… but will we be zagging in a couple of weeks? I freely grant my knowledge base when it comes to Israel and the Middle East is quite limited, but I’ve felt for some time that the encroachment of Jewish settlements on Palestinian land is a form of illegal annexation. I neither celebrate nor condemn the news today of the Obama Administration’s reaction to a UN resolution, from CNN:
The United States on Friday allowed a UN Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlement construction to be adopted, defying extraordinary pressure from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government in alliance with President-elect Donald Trump.
The Security Council approved the resolution with 14 votes, with the US abstaining. There was applause in the chamber following the vote, which represented perhaps the final bitter chapter in the years of antagonism between President Barack Obama’s administration and Netanyahu’s government.
In an intense flurry of diplomacy that unfolded in the two days before the vote, a senior Israeli official had accused the United States of abandoning the Jewish state with its refusal to block the resolution with a veto.
I’ll watch with great interest. As the Israeli government has swung farther and farther to an aggressive and religious right which believes they have a divine right to the land, they also seem to believe they deserve unconditional protection from the United States. Given that much of the population of Israel derives from the remnants of the European Jewry exterminated by the evil of the Nazis, acting as a protector is certainly in character for a United States that has, at least in part, its own dreams of Godliness – silly as they are1.
However, that transfers a certain moral responsibility to ourselves, and regardless of one’s religious aspirations, reality is that acting as if you’re the chosen of God can get you smacked down. The importance of international law cannot be over-stressed when the alternative is a bloody war.
1In reality, we’re neither better nor worse than most countries, and those who have suffered at our hands have certainly a right to paint our hands red with blood – while keeping in mind that the reverse also holds true.
Humanity is a murderous species, truth be told.
