Jonathan Cook@Jonathan_K_Cook
Does Israel look like the frustrated peacemaker facing off with barbaric opponents, or a rogue state whose decades-long aggression has provoked the very retaliatory violence exploited to excuse its constant war-making?
Is Israel a small, reluctant fortress state defending itself, or a western military client so drunk on its own power that it can no more limit its territorial ambitions than a great white shark can stop swimming?
The truth is that the past 30 months have graphically exposed not only what Israel always was but, by extension, what our own western states aspired to achieve through their most favoured Middle East client.
In a moment of imprudence last month, Christian Turner, Peter Mandelson’s replacement as British ambassador to the US, let slip the reality. Washington, the West’s imperial hub, he said, had no deep loyalty to its allies – apart from one.
Unaware his words were being recorded, he told a group of visiting students: “I think there is probably one country that has a special relationship with the United States, and that is probably Israel.”
That special relationship requires that the political and media class in Washington’s other client states, such as Britain, shield the West’s Sparta in the Middle East from critical scrutiny.
So glaring have Israel’s atrocities become that the British government announced last month that it was shuttering its Foreign Office unit tracking war crimes – citing the need for cuts – rather than face further exposure of its collusion in those crimes.
If the British government refuses to monitor Israel’s war crimes, don’t expect more from the establishment media.
For months, Israel has been blowing up village after village in south Lebanon, driving millions of inhabitants from lands lived on for millennia by their ancestors, and it barely registers with our politicians and media.
Israel is destroying Gaza’s water supplies, as it earlier did the tiny enclave’s hospitals and health system, ensuring the further spread of disease, and our politicians and media have barely a word to say about it.
Israel kills journalists and emergency crews in Gaza and Lebanon week after week, month after month, and it raises barely an eyebrow from the political and media class.
Israel declares “yellow lines“ in Gaza and Lebanon, demarcating expanded borders that formalise its theft of other peoples’ lands, and this instantly becomes the new normal.
Israel continuously violates ceasefires in Gaza and Lebanon, spreading misery and inflaming yet more anger and bitterness, and once again, our politicians and media turn a blind eye.
Which western media outlets are pointing out a starkly revealing fact: that Israel now occupies more of Lebanon than Russia does of Ukraine?
This is an extract from my latest article The West’s bubble of illusion about Israel - and about itself – is finally being burst. Find a link to the article in the reply post ⬇️