Will the real Israel stand up?

The late Christopher Hitchens

Israel’s Western backed war crimes in Palestine and Lebanon, its serial incursions in Syria, and WW3-inducing aggression on Iran have a single overarching aim. All should be viewed through the lens, because none can be understood without it, of a messianic vision – the Greater Israel “promised” in Genesis through to Joshua – and its alignment with Washington’s more secular one of reshaping the Middle East to stave off, regardless of human cost, US imperial decline.

The territorial aspirations of Israel’s religious Right, by no means confined to West Bank settlers who deem the bible a Deed of Entitlement which trumps international law, look for legitimacy to conflictual texts written between the 7th and 1st centuries BCE and collectively known as the Old Testament. Genesis 15:18-21, for instance, defines the land granted them by Jehovah (a self-avowedly “jealous God” with psychotic leanings and not above such collective punishment as visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation) as extending “from the brook of Egypt to the Euphrates“ …

… when it comes to taming Iran, the bible-ordained expansionism of Itamar Ben-Gvr, Bezalel Smotrich and Benjamin Netanyahu dovetails perfectly with the geostrategic aims of an empire looking to set the Middle East ablaze in the name of ‘bringing democracy’, and in the ashes build a regional order answerable to Washington.

The US Neocons & Israel’s far Right: Part 3

In November 1983 a young Christopher Hitchens took part in a phone-in on America’s C-Span cable and satellite TV network.  I frequently disagreed with Christopher, and history has shown him wrong – not that I did any better – on Iraq. But he was a true intellectual with a rare gift for cutting through the crap and cant to lay bare the vacuity of the smugly wrong-headed.

Here, in a ninety-one second exchange, we see him respond to a question aimed at entrapping him ¹ on Israel’s right to exist. ^{2 3}

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1. The question put to Christopher, and the pristine simplicity of his reply, puts me in mind of an exchange some 2,000 years earlier. Is it not Written that the Nazarene, when slyly asked if God’s Chosen should pay taxes to Rome, sprang the trap by countering its coy ambiguity with a demarcation of his own?
2. Christopher’s reply on Israel’s right to exist applies equally to its “right to defend itself”. As a matter of international law Israel, established in 1948 with borders clearly defined in UN Resolution 181, has no right to “defend itself” in lands it has since unlawfully occupied – or in the case of the West Bank and arguably the Golan Heights, annexed. By contrast, international law upholds the right of an occupied people to resist with armed force.
3. Christopher said elsewhere that giving Israel a land already occupied was a stupid idea. That depends on where one stands. For Jewish Zionists it was the fulfilment of a project decades in the making and massively expedited by events in Europe for which a people tending olives in a distant land bore no responsibility. For Christian and secular Zionists (frequently anti-Semitic, by the way) its dependence on Western backing would make it an imperial outpost in the Middle East. For a people displaced it would be a nakba  and for the region at large a means of subjugation long after Ottoman direct rule, then British and French, had ended. Be that as it may, there is no intrinsic contradiction between the claim that Israel was a Bad Idea, and conceding the right to exist – subject to its coming clean on where it thinks its borders lie – of a fait accompli.  We are where we are.