By Maidhc Ó Cathail. Published in Kansai Time Out, March 2009.
As last year drew to a close, while Kansai dwellers were indulging in the typical debauchery of the seasonal bonenkai (forget the year gathering), the people of Gaza had little cause for celebration and even more reason to forget 2008.
On December 27 the 1.5 million malnourished inmates of the world’s most densely populated ‘open air prison’ came under massive attack from the Israeli military, which over the next 33 days killed up to 1,300 people, including hundreds of children, in what was claimed by the Israelis to be a justified response to the firing of largely ineffectual homemade rockets by Hamas – the democratically elected Palestinian government – into southern Israel, a land from which the militants’ grandparents had been ethnically cleansed 60 years previously.
The ferociously disproportionate attack by the world’s fourth most powerful military on a caged civilian population provoked outrage around the world. Although the vast majority of Kansai residents appear to have been oblivious to the Christmas slaughter of innocents in what seems perversely called the Holy Land, a small group – perhaps as many as a thousand people – expressed their condemnation of the Israeli aggression by taking part in a number of protest marches which were held in Osaka during the months of January and February. At least one of those protesters was also indignant about the predominantly apathetic response in Japan to the crisis in Gaza.
No “Change” for the Palestinians
Yasuhiro Miyagawa, a pro-Palestinian activist and documentary photographer who has spent some time in Gaza, blames Japan’s post-war alliance with the United States for his government’s indifference to the plight of the Gazan people. “As a result,” he said, “they don’t care how many Palestinians were killed by the Israelis.”
Miyagawa was equally disparaging of the general reaction, or lack thereof, of his fellow citizens to the slaughter in Gaza. “Most Japanese people are so naive,” he said. “Therefore, they ignored what happened in Gaza.”
Despite his pessimism that either the government or people will ever react any differently, he says that he continues to try to educate Japanese people about the problem in Palestine.
However, the Japanese were not the only ones deserving of criticism, according to Miyagawa. “I was quite disappointed when I heard that many American residents in the Kansai area held a welcome party for Obama – even those people who joined our demonstration to protest the Israeli attack on Gaza.”
Despite the widespread belief in “Change” promoted by the new American president’s incredibly successful marketing strategy, Miyagawa for one doesn’t buy it. He remains unshaken in his belief that the pro-Israel policy of the US government “will never change.”
However, the Arab-Israeli conflict must be resolved, he said, because it is the root of most of the problems in the Middle East. But if there is ever to be peace in the region, Miyagawa believes that Israel must abandon its Zionist policies. Otherwise, he said, “the name of Israel should be erased from the map.”
Lost in Translation?
Miyagawa’s echoing of the oft-misquoted words of Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will undoubtedly be misunderstood by some as a call for the destruction of Israel with its five million Jewish citizens, in what appears to be an open threat of a “second Holocaust.”
However, what Ahmadinejad actually said was, “This regime that is occupying Qods [Jerusalem] must be eliminated from the pages of history.” Rather than threatening the annihilation of Israelis, the Iranian president was merely stating that the Zionist state sooner or later must be disposed of like other repressive regimes such as the Soviet Union or apartheid South Africa into the dustbin of history.
Considering the ethno-religious exclusivism and expansionist goals of Israel, it is rather a reasonable view shared not only by many in the Arab and Islamic worlds but by a growing number of anti-Zionist Israelis and Jews around the world who reject the legitimacy of an Israeli state that has been illegally and brutally occupying the West Bank and Gaza since 1967, as well as serially attacking its neighbours on the flimsiest of pretexts.
Nevertheless, a pro-Zionist warmongering Western media continues to misrepresent Ahmadenijad as a “new Hitler” who must be dealt with promptly before he gets his evil hands on the bomb with which he presumably would not hesitate to “wipe Israel off the map.”
Sadly, far too many otherwise seemingly intelligent people fall for these dangerous lies. Moreover, they seem to have quickly forgotten the lessons of Iraq, that is, if they ever learned them in the first place.
A Pack of Liars
A 2004 investigation by Mother Jones magazine aptly titled “The Lie Factory” revealed the key role of the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, headed by Abram Shulsky and staffed by hardcore pro-Israel neoconservatives, in fabricating ‘evidence’ of Iraqi WMDs and Saddam Hussein’s links to Al-Qaeda to justify what was, for the United States, an unnecessary and costly war; for Iraqis, an ongoing nightmare; but for Israeli hawks, a dream come true.
Since then, a number of fine books such as James Bamford’s A Pretext for War, Stephen Sniegowski’s The Transparent Cabal, and Jeff Gates’ incomparable Guilt By Association have confirmed the central role played by Israel-firsters like Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and Richard Perle – all of whom have at one time or another been investigated by the FBI for espionage for Israel – in duping Americans into invading Iraq.
With the US military likely to be in a devastated and radicalized Iraq for the foreseeable future, those primarily responsible for getting them there now have Iran firmly in their crosshairs. And with the hardline Benjamin Netanyahu likely to be Israel’s next prime minister, the chances are greatly increased that the neocons will get their next war of choice.
Iran’s Press TV recently published an article ominously titled “Netanyahu ‘will coax Obama into Iran war,’” in which it quoted Aaron David Miller, the US State Department’s top analyst in the 1980s, who claims that Netanyahu will be able to convince the newly-elected American president that a military strike is the only way to deal with the much-hyped Iranian nuclear issue.
But if Netanyahu is unable to wrap Obama “around his little finger” as Ariel Sharon did with George W. Bush (in the words of former national security advisor Brent Scowcroft), Israeli warmongers may resort to more clandestine methods.
“If Iran is Attacking It Might Really be Israel,” was the title of a recent piece in The American Conservative magazine by Philip Giraldi, a former CIA counterterrorism officer. “Some intel types are beginning to express concerns that the Israelis might do something completely crazy to get the US involved,” Giraldi warned. “There are a number of possible ‘false flag’ scenarios in which the Israelis could insert a commando team in the Persian Gulf or use some of their people inside Iraq to stage an incident that they will make to look Iranian, either by employing Iranian weapons or by leaving a communications footprint that points to Tehran’s involvement.”
For those who might be sceptical that Israel would ever pull such a dastardly stunt on their mighty “ally” and lavish benefactor, Giraldi reminded readers of two previous instances when the Israelis carried out attacks on Americans with the intention of blaming them on their then enemy du jour, Nasser’s Egypt. Although both attempts – the bombing of the US Consulate in Alexandria in 1954 and the savage attack on the USS Liberty in 1967 – ultimately failed in their objectives, the inaction of the American government crucially signalled to Israel that it could kill Americans with impunity.
Apocalypse Now?
If indeed Iran ends up being attacked by either the United States or Israel or both, the consequences are likely to be far-reaching, if not catastrophic. The serious affect it would have on oil production, for instance, would have major implications for all of the industrialized countries, not least Japan.
Soaring oil prices would exacerbate an already precarious situation for Japanese manufacturers who have been hit by the double whammy of a sharp drop in demand from the US market and a rising yen.
But as bad as an attack on Iran would be for the Japanese economy, there is an infinitely scarier scenario.
A military strike against Iran could be the straw that finally breaks the camel’s back of Islamic tolerance of Western aggression against one of their own. Much of the Arab and Muslim world would most likely explode with rage against Israel and its American sponsor. The further destabilization of the oil-rich Middle East could then easily escalate into a wider war, sucking in neighbouring powers into the vortex of violence.
The ever-cautious Chinese and Russians may ultimately be provoked to intervene either directly or indirectly on the side of Iran, rather than look on while yet another resource-rich neighbour is picked off in the ever-widening ‘war on terror,’ as the circle of US military bases creeps ever closer to their borders.
If Russia and China were to get involved, there would be considerable pressure exerted on other regional powers such as India, Taiwan, and Japan – whose hawks would then have their long sought after opportunity to finally shred the ‘peace’ constitution – to back the Anglo-American-Israeli alliance against the ‘forces of evil.’
And then neocon luminaries like Norman Podhoretz and William Kristol would finally have their cherished World War IV – they consider the Cold War to have been World War III – which they’ve been sedulously waging for years in the media against the hyperbolic threat of “Islamo-fascism.”
As for the unsuspecting denizens of Kansai, they might then yearn for a return to the pre-war halcyon days when they naively thought they could not only ‘forget the year’ that had passed but the suffering of people seemingly far away.
Egging on Humanity
One who didn’t turn a blind eye to what happened in Gaza, however, was Haruki Murakami. Japan’s bestselling author, who controversially went to Israel in February to receive the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society, seized the opportunity to condemn Israeli policy in a poetic and powerful acceptance speech.
Sharing a stage with President Shimon Peres, Murakami told his Israeli audience:
“Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg,”
Apart from the obvious analogy between the broken egg and the battered Gazans, the Japanese writer’s metaphor was also an appeal to the Israelis’ common sense of humanity with the oppressed Palestinians.
“We are all human beings, individuals transcending nationality and race and religion, fragile eggs faced with a solid wall called The System,” said Murakami.
“If we have any hope of victory at all, it will have to come from our believing in the utter uniqueness and irreplaceability of our own and others’ souls and from the warmth we gain by joining our souls together.”
Zbigniew Brzezinski