The media constantly deploy an antisemitic trope: that on Gaza, it is Israel pulling the strings in Washington. They get away with it because this trope is crucially useful to the western power elite
From today’s Guardian editorial: “Despite being Israel’s primary arms supplier, the US has failed to secure a ceasefire or hostage deal in Gaza, exposing Mr Biden’s lack of influence.”
No, Guardian. It exposes something quite different – and all too obvious. Biden, like the rest of Washington, is right behind the genocide.
Ask yourself this. Why is an editorial in the Guardian – a supposedly left-liberal newspaper that spent years policing the left’s discourse on Israel, looking for any hint of antisemitism, as part of a campaign to bring down former Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn – peddling an argument that, in any other circumstance, it would call out as a clear antisemitic trope?
This is what the Guardian is claiming:
That the president of the US imperium, the commander-in-chief of the most powerful army the world has ever known, is incapable of standing up to tiny Israel. That, despite the US supplying almost all the weapons Israel has needed to lay waste to Gaza, the Biden administration is powerless, it has no “influence” over Israel.
Is Israel pulling the strings in Washington, Guardian? Maybe Israel’s long tentacles are wrapped so far around the globe that they reach the Oval Office?
The fact that the Guardian, and the rest of the western media, freely and constantly deploy this antisemitic trope about the US being powerless to influence Israel – and no one says a thing in response – tells us something. It tells us that this particular antisemitic trope is crucially useful for the western power elite.
What use could it be?
This: Israel serves as the perfect alibi as the West extends its control over the oil-rich Middle East, disrupting the emergence of any non-subservient power blocs that might ally with potential rivals like China and Russia. And all the while, Washington can redirect the blame to a supposedly defiant Israel – or more specifically, a rogue Benjamin Netanyahu – for committing the atrocities the US empire needs to maintain that control.
Israel is the West’s teflon coating.
Israel carries out a genocide in Gaza, sending a message beloved by all gangsters that defiance is not only futile but suicidal.
Israel further hollows out the sovereign state of Lebanon, and tries to reignite its lengthy, catastrophic, sectarian civil war.
Israel isolates and boxes in Iran from its allies, and provides the belligerent mood music to stop at any cost Tehran from developing a nuclear arsenal equivalent to the one that Israel already possesses.
And Israel helps to foment the conviction among western publics that they are in a permanent, existential clash of civilisations against a barbarian, Muslim East – a supposed clash that requires more expenditure on the West’s war-waging, homeland security and surveillance industries, and more austerity measures on public services to pay for it all.
Meanwhile, the same western publics are encouraged to devote their attention, not to these endless resource grabs from the power-elite, but to a supposed threat posed by immigrants fleeing to our shores from the wars we initiated on their shores.
And if we raise out voice to protest any of this? Be in no doubt. The Guardian and the rest of the establishment media will be only too sure to remind us that it is we who are the antisemites.
