Israel Can Do No Wrong. posted by Richard Seymour

The way in which Zionist apologia works is interesting: whatever Israel does, the other guys started it, and at any rate since they don't care about human life they deserve it. This is an exchange from This Week, the BBC's late night politics programme, yesterday:

Diane Abbot: But the Israeli response as we speak does look disproportionate. Where is Israel going with this?

Maureen Lipman: What's proportion got to do with it though Diane? It's not about proportion is it? I mean human life is not cheap to the Israelis, and human life on the other side is quite cheap because they strap bombs to people and send them to blow themselves up.

It's hard to believe, I know, that the charming old bag from the BT adverts is a pungent racist - perhaps she could update the old ad with Bob Hoskins in it: "It's good to talk - but better to kill the brown bastards."

No matter what Israel does, its apologists are either silently cheerful or loudly bombastic in its defense. Israel can do whatever the hell it likes, can starve people, terrorise them shoot at civilians, bomb them repeatedly, destroy infrastructure, kidnap and torture children, steal land and property, pass racist laws, promote anti-Arab racism in their classrooms, engage in ethnic cleansing, kidnap Palestine's government, treat its Arab citizens with contempt - nary a fucking word.

Hezbollah nicks a couple of soldiers to give Gaza a bit of reprieve and suddenly there's no end to the wailing. And it's not because Israel is committing mass murder in Lebanon (again), which is at worst 'disproportionate', but because of the Arabo-Islamic axis that is supposedly a serious risk to the only nuclear power in the Middle East. They have openly declared that they intend to commit war crimes, just as they have openly been committing war crimes for decades, but everyone knows that the proper response is: those damned Muslims!

Let's be clear about this - Israel has been engaging in activity on the Lebanese border ever since it was kicked out of the south of the country by Hezbollah fighters in 2000. The strategy has long been to target Hezbollah, Syria and Iran via Lebanon. This assault was planned well before the incidents that supposedly precipitated it. Israel has long wished to terminate its regional enemies all the better to finish off the Palestinians as a people and as a polity. They intend to take the whole of the West Bank, and Gaza will be maintained as an ever-shrinking open air prison which can now be bombed freely since there are no settlements there to defend. Time is running out for the Palestinians, and yet the only thing that matters to Western reporters and politicians is Israel's right to 'defend' itself. And as with apartheid South Africa, the right to 'self-defense' of a viciously racist sub-imperial state amounts to the right to threaten, do and dare anything, and present whatever contemptuous excuse can be devised.