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NETANYAHU WAS RIGHT: ISRAEL ACTS LIKE A US AIRCRAFT CARRIER  
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Alan Wagman
March 3, 2024
Common Dreams
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_ Netanyahu likened Israel to a mighty American aircraft carrier.
That is how Israel, as a military colony, serves its imperial master _


A Palestinian resident walks amid near the rubble of buildings after
Israeli bombings of the al-Zahra neighborhood in Gaza Strip on October
19, 2023, (photo: Mustafa Hassona/Anadolu via Getty Images)

 

Although it may seem puzzling why the United States supports and
provides cover for Israel’s most outrageously authoritarian,
lawless, and even brutal actions, the reason is hiding in plain sight.
It is not, as many speculate, primarily because of AIPAC. It is
because Israel is a military colony of the United States.

From its inception, Zionism viewed a Jewish state as the handmaiden of
colonialism. The founder of the Zionist movement, Theodor
Herzl, described
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proposed Jewish state in his 1896 book, _Der Judenstaat_ (_The
Jewish State_) as “a wall of defense for Europe in Asia, an outpost
of civilization against barbarism.” (Astute readers will find echoes
of this racism in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s
recent justifications
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Israel’s conduct in Gaza [[link removed]];
one can decide for oneself if the echo is intentional.)

Some argue that Zionism was not a colonial project because Jews had
lived in Palestine [[link removed]] for
thousands of years. This ignores the fact that the Jews who had been
living in Palestine for the nearly 2,000 years prior to the European
Zionist intrusion into Palestine often were at least as loyal to
their Palestinian identity
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to the incoming Zionist colonizers.

In the two current wars being fought with American weapons but without
congressional appropriations for those weapons, only one state is
running out of ammunition.

In 1947, the United Nations—controlled by European colonial powers
such as France and England and their ally, the United States—voted
to create a Jewish state. The new state was surrounded by victims of
European colonialism: Jordan, which became independent from Britain in
1946; Syria and Lebanon, which became independent from France in 1946
and 1941, respectively; and Egypt, which did not become independent
from Britain until 1952. In 1956, when Egypt dared to declare itself
the owner of the Suez Canal, which ran entirely through Egyptian
territory, Israel joined its colonial sponsors France and England in
making war on a country which had been a former colony of both,
fulfilling Zionism’s promise to be “a wall of defense.”

U.S. military aid
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Israel was almost never more than about $13 million annually until
after the Six-Day War and,in the early 1970s exploded into the
hundreds of millions and then multiple billions of dollars. Almost all
of the aid had to be spent on weaponry from U.S. defense
manufacturers. In an era when the U.S. dared not engage directly with
the Soviet Union, Israel made war on Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt,
pitting U.S. advanced military hardware against Soviet hardware. This
made Israel the only actor who could use American weapons against
Russian weapons without risk of provoking world war, essential for
testing American weapons under battlefield conditions.

Israel also developed its own defense industry, specializing
in selling arms
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dictators that U.S. presidents wanted to support but could not. The
Guatemalan Army used Israeli weapons and training from Israeli
advisers to carry out its genocide against its Indigenous Mayan
population in the 1980s. Guatemalan rightists called it
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By the mid-1980s, just about everyone in the world except
then-President Ronald Reagan and Israel had cut
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relationships with apartheid South Africa. U.S. aid stopped when
Congress overrode
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veto of the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986. But Israeli aid
only stopped
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the U.S. threatened
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end military aid to Israel.

Today, with interstate warfare increasingly rare, the real need of
power elites is to control civilian populations. Israel is a
major exporter
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civilian control weaponry. According to Eran Efrati, speaking on
behalf of the Israeli organization Breaking the Silence
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Albuquerque on February 6, 2014, highly trained, Arabic-speaking
Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers (“musta’ribeen
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infiltrate peaceful Palestinian demonstrations to provoke violence.
IDF troops then deploy multiple types of tear gas or weapons to see
which works best. After the IDF reports the results, these products
are marketed internationally as “battle-tested
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American police
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The chickens are roosting here. Israeli technology is turning the U.S.
into a surveilled state. Israeli defense manufacturer Elbit Systems
sells so much advanced surveillance technology for use at our southern
border that Elbit has opened a subsidiary
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desperate immigrants: A network of surveillance cameras
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on Israeli technology
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Atlanta, making it virtually impossible to go anywhere or do anything
in the city without being seen and watched by an unblinking eye.

NSO Group, a private Israeli company, developed Pegasus
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a software that, once introduced into a cellphone, makes every bit of
data inside the phone available to the software operator. Unlike most
of the malware we all receive, no click is necessary. License to use
the software can only be sold with Israeli government approval
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Who gets to buy a license? Dictators
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have it. The Saudi government installed
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on the phone of the fiancée of Jamal Khashoggi, the _Washington
Post_ journalist murdered and dismembered by Saudi agents. FBI
Director Christopher Wray has admitted
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Congress that, yes, the FBI has purchased Pegasus but would never use
it. How’s your cellphone?

Finally, in the two current wars being fought with American weapons
but without congressional appropriations for those weapons, only one
state is running out of ammunition. Unlike Ukraine, Israel has no
shortage of bombs or ammo. Given the scale of the devastation visited
upon Gaza, how is this possible?

The United States used its military colony to cache billions of
dollars’ worth of munitions, ready for deployment against any real
or perceived enemy of the U.S. As an unforeseen “benefit,”
President Joe Biden has been able to release those bombs and bullets
to Israel without a congressional appropriation. Now, in addition to
vetoes at the U.N., Israel is being serviced with tangibly destructive
assets. The restocking costs will no doubt be buried in next year’s
trillion dollar defense appropriation.

It is no accident that on July 3, 2017, standing aboard the aircraft
carrier_ USS George H.W. Bush_, Benjamin Netanyahu likened
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to a mighty American aircraft carrier. That is how Israel, as a
military colony, serves its imperial master. America repays its
military colony, Israel, in kind.

_Alan Wagman is a retired public defender and long-time advocate for
human rights, social and economic justice, and peace. He is a member
of Jewish Voice for Peace, a former treasurer of one New Mexico
synagogue, former president of another, and a former board member of a
national Jewish spiritual organization._

_Common Dreams is a reader-supported independent news outlet created
in 1997 as a new media model.  Our nonprofit newsroom covers the most
important news stories of the moment. Common Dreams free online
journalism keeps our millions of readers well-informed, inspired, and
engaged.  We are optimists. We believe real change is possible. But
only if enough well-informed, well-intentioned—and just plain fed up
and fired-up—people demand it. We believe that together we can
attain our common dreams._

* Israel
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* zionism
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* Palestine
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* imperialism
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* colonialism
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