza—and it has worked to convince many Israelis to ignore evidence that it is the occupation that causes the terror and not vice versa.

President Bush may hope that Americans can be convinced that the U.S. should follow Israel's example and respond to terror with heightened repression. Israel has just assassinated the leading sheikh associated with Hamas terrorism, and the Sharon government has refined a technique of collective punishment so that over the years, it has punished millions of Palestinians for the acts of a handful of terrorists. While Ariel Sharon's policies have actually generated an increase in the number of Israelis hurt by terror, the impression of "standing tough" has worked to retain his popularity among many Israelis who have become convinced that Israel has every right to hold onto the West Bank. If the strategy works for Sharon, it might work for Bush's adventure in Iraq as well—if Bush can find a way to convince Americans that the Israeli strategy America seems to be following in Iraq is precisely the way to stand strong against terror.

In exchange, President Bush gave Ariel Sharon a written commitment that the United States will no longer push for a return of Israel to its pre-1967 borders. This concession is the most significant accomplishment yet achieved by the Israeli Right. For decades, U.S. policy has aimed to convince Israel that it must live by the same principle that has governed international law since the end of World War II: that countries must not be allowed to increase their territory through armed conquest. It was that very principle that was used to justify the U.S support for the autocratic government of Kuwait when it was attacked by Saddam Hussein's Iraq in 1990, and it is the cornerstone of the hopes of the international community to prevent endless wars in the 21st century. By abrogating that principle, George Bush not only opens the way for Israel to permanently annex major sections of the West Bank and permanently end the hopes of the Palesitnian people for an economically and politically viable state of their own; he also sets a precedent for national expansion through war as dangerous as his pre-emptive war strategy for Iraq.......

http://www.tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/10262

[Rhiannon12866]

1. Good article. Thanks.

They are obviously reading from the same playbook. And losing the war against terror.