-Caveat Lector-
>From http://www.avnery-news.co.il/english/index.html
}}}>Begin
Uri Avnery
8.6.02
Two Souls
One has to pity this man, Bush.
When he was elected, almost by accident, he was a local politician without any
international experience. He would have been hard put to locate half the world’s
states on the map.
Since then he has been sleepwalking around the world, pushed hither and thither,
sometimes listening to one of his handlers, sometimes to the other. He moves in
circles, zigzags, forwards and backwards.
He tells Sharon to withdraw immediately - “I repeat, immediately!" - and when
Sharon laughs in his face he declares that Sharon is a Man of Peace. He calls for
an international conference and kills it before it is born. He fantasizes about the
"vision" of a Palestinian state and humiliates the leader of the Palestinians every
day. He brings himself and his office into disrepute.
What’s happening here?
Well, Bush is torn between two mighty forces that are pulling him in opposite
directions.
On the one side, there is the domestic political pressure. The Jewish lobby is, of
course, one of the strongest in the United States. The Jewish community is highly
organized on rigid, authoritarian lines. Its electoral and financial power casts a long
shadow over both houses of the Congress. Hundreds of Senators and Congressmen
were elected with the help of Jewish contributions. Resistance to the directives of
the Jewish lobby is political suicide. If AIPAC were to table a resolution abolishing
the Ten Commandments, 80 Senators and 300 Congressmen would sign it at once.
This lobby frightens the media, too, and assures their adherence to Israel.
But nowadays, even the power of this mighty lobby does not match the influence
of the Christian fundamentalist lobby, dominated by the evangelist preachers. It
puts the fear of God into the leaders of the Republican Party. George Bush Jr.
remembers well that his father was forsaken by this lobby, when he failed to obey it.
This fanatical religious lobby appears to be extremely pro- Zionist. "Appears",
because there is a darker side to it. According to its theological beliefs, the Jews
must congregate in Palestine and establish a Jewish state on all its territory, so as
to make the Second Coming of Jesus Christ possible. The evangelists don’t like to
dwell openly on what’s comes next: before the Coming, the Jews must convert to
Christianity. Those who don’t will perish in a gigantic holocaust in the battle of
Armageddon. This is basically an anti-Semitic teaching, but who cares, as long as
they support Israel.
The combined might of the two lobbies is being brought to bear on Bush every
time he tends in the direction of the Arabs. There other powerful factors are at work:
the Arab governments and the Arab oil. The kings, presidents, Emirs and Sheikhs
are subservient to the United States, but they are afraid that the suffering of the
Palestinians will push their people into rebellion. They infect the Bush family with
their fears. The Bushes, of course, are heavily involved with oil.
In Washington, as in Jerusalem, all problems are translated into personal
struggles. The pro-Sharon faction is headed by the extremist Secretary of Defense,
Rumsfeld, and his even more extreme deputy, Wolfowitz. They have Vice President
Cheney on their side, and also, so it seems, the National Security Advisor
Condoleezza Rice, whose legs aroused the vocal admiration of Sharon. Opposing
them, almost alone, is the Secretary of State, Powell, supported by the experts of
his department. Every time Rumsfeld and Co. convince Bush that he has to satisfy
the Jewish-Christian lobby in order to win elections, along comes Powell and
convinces him at the last moment that the national interests of the United States
demand the opposite.
This week Bush received Mubarak. Sharon at once invited himself to the Oval
Office, obviously believing that Bush is so weak-minded that he is always influenced
by the last person he has listened to.
That is the struggle that meets the eye. Underneath, perhaps, a more profound
struggle lies hidden. My friend Afif Safieh, the PLO delegate in London, believes
that two souls have dwelt in the American nation from birth.
The one is that of the original settlers, the destroyers of the Native Americans,
the slavers, a soul that adores brute force and cherishes the myth of the Wild West,
that supports tyrants around the world. This soul identifies itself automatically with
the Zionist settlers and the expulsion of the Arabs. Sharon is their man.
The other one is the soul of Thomas Jefferson (in spite of the fact that he was a
slave-owner, too, of course) and the framers of the constitution; of Lincoln, the
emancipator of the slaves; of Wilson, whose 14 Points proclaimed the right of self-
determination; of Roosevelt, who helped to save the world from Hitler; an idealist,
liberal and freedom-loving soul. This one tends nowadays towards the Palestinians.
The first soul occupies Bush’s heart, the other one knocks on the doors of his
mind. It will be interesting to see which one wins.
End<{{{
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