If Israel Wants To Be An “Independent Nation”, Let It Be An Independent Nation

by Caitlin Johnstone | Mar 14, 2024

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

In a continuation of the Democratic Party’s weird new tactic of trying to assign Benjamin Netanyahu all the blame for the PR crisis caused by Israel’s genocidal atrocities in Gaza, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer denounced the Israeli prime minister on Thursday and called for new elections in Israel.

“As a lifelong supporter of Israel, it has become clear to me: The Netanyahu coalition no longer fits the needs of Israel after October 7. The world has changed, radically, since then, and the Israeli people are being stifled right now by a governing vision that is stuck in the past,” said Schumer, adding, “At this critical juncture, I believe a new election is the only way to allow for a healthy and open decision-making process about the future of Israel, at a time when so many Israelis have lost their confidence in the vision and direction of their government.”

Netanyahu’s Likud party responded with an indignant statement saying that Schumer is “expected to respect Israel’s elected government and not undermine it.”

“Israel is not a banana republic, but an independent and proud democracy that elected Prime Minister Netanyahu,” the statement said.

“Regardless of our political opinion, we strongly oppose external political intervention in Israel’s internal affairs. We are an independent nation, not a banana republic,” echoed former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett.

“With the threat of terrorism on its way to the West, it would be best if the international community would assist Israel in its just war, thereby also protecting their countries,” Bennett added, an assertion that is ridiculous in multiple ways. There’s no basis for the claim that the threat of terrorism is growing in the west, there is no basis for the claim that Israel’s genocide in Gaza is a “just war”, and there is no basis for the suggestion that helping Israel kill Palestinians in Gaza makes the western world safer in any way.

The Israeli right wing’s repeated use of the term “banana republic” is both pointed and revealing. The term was coined in 1904 by O Henry to describe the Central American states which US imperialists ruled with an iron fist in order to exploit their people’s labor at robbery prices for the immensely profitable export of tropical fruit. The insinuation being that it’s fine when the US dictates the governmental affairs of the brown-skinned people south of its own border, but it’s unacceptable for the US to do this to Israel.

We saw this point driven home in even starker terms with a Council on Foreign Relations piece titled “Schumer’s Attack on an Ally at War” by virulent neocon Elliott Abrams. Abrams calls Schumer’s mild finger-wagging “an unconscionable interference in the internal politics of another democracy”, claiming the American senator is trying to treat Israel like a “colony” of the United States by controlling its internal affairs. Which is hilarious, given that just a few years ago Abrams was openly working to stage a coup in Venezuela under the Trump administration.

More to the point though, we should probably pay attention to this absurd claim that Israel is an “independent” nation.

Calling Israel an independent nation is like calling a fetus in the womb an independent person. It’s like looking at a man in a hospital bed whose body is full of tubes and medical devices who needs to be manually repositioned every two hours to prevent him from getting pressure sores, and calling him independent.

Israel is as dependent as a nation can possibly be. It literally cannot exist without the direct military backing of the most powerful empire of all time, namely the United States and its globe-spanning network of allies and assets.

Last November a retired Israeli major general named Yitzhak Brick told a columnist with the Jewish News Syndicate, “All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the US. The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability… Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.”

That is not how one talks about an “independent nation”.

Israel knows it’s fully dependent on the US empire, which is why it pours so much energy into lobbying in the US and its imperial member states like the UK. Israel cannot exist without nonstop violence, and it cannot sustain that nonstop violence without the backing of the US imperial war machine.

The reason Israel cannot exist without nonstop violence is because it is an artificial nation that was simply dropped on top of a pre-existing civilization whose inhabitants and neighbors had a deeply-rooted way of living which was massively disrupted by the sudden imposition of a newly created ethnostate ruled by people who’d never lived there before. Its emergence was so forced and unnatural that Zionists literally revived a dead middle eastern language called Hebrew and made it their national language so they could LARP as indigenous people speaking in their native tongue.

Because this alien synthetic ethnostate was abruptly forced upon an ancient pre-existing civilization with no regard for the humanity of the people living there, ever since this occurred the region’s indigenous populations have been rejecting it like a body rejecting an ill-matched organ. The only way for the state of Israel to remain the state of Israel is therefore to exist in a continuous state of war, like a house that can only remain standing if it’s got a giant team of construction workers toiling in perpetuity to stop it from falling over.

But if Israeli right-wingers wants to pretend none of this is happening, that’s fine. Let Israel be an “independent nation” if that’s what they want. Stop sending it arms, stop being its ally, stop bombing Yemen, Iraq and Syria in facilitation of its current military onslaught, stop providing it with intelligence, training and logistics support, stop operating in tandem with its military and intelligence services in the region, stop allowing its lobbyists and influence campaigns to operate in the United States, and stop providing its atrocities with diplomatic cover and mass media narrative spin. See how long Israel can stand independently if that occurs.

Of course, it won’t happen. The managers of the US empire know their agendas of global hegemony benefit greatly from having a fully dependent and intimate ally in a region as geostrategically crucial as the middle east (which is why they allow the Israel lobby to continue to exist), and Israel knows it isn’t actually independent in any meaningful sense of the word. But the fact that the US and Israel are so inextricable shows what a joke it is to pretend that this is a normal nation independently going about its own affairs like any other.

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