International affairs writer and RPI Academic Board Member Eric Margolis, interviewed Monday on the Scott Horton Show, concludes regarding Israel’s military attack on and invasion of Gaza that “the blame for this bloodbath sits as much with the US as it does with Israel” and that the US government could end the war “in a minute” if it had the “political will.”
Expanding on the analysis in his article “David v. Goliath in Gaza” from earlier this month, Margolis states that President Barack Obama could effectively order Israel to end the attack on Gaza that is supported by US aid and weapons, but suggests Obama will not do so for electoral reasons:
Well, the president has the power to do it, but he doesn’t have the will. You know elections are now on the horizon. Democrats are worried. Republicans are beating the war drums. So, typically, the minute elections appear on the radar scope, the Israelis get away with whatever they want to do, and that’s exactly what’s happening.
[Israel Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, what he was really afraid of was that an independent Palestinian state on the West Bank had come a step closer after the Hamas-PLO accord, and this was his way of breaking it. I think he has done it very successfully with this attack on Gaza.
Margolis, who has a long history as a war correspondent, also exposes the misrepresentation that the rest of the Middle East is intent on harming Israel, noting:
We’ve heard this so many times: “Poor little Israel, they are facing 100 million Arabs.” The reality is that the Arab states are all incompetent messes right now. They have almost zero military capability. Half of them are allied with Israel secretly, like Egypt and Saudi Arabia and some of the Gulf States, Jordan have long been covert Israel allies.
Concerning Egypt, Margolis elaborates:
Egypt…all the years under Mubarak was a secret Israeli ally, and now it’s just right out in the open. This tin pot dictator [Egypt President Abdel Fattah] el-Sisi hates and fears Hamas as much as the Israelis do and is collaborating with them to squeeze it to death by shutting off the border crossings from Egypt into Gaza. And he worked with the Israelis to try and create a fake cease fire agreement in which the Palestinians weren’t even consulted.
Margolis also discusses the Israel government’s past efforts to encourage the growth of Hamas, which Israel is now using to justify military actions. Margolis elaborates:
…Hamas sprang up as a religious welfare movement to provide schools and education and food and social welfare for the Palestinian people. It was loosely linked to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, which was a social movement. The Israelis saw this and they thought “what a great way of splitting the Palestinian people.” And they allowed Hamas to grow and, even, at least closed their eyes if not encouraged the flow of funding to Hamas, which allowed it to develop very quickly and to become an important social movement amongst Palestinians.
Listen to the complete interview here.
