Alternative Press Review Editorial

War - The Final Solution

The continuing escalation of the never-ending Israeli war against the entire non-Jewish population of mandated Palestine has become the model for the Bush administration's never-ending war against all those who stand in the way of U.S. economic and military hegemony around the world.

With the passive support of the majority of its non-Arab citizens, the Israeli state continues to tag along behind the simple logic of its incredibly deadly military forces. Given its bloated military capability to carry out increasingly vicious campaigns of mass harassment, impoverishment, imprisonment, torture and murder of the Palestinian population, there is little motivation for Israelis to even consider other approaches to the Palestinian resistance. Especially considering the protection provided by its partner in repression, the United States, from the threat of enforcement of any U.N. resolutions.

Moron that he is, George Bush (with the continuing coaching of his handlers) still remains highly aware that the "success" of the Israeli military escalations depends upon a combination of its overwhelming superiority in weapons (including "weapons of mass destruction"), its ability to circumvent any threats of international intervention, and its massive international propaganda campaigns. The Bush administration has made these three planks the center of its own terrorist war on (non-US-backed forms of) "Terrorism." With its "Death Star" military programs, its neutering of the U.N., and its increasingly well-orchestrated Hollywood-PR-intelligence/psywar-military complex, the U.S. state can afford to sink its own economy, while intensifying the exploitation of international resources, and sowing mass social destruction around the world-all in the pursuit of short-term oil and armament industry profits, even shorter-term Republican Party political gains, and a likely chimerical longer-term plan of Russian and Chinese encirclement and neutralization. As long as the Israelis-with massive U.S. help-continue to get away with murder, the U.S. won't be far behind.

It doesn't matter much that even arch-ally Britain's ambassador to Israel recently angered Israelis by describing the Palestinian territories as "the largest detention camp in the world" (according to Alan Philips in the October15 th Telegraph in England). It doesn't matter that Israel is only able to pursue its never-ending war against an entire population through the generous funding of the U.S. government-at a current total rate of as much as $5. 5billion per year according to a recent Washington Report on Middle East Affairs report ($5,525,800, 000for1997 ). It doesn't matter that this never-ending war requires the creation of an ever-widening list of civilian targets for assassination ("targeted killings" of civilian "suspects" in U.S./Israeli propaganda-speak.)

It doesn't seem to matter that these never-ending wars require the day-by-day, increasing Nazification of both the Israeli and the U.S. states. The semi-racist, semi-religious, apartheid state of Israel has been compared with Nazi Germany for years for a variety of reasons confirmed over and over in its brutally devastating invasions, annexations, expulsions and occupations over the last half century. The U.S. state has also earned its own comparisons to the Nazis-from the invasion, defoliation and genocidal bombings in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia to its seemingly insuppressible penchant for terrorizing and invading tiny countries, including the repeated organization and funding of proxy death squads to torture, assassinate and "disappear" its opponents, including teachers, union organizers, students and health-care workers.

This increasing Nazification can be seen in the prospective US-planned massacre in Iraq ("war" is a gross misnomer) which promises to reach new levels of carnage, depravity and brutality with a proposed "Shock and Awe" strategy. It calls for the launching of 3000 precision-guided bombs and missiles during the first 48 hours of attack to produce a Hiroshima-style effect on the Iraqi civilian population. According to military strategist Harlan Ullman: "There will not be a safe place in Baghdad. The sheer size of this has never been seen before, never been contemplated before."

The population of Iraq is still enduring the effects of the1991 Gulf massacre where water treatment facilities and sewage plants were deliberately destroyed in order to create "favorable conditions for disease outbreaks, particularly in major urban areas" (according to a 1991 US Defense Intelligence Agency document). This was followed by a deliberate US policy of blocking humanitarian supplies to deny necessary repairs, medicines and medical equipment resulting in 1 to1 . 5million deaths, many of them children-a US-enforced embargo declared "genocidal" by Denis Halliday, former Deputy Under Secretary of the UN.

This increasing Nazification can also be seen in the methods used by Israel in the occupied Palestinian territories, including the Israeli military adopting the tactics used by the Nazis against the Warsaw ghettos. This intensified campaign of torture, illegal detentions, deportations, assassinations, house demolitions, economic strangulation, and mass starvation-carried out with the unconditional support of the US-is creating a major health crisis and a silent famine as severe hunger grips ever larger portions of the Palestinian population in the Israeli-imposed "detention camps" of the West Bank and Gaza.

When wars are fought against vastly outgunned enemies, when civilian populations are their primary target, and when no peace is considered possible short of total annihilation of the enemy, the level of barbarism which must eventually take shape increasingly resembles those carried out by Nazi Germany against its enemies in the1930 s and1940 s. Both the US and Israel have committed and continue to engage in terrorist atrocities and war crimes of immense proportions. And the vast majority of the corporate media is complicit in this effort serving as willing propagandists and enthusiastic cheerleaders for the war criminals in the United States and Israel.

This editorial will appear in the forthcoming issue of Alternative Press Review (Volume 8, Number 1) due out in April 2003 .