Forbidden Israel: Sex and the Settlers

By Ira Chernus, AlterNet. Posted July 7, 2009.

Once they are there, many have children, and even grandchildren. Israel calls it "natural growth." Well, the settlers are doing what Rafaeli seems to encourage us all to do -- what comes naturally. But when Israeli leaders insist they must expand settlements to accommodate this "natural growth," they are obviously using disingenuous arguments to justify political expansionism.

Yet, in their most honest moments, they can fairly claim that extending power is just doing what comes naturally to leaders of any nation-state. What could be more normal and natural than using the human body for pleasure or power -- and having a hard time, at least occasionally, distinguishing between the two?

Henry Kissinger, national security adviser for the strongest nation on earth, supposedly said that power is the greatest aphrodisiac. President Bill Clinton, who was destroying Serbia while being sexually served in the back hallways of the White House, seemed to prove that in America the feeling is bipartisan.

Clinton, like other American presidents, thought he could teach the Israelis a few things about making peace. But perhaps rather than listening to presidential words, Israelis leaders and West Bank settlers have learned more by observing and imitating presidential actions -- just as Rafaeli has observed and imitated the great American supermodels -- and succumbed to the pleasure of exercising power.

Now, as President Barack Obama attempts to orchestrate the grand peace agreements that has eluded his predecessors, he must face up to the questions that they evaded: Can he expect anyone in the Middle East to listen if he only talks the talk without walking the walk? Can he expect the Iranians to drop all thoughts of nuclear weapons when the U.S. made them the world's symbol of national strength? Israel followed suit long ago, and both nations maintain and modernize their nuclear arsenals, as if that were normal.

Can Obama expect the Palestinians to heed his call to stop their violence, because "resistance through violence and killing is wrong and it does not succeed," while U.S. planes and drones drop bombs on Afghans and Pakistanis nearly every day, as if that were normal?

Can he expect the Israelis to heed his call to stop expanding settlements when U.S. oil companies are expanding their power in places like Iraq, demanding that the producing nations pay their price, while U.S. military forces, with global reach, stand ever ready to remind the producing nations who is boss, as if that were normal?

The Pentagon can claim that it is doing what all normal nations do -- merely doing it better. The oil companies, too, can claim that they are just doing what comes naturally to any major corporation, in a capitalist economy devoted to transforming nature into private profit, with no moral rules demanding an equitable distribution of the profit. But can they expect Israelis, Palestinians or any Arab countries to do any different?

None of this excuses the horrendous occupation policies that the Israelis have imposed on Palestine for some many years, nor the settlers who have taken advantage of those policies and added some horrendous excesses of their own. But Rafaeli's nude video, a perfect symbol of Israel's aspiration to be a normal nation, can serve to strip bare not only some of the motives behind Israel's support for the settlers, but also some of the hypocrisy of U.S. policy.

If the U.S. hopes to bring Israel and the Arabs to the negotiating table and emerge with some success, we might start by making ourselves, if not a supermodel, at least a bit more of a model for the kind of changes we are asking from them.

Otherwise it's we, the emperor, who are standing there without any clothes -- as stark naked as Rafaeli, though not nearly so attractive -- for all the world to see.

See more stories tagged with: israel, settlers, rafaeli

Ira Chernus is professor of religious studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Read more of his writing on Israel, Palestine, and American Jews on his blog.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from World! Sign up now »