Who’s A Friend of Israel?

Who’s A Friend of Israel?
By Pachacutec

...Sun Tzu recognized that when you are fighting on unfavorable ground and outnumbered, the best thing to do is retreat and shore up your alliances. This simply represents strategic good sense. Fighting wars of occupation against poor people whose populations largely support guerillas means fighting on just such unfavorable ground. As counter-intuitive as this may seem, the best strategic choice is not to take the bait, but to stand firm within your borders, look to your defenses and shore up your alliances.

I consider it a mark of loyalty, a mark of patriotism, to point this out to my own country when we are grinding our own military into the dust, or perhaps I should say, into the sand. I consider it the act of a friend to help my friend avoid making the same mistake. I’m an American progressive, and just as I consider it imperative to criticize the acts and choices of my own country at times, so too do I see it as an act of friendship to do the same for a state like Israel.

George Bush and the Republicans lack the sense or the will to do this, and so they are not friends of Israel. Bush and the Republicans lunge from international calamity to military catastrophe, leaving naught but carnage in their wake, destroying our alliances and our fighting forces all at once. We on the left value human life and the survival of free people, and so we are willing to say to Israel, stand down, for your own survival. Shore up your alliances; look to your defenses. Israel cannot win the population war in the region and is only acting so as to solidify the strength of its enemies into the next few generations, risking the viability of the state of Israel through the current century.

Republicans are not friends of Israel. On the contrary, we progressives are friends of Israel.