Today I resume introducing to my readers content concerned with Palestine and Gaza, written or broadcast by international figures and experts. I have assiduously looked for opinions expressed by brave, free voices who refuse to remain silent via-à-vis notorious western policies of disinformation. For decades on end, the West has ranted about freedom of expression and transparency, yet it has relinquished that for the sake of embellishing the image of Israel, turning a blind eye to the crimes it commits against humanity. In so doing, the West had no qualms about falsifying facts and misleading the public. Yet some voices do creep out of this dark tunnel, enlightening minds and inspiring hope. Let me start by what US President Jimmy Carter, President in 1977 – 1981 who won the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize for Peace in 2002, said as he talked to Amy Goodman of Democracy Now in 2007.
“Americans don’t want to know, and the Israelis don’t want to know what is going on inside Palestine,” Mr Carter said. “It’s terrible human rights persecution that far transcends what any outsider would imagine. And there’re powerful political forces in America that prevent any objective analysis of the problem in the Holy Land. I think it’s accurate to say not a single member of Congress with whom I’m familiar would possibly speak out and call for Israel to withdraw to their legal boundaries, or to publicise the plight of the Palestinians, or even to call publicly for peace talks.. There haven’t been peace talks now for seven years, so this is a taboo subject. I would say that if any member of Congress did speak out as I just described, they would probably not be back in the Congress next term.”
Today, I highlight an interview that gripped me; American political scientist and international relations scholar John Mearsheimer was interviewed by UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers last December. At 77, Mr Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. He belongs to the realist school of thought and is known as “the most influential realist of his generation”. Here is an excerpt of Mr Mearsheimer’s interview with UnHerd:
“I just used my critical faculties to analyse what the Israelis are doing in Gaza, in the same way that I analysed the Ukraine war. I think there’s an important moral dimension to what is happening in the Israeli-Hamas conflict that needs to be discussed.. I’m not criticising the Israelis for responding to what Hamas did on October 7; what I’m criticising is how they responded. And my argument is that it made no sense militarily to launch a campaign where they’re basically massacring huge numbers of Palestinians and starving others. There’s no military use of this.. I think that their response could have been much more selective, emphasis should not have been placed on going to great lengths to punish the Palestinian population, but on going after Hamas… Israel is a remarkably powerful State; in my opinion, it is militarily the most powerful State in the region. It is the only State that has nuclear weapons. Hamas doesn’t even have a State.. It’s remarkably weak.
“There’s no question that Hamas is integrated in all sorts of ways into the civilian population in Gaza. How could it be otherwise? Hamas is not going to build military bases far away from the civilian population so that they present the Israelis with a big fat target. What they have done is they have built tunnels underneath the ground all over Gaza, which is a way of protecting themselves from Israeli bombing campaigns.”
Replying to a question on whether Hamas is deliberately placing centres of strategic importance in the middle of civilians, Mr Mearsheimer said: “Israelis made the case that this one hospital was a site of major command and a control post for Hamas and that underneath was the centre of a huge network of tunnels. But once they got into the hospital and checked around, they did not find any significant evidence that supported that thesis.
“I don’t believe a two-State solution is a realistic possibility. Certainly after what happened on October 7, and what has subsequently happened, there’s not going to be a two-State solution. What the Israelis are determined to do is create a Greater Israel, and that Greater Israel includes Gaza, the West Bank, and what we used to call Green Line Israel — Israel as it existed before the 1967 War. And the problem the Israelis face is that there are approximately 7.3 million Israeli Jews in Greater Israel. And there are approximately 7.3 million Palestinians inside of Greater Israel. And that creates huge problems, because they can’t have a meaningful democracy when there are probably slightly more Palestinians than Israeli Jews.. I have long been a proponent of a two-State solution. But I have long argued that it was no longer a viable alternative because I thought the Israelis were not interested, after Camp David in 2000, in a two-state solution. But now, after what’s happened, it’s almost impossible to conceive of Israel creating a Palestinian State that is right next door to Israel.. I don’t see any viable solution because, in theory, there is only one viable solution, which is to give the Palestinians a State of their own. This conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians can only be solved politically, it can’t be solved with military force. And the only political solution that works, theoretically, is a two-State solution.
“The United States has a special relationship with Israel that has no parallel in modern history. The United States supports Israel, almost no matter what it does. It’s unconditional support.. what’s going on here is that the Israeli lobby works overtime to push American foreign policy in ways that support Israel at every turn.. the Americans have pushed the Israelis to allow some aid to flow into Gaza.. I would like us to treat Israel like a normal country. And when Israel does things that are in our interest, we should back them. And when they don’t, we should not back them.
“If they’re facing an existential threat, if this is the second coming of the Third Reich, if Hamas fighters are the new Nazis, then you can make an argument that what you’re doing here is killing large numbers of Palestinians to avoid another Holocaust. That’s not what’s going on. Hamas is not the Third Reich, they are not an existential threat to Israel.. What country is going to invade Israel and threaten its survival? There’s no country. Jordan? I don’t think so. Egypt? I don’t think so. Syria, or Iraq? I don’t think so. Lebanon? No. Is there a problem with Hezbollah? No.”
Mr Mearsheimer went to some length to explain that only Iran possesses enough nuclear weapons, but then again it is not large enough to threaten Israel. The truth, he points out, is that Israel alone in the region represents a strategic and military threat against its neighbours.
These were the words of Mr Mearsheimer, a man of great political value and weight, but who many here might not know about. He has challenged the West’s falsification and concealment of facts, and their misleading information.
Watani International
15 March 2024