People used to talk about a “third rail of American politics” — a topic so volatile, so controversial, so untouchable that even to discuss it publicly was career suicide. The third rail was simply a settled matter, and no matter where you stood on it, no matter where your party’s guiding ethos led you to view it, you just left it alone or the mob would come howling for your head. A lot of things have had their turn at being that third rail: war, the draft, tax rates, unions. All have fallen before the neoliberal wave. The most recent third rail was Social Security, but now, with clockwork regularity, Republicans and Democrats alike tell lies about it in order to present free-market ‘alternatives’ that will ease the tax burdens of the super-rich and extract even more of the toiling classes’ wages from their pockets and into the coffers of financial managers.
So there is today only one true third rail in American politics, and it is a highly electrified shaft of steel that goes right through the beating heart of Jerusalem. The one final third rail, the last non-ideological issue, the solitary true thing that both Republicans and Democrats can agree on must be forever untouchable in our government policy, is unwavering support — financial, military, political, and ideological — for the Israeli leadership and its ongoing project to completely subjugate the Palestinian population that has been pestering it with their annoyingly persistent existence since 1948. Americans, who can muster an out-of-proportion moral outrage about everything from pop song lyrics to the cut of men’s trousers, are seemingly incapable of finding two sticks of vague peevishness to rub together when it comes to the catastrophic and ongoing ethnic cleansing of the Middle East, and we have written our leaders a blank check to support that ethnic cleansing in whatever way they deem necessary.
The American support of the Israeli right wing and its perpetual war against the battered and brutalized Palestinian people has many and varied origins, and has gone through many changes in the past. It was originally part of our proxy battle against Soviet communism; the Republicans use it to placate their Christian eschatologist wing, who believe the Jews must control the Temple and perish in the great final battle against Satan, while the Democrats are buoyed along by vague feelings of guilt over the Holocaust and a desire to prove they can play realpolitikal hardball with the best of them. But none of that really matters anymore; our support of this organized violence by a supremely powerful government against an almost completely helpless minority has become tangled so thoroughly with issues of military industrialism, state security, the ramping up of domestic police terror, control of oil and gas, and the vicious game of chicken we play with the Gulf States that has since replaced the Cold War that we will probably all die before we can extricate it. Fittingly, Israel, and its straw war against Iran — its perpetual justification for any and all inhumanities inflicted on the people of Palestine — has become the Gordian knot of international relations.
The facts on the ground, now as ever, could not be more clear. Gaza and the West Bank are, by deliberate design, open-air prisons in which Palestinians are herded like animals. They are forced to live under literal military occupation of the sort which, were it inflicted on American citizens, would cause us to foam at the mouth with Red Dawn fantasies of resistance and revenge. They have practically no rights and are abused, humiliated, deprived, and mistreated on a daily basis. Their economy is in ruins, what little infrastructure they have is constantly being uprooted by the Israeli military, which further uses them as target practice in idle moments. Their economy is the worst in the region and one of the worst in the world, while Israel — which surrounds them daily and profits of their misery, using them as cheap labor but granting them no share of the fruits of that labor — mints new millionaires every day. They live in utterly controlled conditions — nothing that happens to them happens by chance — and yet we accept the pretense that their immiseration and despair is their own fault.
Because it is politically expedient to have swapped in the Arab terrorist for our old political bugbear, the Soviet thug, we insist that all the bloodshed visited on the Palestinians (and it is substantial; even now, after decades of terrifying death tolls from suicide bombs, the death toll is massively unbalanced, with Arab corpses providing the weight on the scale) is their own doing. Like black Americans, Palestinians have learned the hard way that their lives are worth nothing no matter what they do. If they demand their rights, they are ignored; if they fight for them, they are vilified. If their leaders are authoritarian, they are dupes of a dictatorship; if they elect their own leaders, they are complicit in that government’s alleged crimes. If they are peaceful, they are exploited; if they are violent, they are killed. Their leaders are routinely murdered, and then they are interrogated as to why they have produced no effective leaders. Even adopting the BDS platform — which is unquestionably non-violent and drawn from a strong tradition of civil rights activism — is seen as ‘unfair’ and generates shockingly undemocratic reactions both from Israel and its eternal partner, the United States.
For sixty years, the Palestinians have been subject to the most intolerable violence and oppression. And for at least half of that time, they, and not their oppressors, have been met with booming disapproval from both liberals and conservatives alike. The response to the most recent provocation by the IDF, who picked them off like irksome ticks when they dared to mount an unarmed protest, was repulsive in the extreme, as Americans who absolutely should no better rushed to justify the mass murder of civilians that would have generated unspeakable disgust had it been carried out against American teenagers at a school. It is time for us to stop lying to ourselves about the true nature of our “only ally in the Middle East”. We have chosen the side of the British Indian Army at Amritsar, the South African Police at Sharpesville, the 1 Para soldiers at Derry; and in so doing we have taken another ugly step towards the full-bodied acceptance of the mass murder of protesters here at home in the U.S. We have tasted the blood, and rather than spitting it out, we have swallowed it whole and demanded more. It’s time for anyone with even an ounce of moral courage to take on the Palestinian cause as if it were fully their own, and for any liberals who claim to care about the rights of the oppressed to stop the mad justifications that allow this to continue. An injury to one is an injury to all, and our steadfast allies are doling out the most severe of injuries with our unquestioning support. If there is to be a future, it will be utterly disgusted by our choice to do anything but demand a change.