Dora McPhee (VIC) responds to Age Editorial “Israel puts its most important ally offside” 17Mar10 March 17, 2010
Age Editorial: “Israel puts its most important ally offside” , 17 March 2010
It is hardly surprising that Israel continues to ignore the illegality of building settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories and more importantly in occupied East Jerusalem. As Netanyahu defiantly says successive Israeli governments have done so for the last four decades. This has been done in open defiance of international law with the full backing of its strongest ally, America, and paid for with US taxpayer dollars with the knowledge that in the end it will be shielded from censure by the US.
So why is the US government so angry when it has in essence actively participated in what amounts to Israelâs colonisation of occupied Palestinian land resulting in the ongoing dispossession of the Palestinian people? The answer is not anger over what Israel has been doing but that Israel has decided to be more honest about what it is doing thereby exposing the hypocrisy of the US its chief benefactor as being anything but an honest peace broker and forcing the US to be further shunned in the world as its empty rhetoric is exposed for the sham it is.
This is a bit like showing the audience how a card trick is pulled off and then expecting the card trick to have the same effect. For decades the façade of efforts for peace negotiations has been carefully maintained when in fact as all Palestinians knew it was the law of jungle – might is right, that prevailed while the world duped itself into thinking otherwise. This has grave repercussions for US foreign policy as it also exposes that Western liberal democracies do not in fact operate by the rule of law when it does not suit and that our whole system of justice is rotten to the core leaving no one with the moral high ground.
Thank You.