Poor little (dangerous) Israel

As I was plowing through my work today I noticed a reference to Israel in the Wikipedia entry on the UN Human Rights Council. Reading through it I immediately recognized the Zionist imprint: their’s is the common refrain that the Council targets Israel while ignoring other human rights issues. Avid readers may recall my blog from 2007 showcasing a video from a Zionist organization pouring scorn and contempt on Council members at one of its meetings (available here).

Given my regular tendency to wander on tangents (ie, my wanderings tend to be some how related to what I ought to actually be doing, howsoever tangentally), I began remembering one of my class mates during my studies last year. In my International Criminal Law class there was a young Israeli student with something of a precocious interest in ICL, who had served somewhere in Israeli Military intelligence (whether this was Mossad or somewhere else I never gathered), and who had a rather Anglo-Celtic name to boot. This student was also something of a human rights activist: from child soldiers in Africa to sexual slavery in Cambodia and a variety of campaigns against human rights violations in China. Basically, every situation except… Israel.

Her myopia even extended to the United States, of which she was a citizen. When we discussed the issue of whether former US Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld ought to be harangued by German police over torture allegations her response was that this was a mockery of international law. She argued that the US was, overall, a very free and democratic society with a robust, independent judiciary which was more than capable of addressing these allegations. I later discovered that my classmate, while born in Israel, was actually resident in the United States. Indeed, when I first met her I assumed she was American owing to her strong accent.

The closest we ever got to discussing Israel was its response to Hezbollah rocket attacks from southern Lebanon. It suffices to say that her interest was squarely focused on how to bring ‘irregular combatants’ to account under international law, and nothing else.

The most dangerous kind of oppression is the oppression that is invisible to the oppressor. It is the hand that grips the throat of the weak without ever realizing it is there at all. To those who complain that Israel is an exceptional victim of criticism the reasons for this criticism are invisible. At the very least Israel might make a few mistakes in the Occupied Territories or in Lebanon. But most of the time there isn’t even the recognition of this lower threshold of guilt.

Such denial is not unique to Israel or its one-eyed supporters. But what is unique to Israel is the unparalleled power, including unknown hundreds of nuclear weapons, and unqualified support it receives from the United States, the most powerful and dangerous geopolitical entity the world has ever known. This, coupled with the inability of many Israelis and Israel’s supporters to even acknowledge its crimes, makes Israel a particularly dangerous nation.

POSTSCRIPT: Just so you know, I’ve deliberately described my classmate in the impersonal third person to avoid giving a name rather than to dehumanize her.