Middle East Violence: Neocons' Fantasy

By Michael Lerner, AlterNet. Posted July 17, 2006.

The champions of American global empire are using the latest upsurge of violence in the Middle East to give new life to their discredited plan to extend the war in Iraq to Syria and Iran. The neo-con Weekly Standard has taken the lead in its July 24th cover issue, proclaiming that the current violence is "Iran's Proxy War" against the West.

As Standard editor William Kristol puts it, "It's our war." America's, that is.

"What's under attack," Kristol argues "is liberal democratic civilization, whose leading representative right now happens to be the United States." The logical conclusion of this "war of civilizations" analysis is Kristol's advice to the Bush Administration: "our focus should be less on Hamas and Hezbollah, and more on their paymasters and real commanders -- Syria and Iran. And our focus should be not only on the regional war in the Middle East, but also on the global struggle against radical Islamism."

Progressives have no sympathy for radical Islamism, if that means those who have systematically denied the rights of women and gays, imprisoned those insisting on human rights and civil liberties, and sponsored campaigns of terror against civilians in Israel, Egypt, Jordan, India, Bali, Spain, England or anyplace else in the world.

But even many who might have forgotten the lesson before the Iraq war today rally around the cry to "Bring the troops home" rather than the neo-con appeal to extend the war into other nations. Most of us have come to the conclusion that violence is not the solution to our problems.

Which is why many of us have been sickened and saddened by the recent escalation of the struggle after Israel decided to use the capture of one of its soldiers by Hamas an an excuse to reenter Gaza and destroy its pathetic infrastructure. This punitive measure left one million of the world's poorest people, living in the world's most densely populated area, without electricity -- i.e., without refrigeration or water -- and can only be construed as an act of collective punishment for the deeds of a small group of people (the elected Hamas government which actually made a public plea for the release of the prisoner, though that did not prevent Israel from moving in and arresting a significant portion of the Hamas elected leadership).

Perhaps seeing the moment as one requiring solidarity, or perhaps instigated by its patrons in Syria and Iran, Hezbollah broke its previous pledge to respect the Israeli border, crossed it, killed a group of Israeli soldiers and captured two. In turn, Israel again resorted to collective punishment, holding much of the Lebanese civilian population responsible, bombing the civilian airport and many other civilian installations, and surprisingly finding that Hezbollah was able to respond with a barrage of missiles which killed and wounded Israelis in several northern cities.

It's ludicrous to try to establish "blame" in the sense of who did what first. Incidents of violence on the part of Palestinians and their allies cannot be separated from the constant violence of the Occupation, the continual kidnapping by the IDF of Palestinian civilians who are held in prison camps without charges or trial for as long as six months, often enduring torture as documented by the Israeli Human Rights Organization B'Tselem.

Nor can the violence of the Occupation be separated from the misguided policies of many Palestinians who have never been willing to unequivocally acknowledge the legitimacy and right of the Jewish people to the same kind of national self-determination in the land of Palestine that Palestinians rightly demand for themselves; nor from the equally misguided fantasy that peace and prosperity will come from violence rather than from the non-violent strategies used by Gandhi, MLK Jr., and Mandela in his later years.

Rabbi Michael Lerner is the editor of Tikkun and author of, most recently, "The Left Hand of God: Taking Back our Country from the Religious Right." He is co-chair of the Network of Spiritual Progressives.

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