Okello Oculi
5 January 2009
opinion
President George Bush is leaving office as a gallant soldier of Israel and confirming views of those who have increasingly argued that America's foreign policy is leashed to the agenda of a powerful and very well organized Jewish and Israeli lobby inside American domestic and Congressional politics. Both Bush and his foreign secretary (Secretary of State) Condeliza Rice are ending their service with blood of Palestinians splashed all over their hands, faces and garments.
Some argued earlier that Israel's fears of "arms of mass destruction" being thrown at them from Saddam Hussein's Iraq (as openly expressed to American envoys by Saddam himself), competed very strongly with interests of oil companies in pushing the hands of Britain's Prime Minister, Tony Blair, and Bush towards raining bombs and troops into Iraq. In either case, it puts Israel as a country with a small territory and population in a strategic oil-rich region as well as vital strategic Mediterranean Sea gateway to the former Soviet Union (and now a diminished Russia), into a rare position of being a brilliant actor in global politics.
The timing of the present attack on Gaza has come in the footsteps of a global economic crisis which, as Joseph Stiglitz has put it, has the trademarks of the United States, and savagely hit both oil prices and financial investments and savings of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Russia, Indonesia and the Gulf mini states, thereby crippling whatever inclinations they might have had for intervening in support of Hamas. The self-proclaimed heir of President Gamal Abdel Nasser as revolutionary leader of Arab nationalism, Libya's Moumar Gaddafi, was reduced to fleeing into a bizarre State visit to Sierra Leone (a country whose bestial and barbaric civil war he was accused of supporting with supplies of arms), as Israel blasted death and destruction into a defenseless Gaza. Angry demonstrators in Egypt could not move a toothless President Mubarak whose regime desperately needs food support from the United States to silence mass protests on hungry stomachs. Finally, Israeli Labour Party leaders combined concerns for taking winds from under the wings of Likud's Benjamin Netanyahu towards elections in February 2009, with hitting Hamas before a new American President with s huge mandate for "change" (including how the country's foreign policy is run), takes office.
Israel has, over the years, played a tightrope diplomatic walk with brutal dexterity. While holding on to huge bags of tears as victims of a horrendous genocide in the hands of Germans during the 1938-1945 war, it has worked at bending the boundaries of what an observer has expressed as peoples of the world having "in us a cumulative conscience, a sort of birthright of the human race". Like the African tale of the rat eating up the tortured feet of a sleeping peasant by following its bites with blowing soothing breaths into a chopped zone, Israel either screams out protests against anti-semitism or threats to Israel's security (often seen as one and the same thing), while committing mass murder against Palestinians. In recent conflicts Israel's leaders have choked world opinion with the practice of assassinations of political leaders (both military and civilian) through the use of satellite bombings. In response, pictures of bleeding backs of President Mugabe's political victims are presented by Euro-American media as more barbaric (and constituting crimes against humanity), than bombs dropped over homes of civilians and moving cars carrying Hamas leaders.
Into this picture has arrived Hillary Clinton as America's captain of that country's foreign policy. Her website, in the run-up to the November 2008 presidential elections, contained two important pieces of information. One presents her as a political activist who changed from being a supporter of Palestinians in her radical student days, to becoming a solid friend of Israel as a politician. Getting elected as a Senator from the State of New York, a State with a huge, rich and politically sophisticated Jewish voters, it would have been suicidal not to show effective support for Israel in her voting pattern inside the American Senate. Her getting nominated as Obama's Secretary of State, must also be seen in this light. It could be surmised that Israel's leaders calculated that it was more useful to bring her with clean hands (as a friendly mourner bringing first-aid bandages to a bleeding and wrecked Gaza), than as a belligerent ally. Obama's promise of "change" would, thereby, arrive already stained with Palestinian blood; and with Israel being the victor to be wooed into being the peace-maker. The global media would ensure that just as Tony Blair and George Bush escaped being accused by the media of committing crimes against humanity in Iraq, Israel's leaders would be presented as victims of a necessity to conduct a war of self-defense.
During her presidential election campaign Hillary Clinton claimed that her role as America's "First Lady" became a foreign policy asset. That would include her collusion in her husband's refusal to stop the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Rwanda's leaders have gone as far as suggesting that President Bill Clinton took part in inventing the genocide as a strategy for creating a chain of regimes led by insecure ethnic or religious minority groups in Eritrea, Ethiopia, Uganda and Rwanda. These leaders remain dependent on Euro-American support for their keeping power through undemocratic repression of majority ethnic groups; while serving the ultimate goal (according to Professor Nzongola-Ntalaja), of containing the spread of Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism from Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Libya. This record does not show Senator Mrs Hillary Clinton as a more promising force for containing willful political bloodletting in American foreign policy than the outgoing Condeliza Rice.
Hillary Clinton also condemned Robert Mugabe as the enemy of democracy while supporting Euro-American policy of toppling and crippling a democratically elected Hamas government. Mugabe continues to be seen as the enemy of white-settler economic domination of economies of not only Zimbabwe but the more important and richer economies of South Africa, Namibia and Botswana. Since the early 1940s, Jewish groups in New York City spoke out against critics of white domination in South Africa. They were defending Jewish economic power in South Africa; a group that increasingly became a major contributor of money for building the new State of Israel. As a politician who won her seat in the American Senate with Jewish votes and campaign funds, it was to be expected that she would enjoy a rewarding doze of moral and political hypocrisy by attacking Mugabe's politics of seeking economic justice for impoverished peasants in Zimbabwe. She would have to commit political suicide if she is to be an effective messenger of an Obama "Change foreign policy".
And yet all is not lost to the greedy hands of pessimism. The troika of Hillary Clinton, Israel's leaders and Hamas each stand with hopes for peace in their hands. Each of them desperately needs a new start in global politics, including cutting the ground from under the feet of terrorism by promoting economic and political justice as the fuel of international politics. That logic applies even more forcefully with America's relations with Mugabe. Nelson Mandela is revered as a symbol of justice. The African National Congress that fought for his cause used a more brutal "black on black violence" to defend its march to freedom against fifth-columnists among the black population than Mugabe has used to keep past supporters in line. The case that Mugabe is making, namely: that racial economic injustice must come to end through the use of state policy, remains the only guarantee for long term peace in Southern Africa. There is a moment of confluence here with the logic of the search for peace in the Middle East. Hillary Clinton has a rare window of opportunity for bringing change to an American foreign policy that must boldly rebuke those (including British leaders), who have been increasingly eroding the frontiers of the "cumulative conscience" in us all. Africa's leaders should vigorously take the initiative in helping her in this perilous journey.
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Interesting so what is your solution to all this?