Washing One’s Hands Is Not So Easy

“Embracing ‘screw-both-sides’ nihilism and doing nothing else [about the Israel-Gaza conflict] is so tempting because it appears to provide relief from the burden of paying any further attention to the horrific violence or bearing responsibility for any of it,” but it means ignoring the U.S. government’s total support for Israeli aggression, Glenn Greenwald writes.

— Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.

Glenn Greenwald at The Guardian:

[T]he overarching fact of this conflict is that the Palestinians, for decades now, have been brutally occupied, blockaded, humiliated, deprived of the most basic human rights of statehood and autonomy though the continuous application of brute, lawless force (for that reason, those who like to righteously condemn Hamas’ rockets (Pierce, defending Obama; “he happened to be correct the other day. No country can tolerate the bombing of its citizens”) have the obligation to state what form of legitimate resistance Palestinians have to all of this). Moreover, as these clear numbers from the Economist demonstrate, the violence and carnage so disproportionately harm the Palestinians that to suggest some form of equivalence between the two sides borders on the obscene.

But the second reason, to me, is even clearer. The government which Americans fund and elect, and for which they thus bear at least some responsibility, is anything but neutral in this conflict. That government — certainly including the Democratic Party — is categorically, uncritically and unfailingly on the side of Israel in every respect when it comes to violence and oppression against the Palestinians.

… [T]his “both-sides-are-hideous” mentality is not what drives the actions of the US government. Quite the contrary: the US government is as partisan and loyal a supporter of one side of this conflict as one can possibly be. So if people want to rail against anyone who has convictions about one side or the other — Pierce: “The only people who make me more ill than the two active sides in this endless slaughter are the people far from the killing grounds who are so very goddamn sure they know what to do . . . I hate the cheering squads over here today” – then the place to begin is with the US government, the Obama administration, whose unstinting, multi-faceted support for and enabling of Israel is central to all of this.

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