>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Yoshie Furuhashi" <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu>
>>Historical records show that the Empire doesn't prefer democracies to
>>monarchies and dictatorships, but for the sake of an argument, let's
>>assume that the Empire somehow wants a democratic state with a Jewish
>>majority in the Middle East.
>
>Or let's assume that abstract "Empire" is not the only decision-maker, that
>elite interests are contending with and having to accomodate the democratic
>voting power of the American people, however imperfectly. People ask why
>military folks support Israel as a client state despite its inconvenience at
>time in pissing off other countries?
>
>One explanation is that if "Empire" picked some other country as its client
>state, the American people might not support the funding for it or look the
>other way at its human rights abuses.
The majority of the American people seldom know anything about human rights abuses of client states of the Empire. They hardly know anything about even those of the enemies of the moment.
>My point is that the present policy towards Israel is a multi-dimensional
>combination of humanistic impulses, religious millenialism, military
>hawkishness and Jewish familial solidarity. Probably no group gets exactly
>the Israeli policy it would prefer, but as to shape its goals in order to
>maintain the actual political coalition that drives policy.
It's not clear why the combination of the above translates into a policy that appears to be beneficial to only a delusional minority among Christian fundamentalists -- we may be very well on the brink of apocalypse now. Sharon cost military hawks their chance to keep the Empire's allies and client states in line and prosecute their war with few loud dissents. Sharon's policy has and is creating more and more suicide bombers, and the morale of Israeli Jews (who, being more prosperous, have more to lose than Palestinians) is lower than ever; I'd think that some American Jews who have Israeli relatives might be starting to consider the advisability of emigration from Israel to the States. As for humanistic impulses, the less said about them, the better.
>And the two-party division just adds to the confusion, since the
>Democrat-Labor affinity is counterposed to the Republican-Likud affinity
>based on economic and social issues that are outside the Israeli-Arab
>conflict. Israel's own democratic politics thereby interacts with our
>internal divisions to create a whole other complicated dynamic effecting
>policy in the region.
The Democrat-Labor combo thought that the comprador Arafat would settle for a bantustan (Cf., "Barak's Generous Offers," <http://www.gush-shalom.org/generous/generous.html>) and succeed in selling it to Palestinians, but either Arafat, corrupt as he may be, is not _that_ corrupt or Palestinians are not buying it anyhow or both -- hence the triumph of Republican-Likud combo. One led inexorably to the other. -- Yoshie
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