Biden and Israel

By ROBERT WEITZEL

“If I were a Jew, I would be a Zionist. I am a Zionist. You don’t have to be a Jew to be a Zionist.” - Senator Joseph Biden

02/09/08 "Counterpunch" -- - Considering the last eight years and the current (viable) options, I’ll admit to wanting Barak Obama in the White House in January. Undoubtedly, more people around the world will have a better chance of surviving the next four years with his finger on—or rather off—the button. However . . .

For all of Obama’s campaign promises of “change,” his choice of Joseph Biden as his running mate sends a clear signal to Israel’s lobby in Washington and its right-wing government in Jerusalem that for the next four years there will be no change in the United States’ unconditional support or its annual $6 billion in direct and indirect aid.

Predictably, neither will there be a change in the hopelessness and the impotent rage of the Arabs suffering under a U.S.-supported Zionist ideology in Palestine.

Senator Biden is the ardently pro-Israel chair of the Foreign Relations Committee. He is a 36-year veteran politician whose specialty is foreign policy. When he told a reporter from the Jewish cable network, Shalom TV, that he is a Zionist, he knew the implications of that admission for the Palestinians, the entirety of the Arab world, and America’s global “war on terror.”

Matt Dorf, the Jewish outreach coordinator for the Democratic National Committee, said that “Israel would have no better friend in the vice president’s office than Joe Biden.” Dorf might just as easily—and as honestly—have said, “Palestinians would have no greater foe in the vice president’s office than Joe Biden.”

Commenting on the unrest in Palestine in 2007, Biden planted his flag deep in Israel’s camp: “The responsibility rests on those who will not acknowledge the right of Israel to exist, will not play fair, will not deal, will not renounce terror.”

Obama’s running mate has chosen his side. He cannot be a neutral American statesman brokering a Middle East peace or he cannot be a Zionist.

One cannot be a Zionist and place the suffering of Palestinians on the same moral plane as that of Israeli Jews.

One cannot be a Zionist and demand that Israel dismantle its illegal settlements that co-opt nearly half the land in the Gaza Strip and Occupied West Bank.

One cannot be a Zionist and place the blame for sixty years of violence and the deaths of innocent thousands—both Palestinian and Israeli—on the cold-blooded determination with which the Zionist cadre executed the ethnic cleansing of 800,000 Palestinians from the land they had inhabited for untold generations.

One cannot be a Zionist and contemplate the return of Palestinians to their homes that are now occupied by Israeli Jews or the rebuilding of the 500 Palestinian villages destroyed during the great Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948.

One cannot be a Zionist and abandon the dream of Eretz Israel in order to live as equals with an Arab neighbor in a truly democratic Palestine-Israel.

One cannot be a Zionist and demand that Israel’s apartheid wall be torn down.

One can be a Jew. One can be an Israeli. But one cannot be a Zionist.

Joseph Biden is neither a Jew nor an Israeli. He is the Democratic vice presidential candidate who unabashedly declared, “The Democrats’ support for Israel comes from our gut . . . and ends up in our heads.” Sound familiar? Haven’t we already had eight years of a president who “thinks” with his gut and expects the rest of us to behave like dung beetle larvae? Speaking strictly for myself, I’m tired of their balls of poo.

Could it be there is no difference, no possibility of change as Obama promises, between the Democratic and Republican parties’ subservience to Israel’s shadow government on K Street or their tacit support of Israel’s internationally condemned policies toward the Palestinians?

Could it be that the two parties’ overt support for Israel’s regional aggression exacerbates the “war on terror” and makes the people their candidates swear to God to protect and defend less safe?

Could it be that the “ball of dung” being fed to the American people by both parties conceals the obvious truth that there is no strategic value in our irrational alliance with Israel?

Commenting on the unrest in Palestine in 1921, Winston Churchill, one of the architects of the modern Middle East, told the House of Commons: “The cause of unrest in Palestine, and the only cause, arises from the Zionist movement, and from our promises and pledges in regard to it.”

Joseph Biden’s self-professed Zionism plays well on Shalom TV, but it is a liability for the United States in the global “war on terror” and a death warrant for Palestinian and Israeli innocents.

Robert Weitzel is a contributing editor to Media With a Conscience. His essays regularly appear in The Capital Times in Madison, WI. He can be contacted at: robertweitzel@mac.com