Is Israel a fascist state?
My best friend called Israel fascist.
This is not exactly fair; yet is it not untrue.
It is not fair because the Israeli government no more represents the whole of that nation than the current administration in the United States does us.
Both seem to have come about because of unacknowledged political coups – and a naïve voting public that is willing to believe any crap a politician hands them as long as it seems to agree with what they already believe.
Our president, George W. Bush, for instance, stole a close election once and possibly twice, and has since done such significant damage to the American constitutional process and economic foundation of the nation; we may never recorder – a kind of Nero fiddling while Rome burns.
In Israel, the power shift was more complicated. An extremist Zionist assassin (their equivalent of a Bush zealot here) goes out and kills the liberal leader of Israel at a time when Palestinian - Israeli relations are extremely violent and the people of Israel go out and elect the most fascist new leader they can find, a man who extends the arm of the Mossad so that it will kill anybody anywhere anytime.
But remember the scum always rises to the top when a nation is attacked, and Israel has been under attack since its foundation after World War II.
This is the animal in us, that fearful fight-flight that responds to threats. We can be righteous as all hell when we are at peace and feel secure, but the minute someone threatens us, our animal side takes hold, and we fight for survival.
This is what is happening in Israel. We are seeing the worst, most vicious animals rising to the top because it takes animal instincts to survive.
Every bomb Israel lobs back at the Palestinians, every kid killed, home bulldozed, every water source taken over, the more “terrorists” Israel creates. And the more bombs the terrorists explode the more savage Israel becomes in a never ending cycle of violence that we see ongoing.
We also tend to emulate the savage methods of those who threaten us most – American settlers emulated the habits of the more aggressive Native American Indians during those conflicts. Israel, which saw the most savage of industrial states during the Holocaust, now seems in part to inflict similar tactics on its enemies. As with the Polish Jews left on the boarder of Poland the late 1930s, Israel has helped make homeless many of the Palestinians who they no longer want inside their own borders. Israel, however, is not Nazi Germany, and there are many good people fighting for the rights of all people inside those borders. Unfortunately, these are generally working against the machine-like mentality of those who actually run the government.
In some ways, the Mossad’s move to hunt down terrorists throughout the world makes sense, partly because it reduced the number of innocents the Israeli response kills, and thus reduces the propaganda value of each response. It is a lot harder for Palestinians to recruit new members when it is a terrorist the Israeli kills instead of a baby.
Steven Spielberg, of course, steps into the middle of a hornets nest with his new film, Munich – which covers the Israeli hit squads sent to avenge the deaths of the athletes.
There are a lot of comparisons between how Israel ignored warnings leading up to the Sept. 5, 1972 attacks and how the Bush administration ignored evidence leading up to the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
Both administrations needed a dramatic event in order to justify their campaigns against their enemies, and a cynical soul might thing both administrations chose to ignore the warnings in order to get an event that would galvanize World opinion on their side and allow them to take extraordinarily violent actions that would not be allowed under normal situations.
Some suspect the current Israeli government’s motives behind the forced removal of Israeli citizens from the Gaza Strip, equating it as a battle between the liberal and extremist factions inside Israel – with the filmed shots of protestors becoming similar to the symbolic moment George Bush used against the liberal faction here when U.S. troops forcibly removed a Cuban boy from his family in Florida. Will the extremists win the propaganda war using similar footage of forced evacuations of Jews? Will this recall that moment in 1938 when Jews were also forced out of Germany?
Some believe President Roosevelt also ignored evidence of an attack on Pearl Harbor in order to force America into World War II – providing a model for 1972 and 2001.
There are several important differences between why Israel might have ignored the threat against its athletes resulting in 11 deaths in 1972 and why Bush might have ignored warnings that led to the almost 3,000 deaths in 2001.
Golda Mier – faced with growing criticism about the lands taken during the 1967 war – needed to galvanize her country’s support for a new war she was certain would soon take place – and did.
Bush used his clout after the 9/11 attack to invade a country ostensibly to secure its oil reserves for his personal friends in the oil industry, killing countless thousands of Iraqis while depleting the American military and embroiling America into yet another Vietnam-like war.
The attack also allowed the United States to implement the most pervasive infringement on civil rights in American history in the so called “Patriot Act.” Oddly enough, on the very day our government was to vote on the renewal of this act, alleged terrorists were foiled in what was supposedly a second attack in London.
The attacks on both Israel and the United States have resulted in the worst possible social element as governing force, setting loose the beast that knows nothing about negotiations, only about striking back.
But fascism based on the need to survive is far different than one based on greed.
My friend, of course, believes that the United States invasion of Iraq was done in support of Israel – just as the upcoming limited nuclear attack on Iran’s atomic weapons program will be – part of the national agenda set since post World War II to keep control of the world’s oil resources. Just as Hitler sent his troops in the southern portion of the Soviet Union in the early stages of World War II to secure the oil reserves, Bush has ordered Americans into Iraq to secure the one Middle East reserve his father and friends did not control. Vietnam had a similar caveat when then President Nixon gave control of the off shore oil reserves there to American-owned oil companies. Unfortunately for the oil companies, Nixon was bounced out of office and oil plans for that take over were foiled. The question is: Will Americans be wise enough to bounce Bush out of office when we come to realize that the troops we so desperately support are dying in order to guarantee his friends profits?
How Spielberg deals with these issues, especially the comparison between Munich 1972 and American 2001 remains to be seen. Will he reference the reports that indicate Israel knew that an attack was imminent? Will he draw the comparison with a similar situation prior to 9/11? Gauging from his most recent effort, War of the Worlds, he will. But we shall see, won’t we?