> And you are comparing apples with oranges...
It's just Israel's exceptional status that's at issue. It seems to be asserted that things that are to be condemned as racist and repressive when other states do them, are not so when Israel does them, so long as they're supported by the US.
I have another comparison to offer.
The Gulf War was the high point of the first Bush administration. In the summer of 1990, Saddam Hussein, the ruler of Iraq and a US client, either misinterpreted his orders from Washington or deliberately chose to flout them, and invaded the oil-producing sheikdom of Kuwait (established by the British and American division of Middle East oil resources). The Bush administration, desperately afraid of what it called the "nightmare scenario" -- that Saddam would withdraw from Kuwait and leave a puppet regime (as the US had just done in Panama) before the US could demonstrate its prowess -- brushed aside Saddam's attempts to negotiate and quickly mobilized an army to attack Iraq by air and land (the local commander asking for permission to use nuclear weapons). The Bush administration stoked US public opinion with conscious lies produced by a CIA-related PR firm, and the one-sided contest had the predictable outcome, which was celebrated in the US as a famous victory.
Now suppose Iraq, facing a demand from the UN that it withdraw its army from Kuwait, had offered to withdraw from 95% of the country, under the following conditions: (1) it would keep a vastly expanded Kuwait City, which would practically cut the country in half; (2) it would place Iraqis in armed settlements scattered about the country; (3) it would build roads (for the use of Iraqis alone) that would divide the country into isolated enclaves; and (4) it would dominate the resources, particularly water, from the entire country.
Would Washington have praised the Iraqi proposals as "magnanimous concessions," called off its demonstration war, restored its former client to favor, sent it billions of dollars each year, and provided it with the most advanced arms -- fighter planes, helicopters, anti-personnel weapons -- to suppress the outraged response of the native Kuwaitis, who would clearly have the right to resist the occupying army, but under the circumstances would surely be slaughtered by their oppressors?
Of course it wouldn't. But that's precisely what it is doing in regard to Israel and the Palestinians. Under Republican and Democrat administrations, the US continues to support Israel's occupation of the West Bank (illegal under UN Resolution 242 since 1967) and Israeli settlements there (a war crime according to the terms of the Fourth Geneva Convention, designed to illegalize the actions of Germany in the territories that it occupied during World War II). The US provides vastly more aid to Israel than to any other country in the world, aid that Israel uses to support the settlements and kill Palestinians who resist the occupation. And the US condemns _Palestinians_ for "resorting to violence" when they resist occupation as the French Resistance did during the Second World War.
The US takes up this hypocritical position because the American-supplied Israeli army (with its hundreds of illegal nuclear weapons) is by far the strongest in the region. It guards "our" oil, which is so inconveniently located under other peoples' sand. The great danger, from the US point of view, comes from any local nationalists who would attempt to use that oil for the benefit of the inhabitants of the region, rather than do what the US has insisted on for generations -- keep the oil and the profits flowing to the West. Israel's job is to provide the strong-arm protection for the US relation to Saudi Arabia and the family dictatorships in the Persian Gulf, where most of the oil comes from.
The Palestinians are just an embarrassment from Washington's point of view and are dispensable, to be left to the mercies of an officially racist state. In his most famous novel, George Orwell has a character suggest, "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- forever." For Israel, the future seems to have arrived, with American help. The media describe generic "violence in the Middle East" in their obfuscating way, but for us Americans, it's necessary to remember whose boot is stamping whose face -- and most importantly, who's paying for the boot.
On this issue the liberals are useless. The liberal senators from New York, Clinton and Schumer, recently held a joint news conference in which they frenetically presented a carefully-crafted propaganda lie about Palestinian textbooks. One hopes that they were duped and didn't know it was a lie, but their unquestioned support for Israeli repression is clear.
The real situation is indicated not only by the overwhelming preponderance of Palestinian dead and maimed since the current resistance began last fall, but also by the contrasting attitudes of the two sides towards having anyone see what they are doing. The Palestinians have pled for international monitors since the current _intifada_ began, but the Israelis have strenuously rejected objective observers of their occupation. A recent such proposal was greeted by the Israeli foreign minister, Shimon Peres (the Nobel Peace prize winner), with the fatuous response, "Terror is clandestine, you can't observe it. So you can only observe our reaction." It's pretty clear that the "terrorized" army of occupation doesn't want its "reaction" observed, and why.
--CGE