Transcription
The United States is a declining empire. And what you see week after week and now year after year are the symptoms, the signs of that. And let me give you some examples.
Israel is a very small country. Israel is trying to do something which was feasible two centuries ago. It's called settler colonialism. It's when you move a group of Europeans into a non-European area, you exclude the people one way or another and you basically populate that area with the arriving Europeans instead of whoever lived there before. It worked two and a half centuries ago because that's what the United States is. And we went to the final solution of the settler colonial project which is literally exterminating all of those people.
What Hitler did to Jews and gypsies and communists and socialists was not new. It was the repeat of what had been done by Germans but also by lots of other Europeans all over the world. The first book I ever wrote as a young man was a study of British colonialism in Kenya in which I studied what the British did from the time they arrived to the time that an uprising of the African people there known in the world as the Mao Mao revolution drove them out. And you see that everywhere in the world. The last century and a half have been and will be in the future called the era of anti-colonialism. It's the overwhelming story of the overwhelming majority of the people on this planet. India which was a formal colony, China which was half a colony and so on.
What Israel is trying to do is to go against a century and a half of historical movement in the opposite direction to undo settler colonialism to apologize for settler colonialism whether it's the Maori in New Zealand or the indigenous people in Australia or the Africans in South Africa and you could go on. This is hopeless and this has nothing to do with the particulars. You can't do now what you could do two centuries ago especially if the intervening period has been an era of anti-colonialism.
So what Israel has done, not willing to give up that project, and let's remember it was British colonialism that created this opportunity for Jews escaping Europe. What Israel has done is hooked itself up to the biggest, toughest military in the world, the United States, and basically made a decision to become the military outpost of the remaining empire, the US Empire. And this meant it was the flash point for everything against all of that, and most of course immediately in the Arab countries that surround Israel and the larger Muslim world which surrounds Israel. And what we have seen and what we're watching today is the slow, painful but inevitable process of teaching the Israelis that this is not going to work.
Now, for a while it can. They have enormous commitment to military everything and they have the endless provision of the means coming from the United States. That is their alliance. And Israel has worked very hard to support the political forces in the United States to support that alliance for obvious reasons. But it can't work. That's why the conflict never stops. The Palestinians have demonstrated that even under genocidal oppression, they're not leaving. That's incredible given what they have suffered. And they have appealed to their Arab and Islamic brothers and sisters to support them and to become problems for Israel, which those others have become, not just Hamas, but Hezbollah.
Eventually, they would overcome what had been their long-term good luck that the Arab countries were afraid anyone who pushed back too much against Israel would get bombed, would get missileled, would get overthrown and would incur the risk that the United States would help. And they didn't trust each other. And so every now and then one of them would make a deal with Israel to be allowed to do something that the others might not be. Not a pretty picture. But eventually the Arab countries figured all this out. If I can understand it, so can they. And they realized we have to come up with one of us that can show the Israelis why and how we're willing to fight back. And they found two.
The first one is this mysterious group referred to in the American media as the Houthis. The Houthis is a part of the population of Yemen. And slowly it became clear they are located where they can stop shipping in an important part of the world economy and they can shoot missiles into Israel and nobody can stop them. The United States tried earlier this year. A month of steady, heavy bombing by the United States had no effect. Oh yes, we broke a few buildings. Couldn't stop it. Can't stop it now.
The second was Iran. Iran is a supporter of Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, fill in the blank. And why? Because it is too big and too powerful and too well-armed for the Israelis to dare. And what did the Israelis do? Had to show that they would do what everybody was counting on them to be smart enough not to do. So they attacked Iran. The Jewish part of Israel is 7 million people. Iran has 90 million people. You don't attack a country of 90 million with 7 million. And you sure don't do it while you're busy fighting a war in Gaza, which the whole world condemns you for. And Iran has very close relations with Russia and very good relations with China. What are you doing?
The act was an act of desperation. The hope of Mr. Netanyahu, obvious to those who follow, was to draw the United States in. And Mr. Trump, when he listened apparently to Mr. Netanyahu and didn't listen to all the voices, including inside the Republican party, that said don't do that, did it. Whereupon Mr. Trump discovered that what he had unleashed was a conflict between Israel and Iran that almost everyone, other than the American media, who are useless in this situation in a way that exceeds bias and exceeds jingoism, this is straight up propagandistic nonsense. Everyone else in the world realizes that the support Iran has in its own country and its border with Russia and its treaties with Russia and its support from China versus Israel is a slam dunk of the worst sort. There's not a sustainable arrangement. And so we now see the backtracking of a desperate Trump who has to try to call off what he just turned on. Yes, he's a herky-jerky leader. Everyone knows that now. He displays that all the time. But that should not obscure us. What we're seeing here is the herky-jerky behavior of someone who's trapped.
There is no future for this whole business until you sit down and try to find one. There may be one, but warfare, that's not a solution. That's not sustainable. That's a losing proposition. And it was before he dropped the bombs on Tehran and the nuclear bases. All of Europe had dozens of commentators just to conclude who enjoyed pointing out that even according to the International Atomic Energy Commission, the enriched uranium and the mechanisms to further enrich it, if they were in those three places, had been removed from those three places. So that even if your bombs got there, which was an open question, this kind of warfare hasn't been done before with bombs like that. And the Iranians had put all of this in the middle of a mountain. So it was unknown. But the point was it wouldn't matter. They have the scientists, they have the laboratories, they have the experience, and they have the uranium. What are you doing in that situation? Showing that you can bomb. Everybody knows that. Showing that you will in this situation, given Ukraine, there's not much doubt about that either. So this was very impulsive, but that's not the important point. It's the larger historical dead end that's being acted out. Yeah, they're desperate. Yeah, it's herky-jerky. What else do you expect once you understand that they're stuck in a colonial project that is an absolute no-win situation for Israel and the West.
Last point, the only sad thing is they can't see it any more than they can see what they're doing in Gaza and how the whole world looks at it. And you have to explain that Jewish people are no more intrinsically violent than anybody else and they're no more blind than anybody else. So you have to ask the question: under what pressure would people like that, and I won't even add who themselves know from their own grandparents what it's like to be on the wrong end of that kind of a situation, even they, you have to explain that. And you answer it by saying when people are put in unbearable contradictory situations, their normal ways of looking at the world, of commiserating with other human beings, disappear and they act like cornered animals with a level of frustration and desperation that usually ends up putting them in an even worse position.