Dear America,
New Year's Day hasn't even come yet and 2017 is already a pox on America's house. Samantha Power abstained from vetoing the long-overdue resolution condemning Israel's imperialism in its middle-eastern neighborhood and Bibi Netanyahu has waxed self-righteous to the applause of the political grand-standers in the Republican Party in particular, but even among some Democrats, Chuck Schumer for one, there is opposition to the abstention, with concomitant sanctimony. To put it bluntly, I don't understand why. Israel's conduct with regard to colonizing the West Bank of the Jordan River is a violation of international law that goes back to 1949 and the Fourth Geneva Convention. And the hyperbole involved in the criticism of the abstention is completely irrational. Israel as an entity is not being condemned...just this action they have been taking since 1967--a time at which the consequences of forced annexation should still have been in current memory. Then, the Israeli ambassador accused one of President Obama's staff, deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes, of being a habitual fabricator in the course of accusing The Administration itself of inspiring the resolution, which the administration denies. There followed a claim of extant proof in the possession of the Israelis, but they have conveniently decided to withhold that proof until Donald Trump is inaugurated. Of course, by then the whole mud-slinging episode will have settled into just one more muddy little pool in the middle-eastern quagmire. Of course, Donald the Tweeter had to weigh in with his commitment to moving our embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv. And before that was his insane twitter entry and subsequent interviews inviting the world to resume the nuclear arms race...and presumably the cold war with it. This is all an inauspicious beginning to a new year.
In the midst of all this, an Israeli official said of the inclusion in the UN resolution of colonization in East Jerusalem, a primarily Arab community, that it was like condemning an attempt to preserve Paris as the capital of France. And all the while, no one mentioned that we just "sold" Israel over $12 billion worth of jets and other armaments for about $4 billion, or about one third the price, while The President overtly avowed support for Israel as both a sovereign nation and the Jewish state. The fact is that Israel still exists at least in part because of the aegis of the United States and its outright auspices. That doesn't mean that we should withhold our support in the future if Israel continues its ingratitude; the endurance of Israel as a Jewish haven state is essential to all of us. But there is no reason that we should indulge Israel's figurative solipsism, like a parent spoiling a child at the expense of everyone around him who has to endure his tantrums. So, we start the year with a parental reproof of an ally so self-indulgent as to be ungrateful for vast largess as if regally entitled. And at the helm, an imminent presence in the White House who's thoughts are so disordered as to be neurotic at the very least, and quite possibly worse. Woe is us.
What bothers me most is that this whole scenario seems so other-worldly. I wake up some mornings and it hits me all of a sudden: we elected Donald Trump. He was a joke when he first announced his candidacy. No one...and I mean no one...took him seriously, and here he is on the virtual eve of inauguration into the most powerful, and hence the most dangerous, office in the world. And he is being advised by a general- emeritus who re-tweeted, even advising his followers to make their own decisions about the rumor that Hillary Clinton was running a pedophilia ring out of a Washington, D.C. pizza joint. It sounds like the punch line of an awful, distasteful joke, but he apparently believed it. But Trump's primary counselors are the son of a convicted white-collar felon of the caliber of the mendacious cadre that caused the financial collapse of the world and his own children, who don't seem to have the sense to recognize overt influence peddling when they are a part of it.
We are in deep trouble this year, my fellow Americans. And it isn't even January 1 yet.
Your friend,
Mike
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