Israel has no plans to kill President George W. Bush. Hard-line Zionists blame the Americans for originally forcing Israel to the negotiating table at Oslo and thus stringing out the futile process from which suicide bombers ultimately emerged. Even though this has caused grievous loss of Israeli life, the Israeli Cabinet has almost certainly decided not to extract its revenge on the president of the United States.
Were ordinary Americans to pause and consider the awful realities of Israeli realpolitik, they would understand that cold-blooded murder has become a part of Israeli policy. Heads of state are no more exempt than five-year-old children ignoring a curfew in order to buy ice cream. Since Ariel Sharon’s government is capable of giving serious consideration to the murder of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, then it is just as capable of ordering the assassination of the president of the United States.
It has shown itself completely prepared to cast aside every tenet of international law and common justice to attain the ends that it requires — which is to crush the Palestinian people, ultimately deported from the last portions of their historic homeland.
Israel has enjoyed US support because in the American mind’s eye, Israelis are the “good guys” in the Middle East. Israelis have elections. They are the long-suffering victims of Arab enmity. They believe in fair play, thus they sometimes have enquiries into the odd killing by their military. But most important, they have some powerful friends in Washington, who never cease whispering, or if need be, openly yelling, into the ears of successive administrations. The interests and outlooks of America and Israel, says that message, are so alike that they are indivisible.
But this is simply not true. The CIA may have condoned political assassinations, such as that of Chile’s Salvador Allende, but the American people did not. Any US president who said that he was thinking of organizing the assassination of an elected head of state, such as Yasser Arafat, would be roundly condemned by the US people and, if the argument reached them, by the US courts. Murder cannot be a foreign policy tool. Washington, far from staying only mildly critical, should recognize that the Sharon government is a regime out of control.
It is the combination of Zionist effrontery and White House blindness which is so breathtaking. Israel has an illiberal and murderous government. Washington’s slavish support for it not only condemns the Palestinians to further misery, but also condemns every step that the Americans themselves try to take in the region in their war against terrorism. This is because, though Washington cannot or will not see it, Sharon with his political murders is himself a terrorist.
