[News] Why the US cannot say no to Netanyahu

[Anti-Imperialist News]

english.almayadeen.net
<https://english.almayadeen.net/articles/opinion/why-the-us-cannot-say-no-to-netanyahu>
Why the US cannot say no to Netanyahu
Robert Inlakesh
July 30, 2024
------------------------------

We are coming to the end of a narcissistic empire’s lifespan. One that was
built on notions of racial, class-based, and cultural supremacy, all of
which are being revealed for what they are, as the masks slide off one by
one.
[image: 4b19ea91-1cce-4f03-9755-76fa6451f8e0.jpg]

   - A key takeaway from the speech, which was missed by almost every
   analyst, was when Netanyahu said he "chooses his words carefully." (Al
   Mayadeen English; Illustrated by Batoul Chamas)

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the United States has
proven to be a major embarrassment for the American government and
political system. However, the reasons behind the reception granted to the
Israeli leader, who awaits an arrest warrant for war crimes, are
multifaceted and expose more than simply the Zionist Lobby.

Netanyahu’s address to Congress appeared as if he was a cult leader
speaking to his worshippers, with the obvious exception of Democratic
lawmaker Rashida Tlaib who chose to stage a quiet protest. The Israeli
Prime Minister received more rounds of applause than any foreign leader
addressing the Congress, and beat UK former Premier Winston Churchill for
delivering the most speeches there, all while attacking American protesters
for using their First Amendment rights.

The Israeli PM then went on to meet privately with both Kamala Harris and
Donald Trump, in addition to US President Joe Biden. His message was clear,
he sought US support for a temporary internal occupation of Gaza, to
continue the war indefinitely and have Washington back an expansion of the
conflict to directly combat the Islamic Republic of Iran.

A key takeaway from the speech, which was missed by almost every analyst,
was when Netanyahu said he "chooses his words carefully" before talking
about how the US and "Israel" have worked together to develop some of the
most advanced weapons on the planet; this was a reference to nuclear
weapons.

Filled with ridiculous lies, distortions, and twisted half-truths, the
Israeli leader received praise and support, with the only objections coming
to his lack of determination to reach a prisoner exchange deal with the
Palestinian Resistance. Also, nearly half of the Democratic Party's
congress-members didn’t show up for his speech, this was in no way
displaying their opposition to the Zionist Entity, but had more to do with
the Democratic Party’s relationship with Netanyahu; with the obvious
exception of a handful of Democratic lawmakers who separately expressed
their distaste for Israeli war crimes in Gaza.
Why is nobody able to say no to Netanyahu?

This question has to be answered on a number of levels, beginning with the
most obvious. When we see members of the U.S. Congress and Senators acting
in a manner of relative worship before the Israeli Prime Minister, the most
clear cut reason for this is the Zionist Lobby in the United States.

Hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, of dollars evidently buy
standing ovations from elected officials. AIPAC, which used to work in the
shadows, is now openly bragging about its ability to buy elected officials,
bragging a 100% success rate with every candidate they back. So for a
moderately intelligent career politician, the answer is simple: take your
check, sign off on pro-Israeli legislation, and clap your hands when
addressed by an Israeli leader. This part is obvious and the lack of
opposition to the pro-Israeli Lobby is born out of fear that if you don’t
take their money, your competitor will be provided more funding to beat
you, or worse, if you speak out against the Israeli regime, you will be
branded an anti-Semite.

This aspect of the Zionist Lobby’s tremendous sway in Washington also goes
for Presidential election campaigns. We see this now in the case of the
campaign race between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, which also exposes
the psychotic nature of the Lobby and major Zionist donors, in that they
cannot even tolerate any descent from a complete worship of the Zionist
Entity.

In the case of the Republican Party, it makes sense for Donald Trump to
publicly display his Zionism, because he has tens of millions of Christian
Zionists who are backing him and forming a kind of cult around him. These
Christian Americans are deliberately misled about Bible teachings by
Christians United For "Israel" (CUFI) and others, being sold on the idea
that they should never even criticize the Israelis, and that the Jews must
move to Palestine in order to bring about the day of judgment.

The Democratic Party's candidate, Kamala Harris, on the other hand, is not
put at an advantage by openly proclaiming her Zionism, but is being forced
to do so, despite the fact that it greatly undermines her chances with her
key voter demographics. According to all the recent polling data,
Democratic Party voters are more favorable towards the plight of the
Palestinians than they are the Israelis, this is especially the case for
most minority communities and amongst younger people; which are the key
groups that Harris must win over in order to claim victory.

Putting aside the fact that Kamala Harris has spoken about her lifelong
commitment to Zionism, the fact that her husband is a Zionist Jewish man,
and that she has taken considerable funds from pro-Israeli Lobby groups,
the best thing she could have done last week was to challenge Benjamin
Netanyahu over his war crimes. She could have even taken the perspective of
the Israeli opposition and that may have even gone down better with her
supporters, but no, her Zionist donors couldn’t even allow that to happen
in a coordinated fashion. This is, by the way, a sign of severe weakness on
the part of the Lobby.

Then we have the more complex issues at hand, like American foreign policy
goals. Despite the political theater, the US government’s foreign policy
strategy in West Asia does not change fundamentally between Democratic or
Republican Presidents. While George W. Bush Jr. started the "War on Terror"
and overthrew the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, there’s a reason why Barack
Obama followed in his footsteps by going on to take out Libya’s Muammar
Gadaffi.

The only issue for the United States government was the ineffectiveness of
their regime change operations at fundamentally reshaping West Asia. While
Obama attempted to weaponise the revolutionary fervor that spread as the
result of the Arab Spring, launching a NATO invasion of Libya, he also lost
control of the situation greatly. While he would eventually end up with a
favorable military regime in Egypt, working alongside Arab regimes in the
Gulf to back the rise of General Abdul Fattah Al-Sisi in 2013, and then
using the rise of Daesh to justify continued American military presence in
Iraq and later Syria, he ended up failing to back the overthrow of
President Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

This happened as Ansar Allah in Yemen had taken power and overthrown the
regime of Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi following the Yemeni revolution, to which
the Obama administration responded to by pushing Saudi Arabia to lead a
multinational coalition in order to reinstate deposed President Hadi. The
US plot in Yemen would also fail.

While Obama would sign the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, he would never fully
commit to it and instead continued hanging onto the idea that through
military force, the United States could get its way in the region. All
along, the US government had planned to eventually crush Iran, but was at a
point where it was not plausible to launch such a direct war, and it was
badly wounded by a range of smaller victories against it.

Then we had the Trump administration, which decided that Obama’s 2015
nuclear deal was not worth maintaining and that it was better to pursue a
straightforward strategy of confronting Iran in a more direct way. Trump,
whose top donor was the Zionist billionaire Sheldon Adelson, was encouraged
to completely toss away the idea of compromise and brazenly display the US
government's intentions in the region. He decided to toss away the old idea
of a so-called "Two-State solution" in Palestine and instead believed he
could push the Palestinian people to one side, to begin opening up ties
between the Zionist entity and a range of Arab States, including the UAE,
Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan and the main prize would have been Saudi Arabia.

When the Biden administration took power, it preached about reviving the
2015 nuclear deal but never actually took the negotiations far enough to
get a deal, instead maintaining Donald Trump’s "maximum sanctions" policy.
As Afghanistan seemed to be a relatively useless cause at this point and
due to the fact that Trump had already set in motion the withdrawal of
American forces, he followed through and departed fully.

Then, placing Saudi-Israeli normalization at the center of its regional
political ambitions, the Biden administration also continued to dismiss the
Palestinians. In order to try and keep Iran from responding forcefully to
Saudi-Israeli normalization, the Biden administration reached private
agreements with Tehran to release frozen assets belonging to the Islamic
Republic and eased up on some of the sanctions. In that same year, the
Biden administration was dealt a blow, when the Chinese government mediated
Saudi-Iranian rapprochement. With tunnel visions however, Washington began
planning out a new trade route that would be made possible with
Israeli-Saudi normalization, which Joe Biden called "a big deal" in
September of 2023. The "big deal" was that the new economic corridor
planned to travel through Saudi Arabia and up through occupied Palestine,
was going to act as a counterbalance to new Chinese trade routes under
their Belt and Road initiative.

Biden’s government believed that they were going to successfully execute
the long transition from the War on Terror era, by forming an "Arab NATO"
which would be spearheaded by the Israelis, and that this could be their
answer to the growing power of Tehran. And then, October 7, 2023, came. As
if it fell from the sky, the Hamas-led Operation al-Aqsa Flood destroyed
the American plot to reassert their dominance over West Asia. The whole
world was shocked by the successful military raid and the Israelis were
left without belief. The whole US project in West Asia appeared to be
crumbling and the American response was not to sit down and reflect, it
chose to revert to its "War on Terror" mindset that it was just ridding
itself of.

The Palestinian cause rose from the ashes; the people who were left without
any means had managed to pull off a military defeat on their enemy, the
likes of which had never happened in the history of the conflict. The US
and the Zionist Project were furious, teaming up to put an end to the
resilient Palestinians once and for all. They decided that there would no
longer be any rules, no UN charter or international law, the colonizer
mindset reverted to its "kill the savages" mindset and they rained hell on
the people of Gaza.

Hanging onto the belief that their unhinged assault on Gaza, a genocide,
would once and for all finish the Palestinian Resistance and crush the will
of an already tormented people, they are now coming upon 10 months of
defeat after defeat. The Palestinian Resistance continues, its allies
strengthen their resolve and launch even more daring attacks from the other
fronts of pressure, while the Zionist Entity suffers wounds from which it
will never fully recover.

The truth is, the Zionists in the United States and inside the Entity
itself, see no viable way forward other than continuous war, and so they
throw all their funds into politicians that will bow to their demands,
while Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, will not end the war due
to it spelling the potential end of his reign in power. This, as the United
States government bears the entire weight of the Zionist Lobby like never
before and faces a situation in which they have no other options to assert
their dominance over West Asia anymore.

The US has no strategy, it cannot offer peace or economic prosperity, and
even if it was to self-reflect, adopting a more China-esk approach to its
foreign policy in West Asia, it has destroyed the region so horribly that
undoing the damage would prove an enormous task in of itself. So, the US
has two options on the table:

1) Kill, divide, destroy, and back the Israelis in any escalation they
seek. Do this as the Zionist Lobby continues writing cheques as an
incentive on the side.

2) Leave the region alone militarily, force the Israelis to conclude a deal
with the Palestinians, and exert influence through investment, diplomatic
maneuvering, and repair ties with Iran.

Unfortunately, the United States government refuses to acknowledge the
reality that it is no longer the power that it once was at the end of the
Cold War. We are now living in a multi-polar world, in which the Islamic
Republic of Iran is a real power in West Asia. The regional resistance
groups that formed to combat US imperialism and Israeli settler colonialism
are stronger now than ever before, this has grown to the point where an
all-out war between the Zionist Entity and Lebanon would crush the Israeli
regime. Yet, the narcissism of the West’s self-appointed "leader of the
free world", the United States, will not allow for it to be anything less
than exceptional, despite the fact that it no longer is what it says it is.
In reality, the US was for a brief period one of the most powerful regimes
in world history, but the length of its empire’s rule is but only a speck
in the historical timeline.

We are coming to the end of a narcissistic empire’s lifespan. One that was
built on notions of racial, class-based, and cultural supremacy, all of
which are being revealed for what they are, as the masks slide off one by
one. At this point, saying no to Benjamin Netanyahu would be saying no to
themselves, because he embodies the ideals on which US Imperialism lives.
The only way that change will come, is the fundamental altering of the
American political system.
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