- Joined
- Nov 1, 2014
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...Biden and Trump ['Bidump'] make love passionately to iZrael... :cuckoo:
Israel Is an Army With a Country Attached
"A week into Israel’s summer 2006 assault on Lebanon — which killed 1,200 people, mainly civilians — Harvard Law School’s resident psychopath Alan Dershowitz surfaced on the pages of the Wall Street Journal with his latest upbeat intervention on behalf of Israeli war crimes.
The article, titled “Arithmetic of Pain,” posited the need for a “reassessment of the laws of war” in light of what Dershowitz determined to be an increasingly blurred distinction between combatants and civilians. Unfurling his concept of a “continuum of ‘civilianality,’” he explained:
Near the most civilian end of this continuum are the pure innocents — babies, hostages and others completely uninvolved; at the more combatant end are civilians who willingly harbor terrorists, provide material resources and serve as human shields; in the middle are those who support the terrorists politically, or spiritually.
The upshot: even purely innocent Lebanese babies were merely “near” the civilian-ish end of the continuum, while Israel was entirely exempt from the whole scheme because it is a “democracy.”....
During Israel’s fifty-day onslaught in the Gaza Strip in 2014, for example — during which 2,251 Palestinians were killed, including 551 children (hi, Dershowitz) — approximately 95 percent of Jewish Israelis supported the bloody escapade. As the New York Times reported at the time, some even headed to a hilltop with plastic chairs, sofas, and popcorn to watch the bombs fall.
Bresheeth-Zabner writes that, in Israel, military service essentially “starts before birth,” and the “whole social structure is militarized” to the point that the IDF and associated apparatuses form a “politicocultural-economic military–industrial complex.” There’s also an academic side to the complex, with Israel’s seven universities and top research centers “collaborating with the IDF and armament production and training companies, creating a seamless security continuum.” So much for that popular argument that boycotting Israeli academic institutions constitutes “rank anti-Semitism.”
Invoking the old hammer-and-nail saying, Bresheeth-Zabner notes that the more a society habituates itself to the use of force, the more the world looks like a place where force is needed — a self-perpetuating vicious cycle that is of course only helped along when the world in question is ever eager to acquire Israeli weapons and murderous know-how that have been battle-tested on Israel’s captive Palestinians and other Arab populations.
And it’s not only the United States that throws gobs of money at Israel for its services on behalf of empire; Israel’s universities and research centers are the “recipients of more EU research funding than the great majority of EU countries,” as Israel busies itself finding new and improved ways to spread insecurity under the guise of security.
Bresheeth-Zabner identifies the late Shimon Peres as the “mind behind the military-industrial complex” in Israel, starting with his appointment by David Ben-Gurion in 1947 — the year before Israel’s “independence” from the people whose territory they stole — as the official responsible for personnel and arms procurement for the Haganah, the precursor to the IDF. Director general of the Israeli defense ministry in the 1950s before going on to serve as both president and prime minister, Peres was instrumental in Israel’s nuclearization and the general militarization of Israeli identity, and responsible for such events as the infamous 1996 massacre of 106 people sheltering at a United Nations compound in Qana, Lebanon.
And yet, in keeping with the magical inverse logic that governs mainstream discourse on Israel, Peres has been memorialized as a man of peace (with a Nobel Peace Prize to boot!)
Israel Is an Army With a Country Attached
"A week into Israel’s summer 2006 assault on Lebanon — which killed 1,200 people, mainly civilians — Harvard Law School’s resident psychopath Alan Dershowitz surfaced on the pages of the Wall Street Journal with his latest upbeat intervention on behalf of Israeli war crimes.
The article, titled “Arithmetic of Pain,” posited the need for a “reassessment of the laws of war” in light of what Dershowitz determined to be an increasingly blurred distinction between combatants and civilians. Unfurling his concept of a “continuum of ‘civilianality,’” he explained:
Near the most civilian end of this continuum are the pure innocents — babies, hostages and others completely uninvolved; at the more combatant end are civilians who willingly harbor terrorists, provide material resources and serve as human shields; in the middle are those who support the terrorists politically, or spiritually.
The upshot: even purely innocent Lebanese babies were merely “near” the civilian-ish end of the continuum, while Israel was entirely exempt from the whole scheme because it is a “democracy.”....
During Israel’s fifty-day onslaught in the Gaza Strip in 2014, for example — during which 2,251 Palestinians were killed, including 551 children (hi, Dershowitz) — approximately 95 percent of Jewish Israelis supported the bloody escapade. As the New York Times reported at the time, some even headed to a hilltop with plastic chairs, sofas, and popcorn to watch the bombs fall.
Bresheeth-Zabner writes that, in Israel, military service essentially “starts before birth,” and the “whole social structure is militarized” to the point that the IDF and associated apparatuses form a “politicocultural-economic military–industrial complex.” There’s also an academic side to the complex, with Israel’s seven universities and top research centers “collaborating with the IDF and armament production and training companies, creating a seamless security continuum.” So much for that popular argument that boycotting Israeli academic institutions constitutes “rank anti-Semitism.”
Invoking the old hammer-and-nail saying, Bresheeth-Zabner notes that the more a society habituates itself to the use of force, the more the world looks like a place where force is needed — a self-perpetuating vicious cycle that is of course only helped along when the world in question is ever eager to acquire Israeli weapons and murderous know-how that have been battle-tested on Israel’s captive Palestinians and other Arab populations.
And it’s not only the United States that throws gobs of money at Israel for its services on behalf of empire; Israel’s universities and research centers are the “recipients of more EU research funding than the great majority of EU countries,” as Israel busies itself finding new and improved ways to spread insecurity under the guise of security.
Bresheeth-Zabner identifies the late Shimon Peres as the “mind behind the military-industrial complex” in Israel, starting with his appointment by David Ben-Gurion in 1947 — the year before Israel’s “independence” from the people whose territory they stole — as the official responsible for personnel and arms procurement for the Haganah, the precursor to the IDF. Director general of the Israeli defense ministry in the 1950s before going on to serve as both president and prime minister, Peres was instrumental in Israel’s nuclearization and the general militarization of Israeli identity, and responsible for such events as the infamous 1996 massacre of 106 people sheltering at a United Nations compound in Qana, Lebanon.
And yet, in keeping with the magical inverse logic that governs mainstream discourse on Israel, Peres has been memorialized as a man of peace (with a Nobel Peace Prize to boot!)
