Tuesday, June 11, 2024
Year : 2, Issue: 24
In a video recorded in 2001, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly said, “The main thing, first of all, is to hit them [Palestinians]. Not just one blow, but blows that are so painful that the price will be too heavy to be borne.” Dismissing the possibility that the United States would be an obstacle to the perpetration of such gruesome crimes, he added, “I know what America is. America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction. They won’t get in the way.”
The US’s acquiescent submission to Israeli authorities has become more conspicuous, and the magnitude of its catastrophic consequences more evident, since early October 2023 when Israel launched its ongoing genocide against Palestinians. At the expense of its domestic and international interests as well as its global standing, the US has been providing Israel with economic incentives and military munitions, which the latter has been using to slaughter innocent Palestinian children, women, and men and to demolish educational institutions and other critical facilities—all designed to trigger a mass exodus of the surviving Palestinians from their land.
There are instances when the US government treated its own citizens’ lives as less valuable than the interests of Israel.
In March 2003, Israelis went on their routine killing and demolition spree in the Palestinian town of Rafah. At that time, Rachel Corrie, the 23-year old US citizen Rachel Corrie stood in the path of the bulldozer, urged the operator to stop, and acted as a human shield to protect the property. Manufactured by the US company Caterpillar, Inc, the bulldozer ran over Corrie, fracturing her skull, shattering her ribs, and puncturing her lungs; she was crushed to death on the spot. Later, an Israeli court acquitted the IDF soldier who “deliberately” ran the bulldozer over Corrie, and the US government didn’t protest.
About 21 years after Rachel Corrie’s death, 25-year-old US Air Force serviceman Aaron Bushnell couldn’t take the mass murder that Israel has been committing in Palestine since October 7. On February 25, 2024, he walked to the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC, “poured a flammable liquid atop his buzz-cut head, [and] lit himself on fire. what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”
For a very long time, the US has prided itself as a land of freedom, free speech, and freedom of movement. Unfortunately, acting in the interests of Israel, it has flouted such core principles.
Prof Ilan Pappé of the University of Exeter is a British-Israeli citizen of Jewish background. He is the author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006) and a known critic of Israeli apartheid and genocidal policies. He was travelling from the UK to the US to deliver a talk in Michigan. Upon his arrival at Detroit airport on May 13, 2024, he was detained and questioned by security personnel for two hours about his views on Israel-Palestine issues. He was allowed to leave the airport only after the agents “copied the contents of his phone.”
The US government regularly lectures the rest of the world on intellectual and political freedom and castigates other nations for their lack of free speech. It is very unfortunate that, guided by its loyalty to Israel, it let this incident take place.
Authorities in the US are eroding long-established principles and values in order to support Israel’s apartheid rule. This has harmed US reputation in the world and embarrassed its conscientious citizens. The extent to which the US has contravened its own principles and international laws to show allegiance to Israel does not suggest that it has acted independently.
It is time for the US to realise how it has subverted its own interests and prestige, and follow its own interests as a sovereign country. With students’ encampments at US universities, the movement for US “independence” from Israel has started. The sooner it materialises, the better for the US and for the rest of the world. Importantly, the freedom of Palestine from Israeli occupation is dependent on US “independence” from Israel.
