KALL: And what happened when they came to blows - Hamas was literally massacring the Palestinian Authority people, right?
LERNER: Right, exactly. Israel withdrew from Gaza - to say that it withdrew is somewhat of an exaggeration, because what actually happened is, it withdrew its troops to the borders and surrounded Gaza with its troops and made it impossible for anybody to get in or out of Gaza without Israel's permission. So de facto, that meant that this was not what one would mean by a withdrawal in the common parlance of what people usually mean by withdrawal - they mean that one country lets the other one be free or decide for itself its own future.
In this case, Israel was making it impossible for the Gazans to travel any place outside of Gaza - outside of the Gaza Strip - without Israel's approval, and Israel was frequently shutting the borders, and then permanently shut the borders. In shutting the borders, it also shut the borders to the supply of food coming into Gaza and gas and other vital necessities for the Gazan people - to the Palestinians living in Gaza. So this created a tremendous amount of anger on the part of Hamas and the Palestinians living in Gaza.
KALL: They shut it down completely and didn't let anything through?
LERNER: So what happens is that, for big periods of time, they shut it down and won’t let anything in and occasionally they’ll lift the blockade and let some food in - usually in response to international pressures and international demands. But you have a level in which there… about 60% of the population of Gaza is facing severe malnutrition.
KALL: Now where does the United States fit into all this?
LERNER: Well, the United States has basically been the enabler of Israel's policies all through this period. It has been giving a green light to whatever Israel wanted to do, and largely because Israel has been willing to be a local partner to the United States in whatever of the United States wanted to accomplish in the Middle East.
Israel was and is the largest military force in the area and in fact has either the third- or fourth-most efficient army in the world - largest and most efficiently organized army in the world. Israel became an ally; it started to be an ally with the United States during the Cold War, when the United States imagined that it should surround the Soviet Union with bases and allies of the United States to contain communism. However, after communism collapsed in East and Western Europe, the special relationship between the United States and Israel continued and Israel became the ears of the United States and the eyes of the United States in the Middle East, often providing it with a base for operations on the intelligence level, as well as providing them with all kinds of safe harbors and safe passageway for American power in the Middle East. So the United States became very aligned with Israel, Israel voted with the United States in the United Nations almost all the time, so that the United States was never just one, there were always two votes on the United States’ side. And the United States has supplied Israel with a huge amount of weaponry of the most sophisticated and technologically advanced sort, which gives Israel a huge military advantage in any struggle with the surrounding Arab armies.
KALL: Has the treatment of Israel by the United States been the same under the George W. Bush administration, as compared to under Clinton or George Herbert Walker Bush?
LERNER: The only person who’s ever stood up to Israel in any way was George Herbert Walker Bush, who said that Israel should stop its construction of new settlements in the West Bank and if it wouldn't do that, then that Bush administration - the one from 1988 to 1992, would not allow Israel to receive the loan guarantees that it had sought from the United States, in order to build more housing or for Jewish refugees from Russia, who were taking advantage of the collapse of the old order in Russia, to flee Russia and come to Israel. So Bush stood up to the Israel lobby, and, as a result, he lost a tremendous amount of support from all those who were friendly to the lobby and eventually got defeated in his rerun for the Senate.
KALL: Well, there were a lot of factors, including his, “Read my lips, no new taxes,” but do you think that…
LERNER: Yeah, I said rerun for the Senate, but I really meant rerun for the Presidency.
KALL: And this is always something that is a threat to any American politician, just about anywhere, except maybe the most remote parts of the Appalachian Mountains…
LERNER: The threat of the Israel lobby, AIPAC [American Israel Public Affairs Committee], is composed of many of the leaders of the organized Jewish community, but it also has the strength it has for several more reasons, one of which is the very strong pro-right wing Israeli government that comes from the Christian Right in this country. The Christian Right is much bigger and in many ways more politically impactful than the Jewish community is and it has aligned itself with the Israeli Right.
And then, of course, you’ve got the American corporate interests, which I believe to be decisive in foreign policy matters. Those corporate interests have seen Israel as a big ally in potentially constraining any Arab militarism and supporting the more reactionary regimes in the Arab world like the Saudis. Allegedly, I mean, on the surface, Israel and Saudi Arabia are in conflict with each other, but on a deeper level, they work in concert with each other in the sense that the Saudi regime makes sure that the Arab states do not align in any serious way to challenge Israeli power over Palestinians. Israel and the Saudi regime and other Arab states are all aligned against the Arab militants who might seek to change the relationship of the Arab states to the United States and, in particular, not let the oil be sold at cheap rates to the West, where it’s been used to make it possible for the United States and other Western countries to have a higher standard of living in material terms.
There’s a whole nexus of forces that lead to no one wanting to challenge Israel.
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