"The point where silence is considered betrayal" in the US on Palestine–Israel

There are those who see ABD's Middle East policies, and especially its support for Israel, as an ontological necessity of ABD. They must think that ABD has no option other than what it is doing in the Middle East today, and even that everything it does is part of grand American strategies.

Whether these are views nourished by resentment toward ABD or the product of admiration for its long-term strategic mind, they cannot avoid seeing, or presenting, the fate of ABD and the fate of Israel as inseparable. According to this view, Israel's presence in the Middle East from the very beginning constitutes a highly strategic pillar of ABD's hegemony. ABD maintains its hegemony in the Middle East thanks to Israel, and so on.

We, however, have said here many times that ABD's relationship with Israel is absolutely not a necessary one, and that instead of giving it strength, it erodes its strength with each passing day and also threatens its global hegemony.

Were it not for the support it gives to Israel, which, with aggressive, occupying and massacring practices that ignore all international relations and customs, commits countless human rights violations, ABD's global hegemony would have a longer life and could have taken root much deeper in the Middle East. Yet today Israel, like a black hole of ABD, draws in and consumes all its power, its existence, its hegemony.

While Israel, as a black hole in the region, draws in and consumes this power and prestige, sympathy toward ABD among the peoples in every part of the Middle East is zero, and hatred reaches an extreme. In the end-of-day balance sheet, when one looks at what ABD has gained from all this support it has given to Israel, it is bound to be faced with a huge nothing.

In a way, the strategic mind that steers international relations, just like the human mind, is not independent of its positive and negative emotions. For that reason, however strategic it may be, a greedy mind can bring about its own end with its own greed. Nations too have their nafs al-ammara or nafs al-lawwama, and this can blow all their strategic minds and wills sky-high.

There is a social consciousness gradually awakening in ABD itself as to what kind of harm ABD's policy toward the Middle East in general and Israel in particular does to ABD, both strategically and at the level of humane democratic values. The course of this ABD policy, which proceeds recklessly and requires disregarding the values that make America America, increasingly disturbs more circles, and the voices of those who consider this a threat to ABD itself are beginning to rise.

You must be following the writings of our friend Abdullah Muradoğlu. If not, I recommend that you do. He reflects the developments inside ABD very well. In his piece on Sunday he conveys the reactions of American public opinion to Trump, who shut down the government because he could not get money out of Congress for the wall to be built on the Mexican border, attempting to pass the aid package for Israel in precisely such an economic crisis environment. It seems that this support has had a shocking effect in awakening ABD public opinion to the striking realities about Israel.

4 days ago a very interesting piece by Michelle Alexandre, a columnist at the New York Times, reflecting the mood in ABD on this situation, was published. The piece, published under the title "Time to break the silence on Palestine," begins by drawing a comparison with Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1967 call to break the silence that existed in American public opinion about the Vietnam War.

Back then too there was heavy political pressure that silenced those who spoke about the Vietnam War, prevented the truth from being spoken, declared those who spoke traitors, and immediately removed them from their positions through McCarthyist practices. In that climate, King, on his visit to Riverside Church in Manhattan, showed everyone the emperor's nakedness by saying "we are now at the point where silence is the same as betrayal."

Alexander too says "we are at the same point," "we are at the point where continuing the silence we have been forced into on Palestine and Israel now means the same thing as betrayal."

His decision not to betray cost Martin Luther King his life. What has happened today to those who want to break their silence on Palestine should be a separate matter of attitude and discussion. Unfortunately, on this subject there is a "discourse order" maintained through existing career systems and other means to repeat the discourses imposed by the Israel lobbies and not to step outside them. This order silences those who want to speak about Israel's occupying, massacring settler policies that it persistently tries to continue. The stories of what has happened to those who speak are instilled in people to us like legends. In the end, even if we do not say the opposite, we feel compelled to keep silent, at the very least in order not to lose some of our gains.

Meanwhile, Israel continues to hold a whole people under siege on the lands it occupies, to deprive them of their most basic needs, to bomb civilian places whenever it wants, to settle Jews it has brought from the other end of the world on whichever Palestinian land it wants, forcibly evicting from their homes the rightful Palestinians who have been there for generations as it does so, to have Israeli soldiers enter and search Palestinians' homes and places of worship in their most aggressive manner whenever they want, to severely harass the households, and to subject Palestinians to the harshest treatment at checkpoints set up between their leaving their own home and going to the next.

And we ignore these things, we remain silent about them, because of the pressures of the big media and the career order that threatens us and in which the Israel lobbies are influential.

"No!" says Alexandre, recalling King's words, "we are now at the point where silence is the same as betrayal."

And she speaks, and also reports the existence of other Americans who speak as she does.

She speaks of the serious political developments that have recently awakened in ABD against these injustices of Israel and its holding ABD policies hostage, and of the civil society movement's campaign to boycott Israel. This was something that until a short time ago could not even be imagined.

Of course, Alexandre also specifically notes that all of these discourses never mean, and should not mean, enmity toward Jews. Indeed, one of the loudest voices in ABD today against these injustices of Israel in fact comes from the Jews here.

Jews think that what Israel does in the name of Judaism harms Judaism most, and they are joining the caravan of revolt against Israel.

We too, of course, join Alexandre in this sensitivity exactly.