By Jon Pattee
Senior English Editor
Albawaba.com - Amman
Before addressing Ariel Sharon’s recent labeling of Yasser Arafat as a liar, murderer, and Osama bin Laden clone, let us first provide a context by dispelling the most crude of anti-Semitic myths: that Jews run America for the benefit of Israel.
In fact, there were no Palestinians in Vietnam, yet US troops still killed millions of poor Vietnamese. There was no 1,000-year-old fundamentalist Jewish claim to the land of Guatemala, yet the US still supported military dictators there who massacred tens of thousands of poor Guatemalans. Nelson Mandela’s movement posed no military threat to the borders of Israel, yet the US still supported South Africa’s racist apartheid regime.
In short, the US has always had interests of its own, and a keen dislike for human rights when those interests are threatened. In the Middle East, the agenda is primarily obtaining oil, countering the influence of other world powers, and crushing Islamic fundamentalism.
These objectives may coincide, for now, with those of many American Jews. But if there was not a single Jew in the US government, and no Israel, US troops would still be in the Middle East.
In fact, as other commentators have noted, American Jews are conveniently there – in a scapegoat role that Jews have played in various societies – for other political elites, mostly white Anglo-Saxon Protestant males, to throw the blame on when needed. Meanwhile, for a price, Israeli Jews can be persuaded to provide arms and diplomatic support to the most brutal of US allies when American human rights advocates get too vocal.
In this light, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon emerges for what he is: Kesselwascher (vat-washer) to the US empire.
In fact, Sharon’s and Israel’s biographies are the intertwined and tragic repetition of what Holocaust survivor Primo Levi calls the phenomenon of the “Prominents” – the vat-washers, latrine superintendents and night guards of the Nazi death camps. In exchange for betraying their natural solidarity with their comrades, Levi writes, the Prominents, many of them Jews, received privileges that allowed them to survive while those around them died.
The camps were in some ways a microcosm of the world, in the sense that many or most Jewish immigrants to Palestine arrived there fleeing from death camps, pogroms or similar persecution elsewhere, after being turned away by the US and other Western powers. Only to find their colonial project rejected by the people of Palestine, the Arabs, who comprised at least 90 percent of the population before the Zionists flooded in from Europe and beyond.
Seeing the precariousness of their colonial project, the Israelis found a protector and overlord in the form of America, which has supplied them with billions of dollars in military aid, seemingly unending praise and trade privileges, and a slew of UN Security Council vetoes.
The price? As with all Prominents elevated from victimhood to a position of power, the price has been the soul – in this case the soul of the Israeli people, and their transformation from victims to global Prominents responsible for advancing US interests.
How else to explain the many times Israel has stood beside the US in tragicomic UN votes that pitted the pair against nearly every other country in the world?
Moreover, how else to explain Israel’s arms sales to South Africa’s US-allied apartheid regime? How else to explain Israel’s military support for the brutal Nicaraguan dictator Somoza? How else to explain reports that place Sharon himself at an arms sale meeting with the US-backed Contras, the Nicaraguan mercenaries notorious for murdering health workers and teachers?
Was the suffering of black South Africans and poor Latin Americans not enough to remind the Israelis of the suffering of their own people?
While it is not for outsiders to judge without walking in Israeli shoes, it nevertheless must be said that one’s soul is a high price to pay for US patronage.
So what compels Israeli Prime Minister Sharon to label someone else a pathological liar, a murderer, and the moral equivalent of Osama bin Laden, as he has recently done with Yasser Arafat?
If Levi is to be believed, there is a particular logic to this lashing out by the general, whose own claim to fame is having kept watch while over 800 helpless Palestinian men, women and children were slaughtered in the Lebanese refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla.
Levi notes that the more power a Prominent is given, the more he will become hateful and hated, and his capacity for hatred, unfulfilled in the direction of his oppressors, doubles back, beyond all reason, on the oppressed.
Hence the rant in which Sharon projects his own guilt and crimes on Arafat - the symbol of a colonized people who have recently seen Israeli soldiers gun down over 450 of their number, including nearly 100 children.
Pitiable and horrifying, pitiless and murderous, ladies and gentlemen, we give you Ariel Sharon, symbol of Israel and Kesselwascher to the Empire.
