[ Americas War Economy and the Urgent Call for Peace in the Middle
East]
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ROSES DRESSED IN BLACK  
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Liz Theoharis
November 5, 2023
Tom Dispatch [[link removed]]

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_ America's War Economy and the Urgent Call for Peace in the Middle
East _

Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu greets US President Joe
Biden upon his arrival at Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion airport on October 18,
2023, after the bombing of a hospital in Gaza , Brendan Smialowski/AFP


 

On September 19, 2001, eight days after 9/11, as the leaders of both
parties were already pounding a frenzied drumbeat of war, a diverse
group of concerned Americans released a warning about the long-term
consequences of a military response. Among them were veteran civil
rights activists, faith leaders, and public intellectuals, including
Rosa Parks, Harry Belafonte, and Palestinian-American Edward Said.
Rare public opponents of the drive to war at the time, they wrote
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with level-headed clarity:

“We foresee that a military response would not end the terror.
Rather, it would spark a cycle of escalating violence, the loss of
innocent lives, and new acts of terrorism… Our best chance for
preventing such devastating acts of terror is to act decisively and
cooperatively as part of a community of nations within the framework
of international law… and work for justice at home and abroad.”

Twenty-three years and more than two wars later, this statement reads
as a tragic footnote to America’s Global War on Terror that left an
entire region of the planet immiserated. It contributed to the direct
and indirect deaths of close to 4.5 million people
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while costing Americans almost $9 trillion
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The situation is certainly different today. Still, over the last few
weeks, those prophetic words, now 22 years old, have been haunting me,
as the U.S. war machine kicks into ever higher gear following the
horrific Hamas massacre of Israeli civilians and the brutal
intensification of the decades-long Israeli siege of civilians in
Gaza. Sadly, the words and actions of our nation’s leaders have
revealed a staggering, even willful, historical amnesia about the
disastrous repercussions of America’s twenty-first-century
war-mongering.

Case in point: recently, the United States was the only nation to veto
[[link removed]] the U.N. Security
Council resolution calling for “humanitarian pauses” to deliver
life-saving aid to Palestinians in Gaza. Instead, all but a few
members
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of Congress are lining up to support billions more in military aid for
Israel and the further mobilization of our armed forces in the Middle
East. These moves, experts say
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may only accelerate wider regional conflict (something we are already
seeing glimmers of vis-à-vis Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen) at a
time of increasingly profound global instability. In the last few
weeks, the U.S. Navy has
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“assembled one of the greatest concentrations of power in the
Eastern Mediterranean in 40 years,” while the Department of Defense
is readying thousands
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of troops for possible deployment. Meanwhile, college administrators
are suggesting student-reservists
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be prepared in case they get called up in the coming weeks.

Amid this frenzy of American bluster and brawn, the U.N. agency for
Palestinian refugees reports that Gaza is “fast becoming a hell hole
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riddled with death, disease, starvation, thirst, and displacement.
Hundreds of scholars of international law and conflict studies have
warned that the Israeli military may already have launched a
“potential genocide
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of Gazans. At the same time, within Israel, citizen-militias, armed by
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the far-right minister of national security, have escalated violent
attacks on Palestinians, only worsened by the acts of armed Israeli
settlers on the West Bank protected by that very military.

Finally allowing a tiny amount of aid across the Egypt-Gaza border,
after shutting down
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food, water, and fuel for Gaza, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant
made it clear
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just how much power the United States wields over this unfolding
humanitarian crisis. “The Americans insisted,” he reported, “and
we are not in a place where we can refuse them. We rely on them for
planes and military equipment. What are we supposed to do? Tell them
no?”

As Gallant implied, the U.S. could use its influence not only to
demand far more aid for Gazans, but to compel quite a different course
of action. There should, after all, be no contradiction between
condemning Hamas for its heinous slaughter in the south of Israel and
denouncing Israel for its decades-old dispossession and oppression of
the Palestinian people
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and its now-indiscriminate killing and destruction in Gaza. There need
be no contradiction between decrying terrorism and demanding diplomacy
over violence. In truth, the Biden administration could use every
non-military tool at its disposal to pressure both Hamas and Israel to
pursue an immediate ceasefire, the full release of all hostages, and
whatever humanitarian assistance is now needed.

If only, rather than further militarizing
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the region or questioning the death toll
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Biden administration were to focus on making this most recent and ever
more ominous crisis a final turning point, not for yet more brutality
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but for a long-term political solution focused on achieving real
peace, human rights, and equality for everyone in the region. In this
moment of grief and rage, when tensions are at a fever pitch and the
wheel of history is turning around us, it’s time to demand peace
above all else.

THE CRUEL MANIPULATION OF THE POOR

While the U.S. government refuses to use its considerable power as
leverage for peace, ordinary Americans seem to know better. Unlike the
days after 9/11, recent polls suggest that a majority of Americans
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sending more weapons to Israel and support delivering humanitarian aid
to Gaza, including a majority of people under the age of 44, as well
as a majority of Democrats and independents and a significant minority
of Republicans. While Representative Rashida Tlaib, the only
Palestinian-American in Congress, was made a pariah and is in the
process of being censured
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by some of her colleagues after her plea
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a ceasefire, she actually represents the popular will of a significant
portion of the public.

And that, in turn, represents a generational shift from even a decade
or two ago. In the wake of this country’s disastrous wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as dozens of other military conflicts
globally, many Americans, especially Millennials and Gen Zers, see the
U.S. military less as a defender of democracy than as a purveyor of
death and chaos. Nearly second-by-second online coverage of the
Israeli bombing campaign is offering Americans an unprecedented view
into the collective punishment of more than two million Gazans, half
of them 18 or younger
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(Now, with limited Internet and communications
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it’s unclear how word of what’s happening in Gaza will continue to
get out.) Add to that the slow-burning pain that has marked life in
the United States over the last 15 years — the Great Recession, the
Covid-19 economic shock, the climate crisis, and the modern movement
for racial justice — and the reasons for such a relatively
widespread urge for peace become clearer.

Today, half of all Americans are either impoverished or one emergency
away
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from economic ruin. As younger generations face what often feels like
a dead-end future, there’s a growing sense among those I speak to
(as well as older folks) that the government has abandoned them. At a
moment when the Republicans (and some Democrats) argue that we can’t
afford universal healthcare or genuine living wages, the military
budget for 2023 is $858 billion
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and the Pentagon still maintains 750 military bases
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globally. Last week, without a touch of irony, Treasury Secretary
Janet Yellen, who claimed last year
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that student debt relief would hurt the economy, insisted
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that the U.S. can “certainly afford two wars.”  

Millions of us tuned into President Biden’s Oval Office speech on
his return from Israel, only the second of his presidency. There, he
asked Congress to earmark yet another $100 billion
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mainly for American military aid to Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan (a
boon to the war-profiteering weapons makers whose CEOs will grow even
richer thanks to those new contracts). Just a year after Congress
killed the Expanded Child Tax Credit
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which had cut official child poverty in half
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Biden’s speech represented a further pivot away from socially
beneficial policymaking and toward further strengthening of the
ravenous engine of our war economy. After the speech, the _Nation_‘s
Katrina vanden Heuvel offered
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this compelling instant commentary: “Biden tonight rolled out a
version of twenty-first-century military Keynesianism. Let’s call
his policy just that. No more Bidenomics. And it consigns the U.S. to
endless militarization of foreign policy.”

A decision to organize our economy yet more around war will also mean
the further militarization of domestic policy, with dire consequences
for poor and low-income people. Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., once
called such steps the “cruel manipulation of the poor
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phrase he coined as part of his denunciation of the Vietnam War in the
late 1960s. King was then thinking about the American soldiers
fighting and dying in Vietnam “on the side of the wealthy, and the
secure, while we create a hell for the poor.”

Today, a similar “cruel manipulation” is playing out. For years,
our leaders have invoked the myth of scarcity to justify inaction when
it comes to widespread poverty, growing debt, and rising inequality in
the United States. Now, some of them are calling for the spending of
billions of dollars to functionally fund the bombardment and
occupation of impoverished Gaza and a violent Israeli clampdown in the
West Bank, not to speak of the possibility of a wider set of Middle
Eastern wars. However, polling numbers suggest that a surprising
number of Americans have seen through the fog of war and are perhaps
coming to believe that our nation’s abundance should be used not as
a tool of death but as a lifeline for poor and struggling people at
home and abroad.

NOT IN OUR NAME

In a time of stifling darkness, one bright light over the last weeks
has been the eruption of non-violent, pro-peace protests across the
world. In Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Europe, hundreds of
thousands of people have hit the streets to demand a ceasefire,
including possibly half a million people
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Here in the U.S., tens of thousands of Americans have followed suit in
dozens of cities, from New York to Washington, D.C., Chicago to San
Francisco. No less important, those protest marches have been both
multi-racial and multi-generational, much like the 2020 uprisings for
Breonna Taylor, George Floyd [[link removed]], and
the countless other Black lives lost to police brutality.

Recently, close friends and colleagues sent me photos from a march in
Washington
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where Jewish protesters
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demanded a ceasefire and held up signs with heartrending slogans like
“Not in My Name,” “Ceasefire Now,” and “My Grief Is Not Your
Weapon.” Ultimately, close to 400 people, including numerous rabbis,
were arrested
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peacefully sang and prayed in a congressional office building, while
David Friedman, ambassador to Israel under President Trump, hatefully
tweeted
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“Any American Jew attending this rally is not a Jew — yes I said
it!” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia ludicrously
claimed
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that they were leading an insurrection.

Two days later, my organization, the Kairos Center
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Justice, cosponsored a pro-peace march that drew a large crowd of
Palestinians and Muslim-American families. At noon, about 500
protesters, a gorgeous, multicolored sea of humanity participated in
the Jumma call to prayer [[link removed]]
in front of the U.S. Capitol. The following week, folks co-organized a
pray-in at New York Representative Hakeem Jeffries’s office, using
the phrase “ceasefire is the moral choice.” Faith and movement
leaders offered prayers from their various religious traditions and
displayed the names of people killed so far.

On October 27th, as Israel expanded its ground invasion
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of Gaza, I joined thousands of people in Grand Central Station to call
for a #CeasefireNow, one of the largest demonstrations
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in New York since this most recent conflict broke out. Protests
continued all week. And on November 4th
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there was a mass rally and march in Washington, D.C., to call for an
end to war and support the rights of Palestinians, with hundreds of
organizations bridging a diversity of views and voices to plead for
peace.

Those marches were an inspiring indication of the broad coalition of
Americans who desperately want to prevent genocide in Gaza and dream
of lasting peace and freedom in Israel/Palestine. At the lead are
Palestinians and Jews who refuse to be used as pawns and prop-pieces
by military hawks. Alongside them are many Americans all too aware
that, though they might not be directly affected by the nightmarish
events now unfolding in the Middle East, they are still implicated in
the growing violence there thanks to their tax dollars and the actions
of our government. Together, we are collectively crying out: “Not in
Our Name.”

Such marches undoubtedly represent the largest antiwar mobilization
since the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and are weaving together diverse
communities — young and old, Black, Brown, and White, Muslim,
Jewish, and Christian, poor and working-class — in a way that should
prove encouraging indeed for a growing peace movement. Right now,
there are new alliances and relationships being forged that will
undoubtedly endure for years to come.

Yes, this remains a small victory in what’s likely to prove a
terrifying global crisis, but it is a victory nonetheless.

ROSES DRESSED IN BLACK

The last few weeks have resurrected traumatic memories for many Jews
and Palestinians globally — of the Holocaust, the Nakba, and the
long history of Islamophobia, anti-Arab hate, anti-Jewish violence,
and antisemitism. For many of us who are not Palestinian or Jewish,
the recent mass death and violence have also triggered our own painful
reckonings with the past.

I’m a descendant of Armenian genocide survivors. When I was a child
growing up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, I heard hushed tales of death
marches, hunger, lack of water, barricaded roads, and harrowing
escapes. Those stories remain etched into my consciousness, a mournful
inheritance my dispossessed ancestors handed down.

My great-grandfather, Charles Ozun Artinian, fled his home in what is
now Turkey’s Seyhan River valley after the 1909 Adana Massacre in
which Ottoman militants killed 25,000 Armenian Christians. Part of his
family escaped over the Caucasus Mountains into Western Europe. They
then traveled halfway across the world to Argentina, because so many
other nations, including the United States, had closed their borders
to Armenian refugees and would only open them years later.

As he was fleeing Adana, Charles wrote a poem, one of the few
surviving long-form poems from the region at the time. It begins:

_“In the Seyhan valley there rises a smoke_

_Roses dressed in black, month of April cried_

_Cries of sadness and mourning were heard everywhere_

_Broken hearted and sad, everybody cried…”_

My family taught my siblings and me that although the genocide against
our people was carried out by the Ottoman Empire, it was made possible
by the complicity and indifference of the international community,
including the world’s richest and most powerful nations. Right now,
the smoke rising over Gaza is suffocating and every additional hour
the U.S. enables more bombs to fall and tanks to rumble, more roses
will be, as my great-grandfather put it, dressed in black. Not only
that, but with the detonation of each new American-made bomb, the
conditions for the long-term freedom and safety of both Israelis and
Palestinians are blasted ever more into rubble.

Let us honor the memories of our ancestors and finally learn the
lesson of their many stolen lives: “Not In Our Name!,” “Peace
and Justice for All!” and the pleas
[///Users/tomengelhardt/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/Mail%20Downloads/E1846969-97C7-424D-87C7-D6B69ADE847D/signal-2023-10-28-200338_002.jpeg?utm_source=xxxxxx-general&utm_medium=email]
from Gaza, including “Ceasefire Now!,” “End the Siege,”
“Protect Medical Facilities,” and “Gaza is Home!”

Copyright 2023 Liz Theoharis

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_Follow _TomDispatch _on Twitter
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Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, _Songlands
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as well as Alfred McCoy’s _In the Shadows of the American Century:
The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power
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John Dower’s _The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since
World War II
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_and Ann Jones’s_ They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from
America’s Wars: The Untold Story
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* US War Economy; Biden's Military Budget; US Anti-War Movement;
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