EDITORIAL: The only surprise in the US senate shooting down Bernie Sanders’ attempt to block sales of “offensive weapons” to Israel so harshly was the American political elite’s shocking divorce from reality even as much of the country’s population, most other nations, and all aid agencies especially the UN, openly accuse Washington of bankrolling, arming and protecting the Jewish state’s genocide in Gaza and Lebanon.
So American tax dollars – just as Sanders lamented in his speech ahead of the senate vote – will continue to underwrite the most atrocious war crimes and crimes against humanity of the 21st century; and the rest of the world will helplessly look on.
Meanwhile, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the country’s former defence minister Yoav Gallant, along with Hamas military leader Mohammed Deif, for war crimes.
This is truly “the most momentous decision in its 22-year history”, as the UK newspaper The Guardian put it, since it marks the first time that leaders of a democracy, especially a western-aligned state, have been charged by the court. The Biden administration was quick to dismiss the ruling as “outrageous”, quite naturally, but other world leaders are no longer willing to extend blind support to Israel like the old days.
The Netherlands, Switzerland, Ireland, Italy, Spain and especially Canada have surprised observers by calling for ICC’s decision to be respected. The UK and France pretty much said the same, but declined to elaborate, especially whether Netanyahu and Gallant would be arrested if they set foot on their shores.
All this goes to show how strongly the pendulum of international opinion has swung away from the knee-jerk pro-Israeli position that the US continues to champion, even as the death toll from the genocide races to the 50,000 mark amid credible reports of forced starvation and inhuman tactics employed by the Israeli military.
Let’s not forget that all this happened just when the outgoing Biden administration also greenlighted use of American missiles in Ukraine’s war against Russia, prompting Kyiv to fire American and British long range missiles into Russian territory and dramatically raising the temperature in Europe as well.
It’s interesting, and very revealing, that the Biden White House took this decision in its very last days, after holding back for almost one thousand days, as if to deliberately complicate the situation before Donald Trump returns to power; given the latter’s strong objections to the way Nato is structured and how it operates.
Yet even as Trump might disagree with the current US position on Ukraine, he will not see the Israeli situation very differently. It was his administration, after all, that sanctioned the ICC, aimed at court officials and their families, for what his Secretary of State at the time, Mike Pompeo, said were ICC’s investigations into actions of US and its allies in Afghanistan as well as Israeli military operations in the occupied territories. He’s also openly called for Israel to “finish the job”, which explains the post-US election glee in Tel Aviv.
Connecting the dots, from Israel’s offensive since October last year to the US senate’s strong backing of its genocide and expectations of worse to come under Trump, it seems comparisons with the Russian experience leading to World War One – when the empire was held hostage by Serbian influence to the extent that it plunged into the great war – are only too chillingly real. There’s no doubt that the US government has allowed itself to be completely controlled by Zionist influence, especially its money.
And in doing so it has not only brought shame upon itself, but it has also pushed the whole world perilously close to another great war that has the potential to be far more destructive than anything that has come before.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2024
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