The silencing of America

 If a dominant football team ran up a score by a 10 to 1 ratio the public would be in an uproar.  Yet few are talking about the same ratio in lives in the conflict between Hamas and Israel, a kill ratio that will very likely increase.  What does that tell us about society?  Have we forever lost our moral compass?

I am in no way condoning the Hamas attack or the taking of hostages, but what I am saying is that egregious acts such as these don’t happen in a vacuum; they’re usually precipitated by unrelenting oppression.  Real peace will never be realized without objectively looking at both the Israeli and Palestinian points-of-view.

It’s common knowledge that the Israeli lobby has considerable influence in Washington, D.C., but I’m both astounded and alarmed by the unprecedented power it apparently wields as evidenced by what’s going on in the U.S. in the aftermath of the Hamas attack.  The Palestinian point-of-view has been conspicuously under-represented or purged in media, politics, and public discourse.

In a 2006 paper titled “The Israeli Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” John J. Mearsheimer from the University of Chicago and Stephen M. Walt from Harvard University concluded “The overall thrust of U.S. policy in the region (Middle East) is due almost entirely to U.S. domestic politics, and especially to the activities of the ‘Israel Lobby.’ Other special interest groups have managed to skew U.S. foreign policy in directions they favored, but no lobby has managed to divert U.S. foreign policy as far from what the American national interest would otherwise suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that U.S. and Israeli interests are essentially identical.”

America’s financial and military support to Israel has only perpetuated the conflict.  Not only has it cost U.S. taxpayers $260 billion (adjusted for inflation) since World War II per a U.S. News and World Report analysis, but it has facilitated the oppression of the Palestinian people over decades, and helps Israel to continue building settlements on Palestinian land in defiance of international law.  This massive, one-sided support certainly puts American lives at risk as 9-11 demonstrated.  

According to The Congressional Research Service “Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since World War II” adding that almost all current U.S. bilateral aid to Israel is in the form of military assistance.  Yet Israel is the only nuclear power in the region and the 10th largest weapons exporter in the world.  They receive more U.S. foreign military aid than all other countries in the world combined according to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Every couple of years some Palestinians rise up from squalor in a futile attempt to stop the oppression by this regional juggernaut.  This only serves as a pretext for Israel to further destroy their infrastructure and colonize more of their land.

As a rule anyone criticizing Israel, even when it’s constructive, has been labeled anti-Semitic, but in the wake of the Hamas attack this has taken on disturbing proportions.  American democracy appears to have been hijacked and in its place a climate of McCarthyism has crept upon us.  These sophisticated, dark forces, abetted by U.S. politicians, have managed to intimidate or bamboozle the entire nation, at least on the surface, and consequently stifled any semblance of balanced debate while a genocide unfolds.  

Individuals criticizing Israel or simply offering an alternative perspective are being promptly fired from their jobs for exercising their right of free speech. Petty, yet elaborate, vindictiveness has even silenced protests on college and university campuses.  Students in prominent schools like Harvard and Columbia Universities have been blacklisted by prominent law firms and Wall Street because they signed open letters criticizing Israel.  Solid job offers to top students have been rescinded.

Trucks displaying the faces of some of these students appeared near the Harvard and Columbia campuses.  In New York City the photos were accompanied by the words “Columbia’s biggest antisemites,” the New York Times reported. According to some protestors, the Columbia photographs were taken from a secure, private student portal.  In the wake of such reprisals numerous Harvard students backtracked from their heartfelt beliefs.  Palestinian-American conventions and conferences scheduled before the Hamas attack are being outlawed, moved, or cancelled due to coercion.

Pressure is also being placed on school administrators by pro-Israel donors.  The Israeli newspaper, Jewish Currents, reports “Multiple donors to Harvard said they would cut off their funds because the university had been too slow to condemn the Hamas attack and the student groups’ statement. Some donors to the University of Pennsylvania have also said they will no longer fund the school because of what they described as its ‘silence’ on the Hamas attacks.”

The sophistication and breadth of pro-Israel pressure cannot be fairly compared to your isolated, primitive, garden variety anti-Semiticism that typically comes in the form of spray paint.

The Israeli lobby along with certain powerful Jewish-American citizens wield tremendous, disproportionate power, particularly over politicians, when you consider that Jewish-American adults account for only 2.4% of the adult population according to the Pew Research Center.  However, over 50% say they have an annual household income of a least $100,000, significantly higher than the U.S. average.  Palestinians, on the other hand, have little wealth and certainly no noteworthy lobby in Washington, D.C.

The politicians who do not demonstrate sufficient support for Israel can find themselves voted out of office because of dark money channeled to opposing campaigns. To expect elected officials to be more objective would be like asking a vampire to drive a wooden stake through their own heart.  It’s not going to happen without changing the ways foreign and domestic powers can influence our elected government.

“Three weeks into Israel’s assault on Gaza, only about 10% of House Democrats have called for an end to the bombing,” according to Jewish Currents, yet 80% of Democratic voters believe the “U.S. should call for a ceasefire and a de-escalation of violence in Gaza” according to a Data for Progress poll.  So who do you think our elected officials are answering to?

I suspect that many of the Americans who do support Israel right now are reacting exclusively to the horror of the Hamas attacks with little or no knowledge of the oppression that has been inflicted on the Palestinian people for decades, especially during the ongoing and unlawful 16-year land, sea, and air blockade of Gaza depriving civilians of basic human needs like food, water, electricity, and medical supplies.  Palestinians and humanitarian organizations often refer to the Gaza Strip as the world’s largest outdoor prison. What would anyone do under such oppression?  

How many Americans are well informed of the insidious building of settlements on  Palestinian land in the West Bank over decades in defiance of international law and world opinion?  

In the months preceding the Hamas attack, escalating violent attacks perpetrated by settlers and the Israeli Defense Forces on defenseless Palestinian civilians in the West Bank, people who have no affiliation with Hamas, were given minimal or no coverage in the U.S. press while they were far more prominent in the international press.  A recently disclosed plan to build 10,000 illegal housing units for Israeli settlers on Palestinian land in East Jerusalem has also been virtually ignored or relegated to the back pages.

Israel has an insatiable appetite for land, simply that, and it needs war or instability as a justification to obtain it.  The claims to need a security buffer requiring more land doesn’t hold up in my mind when you consider they are the only regional power with nuclear weapons and have one of the most technologically-advanced militaries in the world, not to mention the undying support of the strongest nation on the planet.  There’s no better example of Israel’s military supremacy in the region than the 1967 six-day war when it crushed the combined forces of three Arab nations after Israel preemptively attacked Egypt destroying 286 of their 420 combat aircraft and surged through the Sinai with their tanks.

Furthermore, the relentless advancement of technology will make weapons of mass destruction smaller and more deadly as time goes on.  No buffer is going to stop a chemical agent from being released in a crowded city or blown across the border in the wind.  We now live in an age where it’s unwise to stoke the flames of hatred.               

The status quo over the years has not made Israeli citizens any safer as demonstrated on Oct 7th.  It’s in the best interests of Israeli citizens to wholeheartedly seek a meaningful peace which must include a two-state solution.  Completely leveling a city where tens of thousands of civilians are trapped will only encourage anti-Semitism in the global community.

I wonder whether most Americans even know that we are largely alone right now in the global community in our unconditional support of Israel as evidenced by the recent non-binding, Jordanian, UN resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire and adequate humanitarian aid which passed overwhelmingly 121 to 14.  Beside the U.S. and Israel only Austria, Croatia, Czechia, Fiji, Guatemala, Hungary, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay and Tonga voted against the resolution.

The decades of Israeli’s oppression of the Palestinians is in many ways akin to our own genocidal treatment of native Americas for which we now effusively apologize.  So how then can we now turn a blind eye in the Middle East when we’re the only nation who can likely put a stop to it?

It’s time for Americans to see the true bigger picture both in terms of the suppression of free speech and the genocide of the Palestinian people rather than being led by dark forces down an ignominious path from which we might not return.

   

ASSESSING THE BABY BOOMER LEGACY

My generation, the baby boomers, are arguably the most celebrated generation in American history. Time Magazine named us Person of the Year in 1966. As youths we fostered peace, love and understanding principally by helping to end the Vietnam War, and we played an influential role in the civil rights and environmental movements. But, did we live up to the high ideals we preached in the four decades since then?

As young people, we vehemently criticized all institutions of power from our parents to government. The lyrics of Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are a-Changin’ characterized what appeared to be the pervasive sentiment of the baby boomers at the time when he said the “old road” of our “mothers and fathers” is “rapidly agin.”

But, did we really abandon the “old road” of our parents, and take a “new one”?  Now that we have occupied the seats of power in government, business, academia, and media, and are transitioning to our golden years, it’s the ideal time to evaluate ourselves by the same standards we judged our parents.

The centerpiece of our legacy to date has to be the peace movement. However, although the Vietnam War was brought to an end, the U.S. has essentially remained in international conflicts ever since including Beirut, Grenada, Panama, the Gulf War, Somalia, Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Iraq. And, if truth be told, we had an ulterior motive in our protests of the Vietnam War. Our necks were in the noose since the military draft was still in full effect and any one of us could suddenly find ourselves fighting an unpopular war in the jungles of Southeast Asia. Once the draft ended, war suddenly became more palatable and collectively the baby boomers fell silent in the face of war ever since.

While American deaths have plummeted since Vietnam largely due to weak adversaries, smart weapons, and quicker and better battlefield medical attention; civilian mortality rates are disturbingly high. We were outraged by events that unfolded in My Lai, yet civilian deaths in Iraq alone are estimated to be well over 100,000 since 2003, even by U.S. government measurements. The folly and futility of the Vietnam War are now being replayed simultaneously in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The record of racial equality in America is also a bit disappointing. Although the 1960’s brought about desegregation, the plight of people of color has not improved much in the decades that followed. The gap between rich and poor has only grown more pronounced, and the digital divide makes the disadvantaged ever more challenged.

Our incarceration rate is the highest in the world. In 2005, for the first time in our history, more than one in 100 Americans was behind bars with a disproportionate amount being people of color. According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics non-Hispanic blacks accounted for 39.4% of the total prison and jail population in 2009, even though they represented only 13.6% of the U.S. population according to the 2010 census. One in nine black men between the ages of 20 and 34 are behind bars.

Today we teeter on repealing or amending much of the environmental legislation of the past four decades at the expense of the environment and to the benefit of big business. We have shunned global efforts that deal with atmospheric threats refusing to support the Convention on Biodiversity treaty at the Earth Summit in 1992 and the Kyoto Protocol in 1997. 193 nations ratified the former and the U.S. remains the only signatory out of 192 nations not to have ratified the latter.

All-in-all we have behaved no differently than our parents. Our lofty aspirations and criticism of our parents’ generation were hypocritical in light of what we accomplished. War is pervasive as ever, the plight of people of color is still alarming, and we shun world and scientific opinion in the face of the greatest environmental threats mankind ever confronted. Some of the problems that remain as we fade into our senior years may not be entirely of our doing, but much of it is. Given that we preached such high ideals and lambasted our parents in the process, I think all of us baby boomers owe our parents an apology, not because our principles were wrong, but because we were wrong about ourselves.

BABY BOOMERS SHOULD BE ASHAMED OF THEMSELVES

I would think there has never been a generation quite like the baby boomers who preached such high ideals and fell so short of fulfilling them.

Our generation promised peace, love and understanding. Instead we delivered bombs - even "smart" ones and plenty of them. In our self-righteousness we attacked Grenada, Lebanon, Libya, Panama, the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Iraq twice; not to mention all the other places where we meddle clandestinely. Civilian casualties, including children, are considered tolerable "collateral damage." Our military/industrial complex continues to provide the vast majority of the weapons in the world, many of which are used against our own citizens or allies.

Our generation demonized our parents for not even questioning the Vietnam War and allowing it to escalate. Now that we hold power in government, media, business, and the military, we do exactly the same thing with Afghanistan and Iraq. We don't even escalate, we unleash unimaginable firepower from the onset. We condone the present Administration's self-declared right to preemptive attack against perceived threats from other nations or alleged terrorists.

When the baby boomers were the ones doing the fighting we vehemently opposed the Vietnam War. Now that we are too old to fight we patriotically support our naive children who go off to war as our surrogate warriors and like our parents we watch it all on TV from the coziness of our living rooms.

The 1971 Coca-Cola commercial said that we would "like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony" and yet we have managed to alienate just about everyone in the global community.

As young people we passionately expounded the importance of cleaning up the environment. Now we allow much of the legislation we were instrumental in creating to be repealed or its restrictions reduced. We even oppose the global community's efforts to address global warming by rejecting the Kyoto Protocol.

Our generation has produced some of the biggest corporate scandals in American history; tortured, humiliated and murdered prisoners of war; and incarcerated people indefinitely without due process or the right to an attorney. Our politicians misappropriate money and obstruct justice, and our clergy molest children while church leaders stand idly by. The gap between rich and poor is far greater than when we grew up and continues to widen. The divorce rate is soaring. We have had an unprecedented rise in our incarceration rate which is six times higher than it was in 1972 and the highest of any industrialized nation in the world.

Media executives of our generation develop "reality shows" and other forms of crude, mindless entertainment that create an atmosphere of fear, violence, intolerance, and disrespect for one another.

Our generation has produced few if any role models for our young people - unless you consider greed to be an attribute. The only political leader of our lot who lived up to part of our youthful philosophy was Bill Clinton who actively condoned "free love" while in office.

We can only hope the children of the baby boomers do not try to emulate us.