Capitol Hill Blue Forums Political Issues Foreign Policy & News Israel is Lying?

Time to expand the discussion away from the "either or" and the "zero sum game" territory.

Israel's existence is important for many reasons which are already well understood and discussed often enough that it's safe to say that it does not merit an in depth rehashing here.
The Jewish people have lived in the region for thousands of years, they earned the right to carve out their homeland and, in cases where wars erupted, they fought and won them fair and square, or at least as close to such a notion as is possible on Man's Earth.

In many cases it was simply, "you declared war on us instead of attempting negotiation first, therefore all bets are off and the fight is on, and we won, get over it".

Hey...that's been the way things are done...FOR THOUSANDS OF YEARS, so Israel wasn't the first to do things that way.
WE did it that way in many instances as well.

The problem we are encountering with regard to support for Israel is that Israel has ceased acting as an ally or even as a friend. They've repeatedly spied on us, they HAVE lied to us, they've instituted disruption to the peace process in roughly as large a degree as the other players, they've routinely disregarded the human rights of others...

In short, they've behaved pretty badly as of late.

This is not to say that others haven't done the same.
I grant you everything with regard to Hezbollah, Hamas, and all the other Arab groups, extremist and otherwise.
Again I say to you, it's well understood and not in need of a rehash, simply because I sympathize with Israel's claims in regards to her enemies.

Where Israel parts ways is in their handling of the situation.
They know full well that they deserve the territories that they won in the 1967 war, they know that they have a right to establish a healthy defensive posture...hell, I'd even grudgingly admit that they are entitled to the nuclear deterrent that they claim not to possess.

But let's take the settlements, for starters.
The settlers have no interest in the peace process.
To the settlers and their supporters, the only path to peace is a series of mushroom clouds and total extermination of all Pals and forced expulsion of all non-Jewish citizens of the Israeli state.
In fact, even that isn't good enough for most settlers.
Several years ago a series of short articles in Haaretz Daily quoted one group as saying they wanted to inflict maximum suffering upon the Palestinians as they were pushed out, so apparently it's not enough for the settlers to just have a really large can of "RAID" with which to exterminate the "cockroaches" (as they regularly call the Palestinians).
No, they want to pull the wings off them as if they were flies first.

Then, let's take the American Evangelical Right, who see Israel as a part of their dream scenario in which they act as "God's Little Helpers", as if God needed helpers.
Remember God, the omniscient and all powerful One, the One who said that only He knows the day when the end of the world comes, when Armageddon starts, all that groovy stuff.
The Fundie Evo's WANT and PRAY for all out war in the Middle East. It means that they're getting the Rapture tickets on sale at a hefty discount without going through TicketMaster.

And there is a large contingent in Israel that sees our policy in the Middle East as an irritant which they no longer feel like tolerating. They want to call the shots, and they don't want a lot of conditions imposed on them by American taxpayers, just give us the damn money, shut up and get out.

And then there's the rest of the documented discrimination and other various and sundry forms of brutality that any normal thinking American would find shocking were it committed before their eyes, hence the reason ALL film and video leaving Israel, either via satellite or by hand carry, is first cleared by no less than THREE LEVELS of military censorship.

We do not have unfettered access to what goes on in Israel unless we go there.

Israel is behaving not as an ally or as a friend, but as a pissed off gangbanger who wants Grandma to just shut up, hand over the car keys and not ask a lot of questions about the thugs that routinely show up at the house.

It's time Israel think carefully about the way they are treating the best friends they ever had.
If they were smart, they'd do it now, because America does not want to withdraw support for Israel. They just want Israel to behave honorably, EVEN WHEN their neighbors DO NOT.

That's the American Way, and as our greatest ally in the Middle East it's the price they should be willing to pay just as we did not too long ago.
A great many Americans are starting to remember that this is one of the things that made us great once upon a time.

America has recently strayed from greatness, and so has Israel.
It is now time for Israel to remember the name of the tune being played or for them to dig in and pay the piper if they want the tune changed to suit their honestly stated goals.