Then there is the exorbitant (some might say extortionate) amount of aid and support in all of its variant forms that America provides Israel, the no-strings-attached largesse of which no other nation in the world comes within a country kilometer. This is a reality indisputable for all but the most politically myopic or reality impaired. The recently renegotiated Israel aid agreement by all accounts is more favourable than ever, despite the additional reality there is little love lost between Bibi and his minions, and the Obama administration.
Indeed, this time round, Netanyahu -- a man not averse to (ahem) wearing his chutzpah on his sleeve -- was not shy about demanding even more aid from Washington. Doubtless, these demands will be met with renewed forbearance if not equanimity when the new administration is sworn in next January.
-- A Highly Successful Act of Hypnosis --
For those folks predisposed then to questioning -- or doubtful about the broad content of -- the narrative herein, they may wish to watch the recently released documentary The Occupation of the American Mind -- Israel's Public Relations War in the United States.
Narrated by Pink Floyd's Roger Waters, this powerful and timely film provides a much needed 'tonic of truth' to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. After watching this film, anyone with any illusions or uncertainties about who the good guys and who the bad guys are in this interminable standoff will -- unless afflicted with an incurable case of cognitive dissonance -- be disabused of all of the above in one fell swoop.
As the film's title suggests, it also delivers an essential insight into the inordinate power and influence -- and the self-serving duplicity, mendacity and unalloyed hypocrisy -- of the Israel Lobby. Just as significantly, it serves as a no-punches-pulled indictment on the venality, irresponsibility and double standards of the corporate (mainstream) media establishment in the U.S., especially in the way it unfailingly caters to special-interest groups at the expense of truth, balance, and integrity in their reporting of the Big Issues. To be sure, of all the "Big Issues", they don't come much bigger than the Palestine-Israeli conflict, and of all the so-called "special-interest groups", few come much more "special" than the Israel Lobby.
(In addition to the film itself, I recommend readers take time to watch an extended interview conducted by Paul Jay of the Real News Network with Roger Waters and the film's producer Sut Jhally. It contains many of its own revealing moments, and is a superb complement to the film proper.)
By way of summary, the following is apposite. In relation to the Palestinian question alone, for this writer Israel has over the years forfeited vast chunks of the seemingly inexhaustible moral capital it accumulated as a result of revelations about the Holocaust, and AIPAC and its institutional ilk for their part have been instrumental in facilitating this forfeiture. All of these have been ably abetted by the mainstream media and the so-called "Friends of Israel" who populate Capitol Hill and the broader Beltway.
Likewise, for its part Israel -- and the drivers past and present of its own overarching narrative and its trajectory since its inception in 1948 as a newly formed national entity in the aftermath of the Holocaust -- had a 'heavy-duty' moral obligation to present to the world at large an historically unprecedented example of how a civilized nation populated by a peaceful, just, lawfully minded, empathetic people, itself one built on the very notion of an inarguable recognition and acceptance of inviolable, universal human-rights principles -- might conduct itself in the modern age on the world's stage.
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