Trump/Pence Regime Moves U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem:
An Outrageous “Fuck You” to the Palestinian People… A Huge Provocation Aimed at Exacerbating Antagonism and the Risk of War
December 7, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
On December 6 Donald Trump announced that the U.S. embassy in Israel will formally move to Jerusalem. This is a vicious slap in the face of the Palestinian people, who for 70 years have been subjected to escalating genocide at the hands of the state of Israel and its main backer—the United States. And, this move consciously pours gasoline on the tinder-strewn and volatile Middle East region.
Until this year, no country recognized Jerusalem as the country’s capital and none of them have embassies in the city. Every prominent expert on the region (coming from the perspective of safeguarding the interests of the U.S. empire) has warned this move will likely set off violence, unrest, and destabilize the region, including countries that the U.S. is working with to forge into an alliance against Iran. Trump got phone calls from his counterparts around the world, heard their warnings and pleas, and began his speech by rejecting that advice:
“When I came into office, I promised to look at the world’s challenges with open eyes and very fresh thinking. We cannot solve our problems by making the same failed assumptions and repeating the same failed strategies of the past. All challenges demand new approaches. My announcement today marks the beginning of a new approach to conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.”
What is “new” here is not U.S. backing for Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people. Such backing is a basic job requirement for any political figure who wants to be considered legitimate by the ruling forces in this country, who see Israel as a key ally and enforcer for their interests in the Middle East and beyond. (See Bastion of Enlightenment … or Enforcer for Imperialism: The Case of Israel for the real history and nature of this settler state, which has been systematically distorted or hidden from most Americans.)
Christian Fascism On The Rampage
What is new, is that Trump is redefining the nature of this alliance in ways that abandon pretense that the U.S. is any kind of “neutral broker” and instead frames the U.S.-Israel alliance in terms of a holy war between the West and Islam. This converges with an aggressive move from the U.S. policy of supporting the two state solution to an openly ethnically cleansed Israeli state. The Christian fascists led by Vice-President Mike Pence (along with extreme Zionists in both Israel and the U.S.), have been clamoring for the U.S. to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem—knowing that it may well set off hellish conflict. These Christian fascists think that the establishment of the Jewish state in Israel is a crucial step on the road to “the second coming of Christ,” so Israel has to be backed 100%. Therefore, the fulfillment of their (imaginary) “God’s will” lies in some kind of Armageddon-style clash between their “true god” and Islam.
This outlook is at the core of the Trump/Pence regime. Trump’s advisor/wing-man/hitman Steve Bannon has articulated explicitly that this is the defining clash in the world today. For instance, in a talk Bannon gave three years ago at a conference held inside the Vatican, he laid out a “holy war” perspective of “Judeo-Christian capitalism” versus Islam. He traced this back to religious wars of the past and in the process accused “secularism” of sapping the “strength” of the West. (See the section “Israel’s Special Place in the Trumpite Holy War on Islam” in the article “Obama Abstains on a UN Resolution Condemning Israel... Trump Lashes Back: Not a “Sign of Hope,” a Preview of Incoming Horrors.”)
Stoking A Reactionary Dynamic
Trump’s announcement is very likely to set off a dynamic that is extremely dangerous to the people of the region and the whole world, but which is expected and may well be welcomed by the fascist theocrats and lunatics running the U.S. The web site Politico reported that “At least two classified cables have been sent to (U.S.) embassies and consulates warning them of potential danger and advising they ramp up security.” Fox News reported that the U.S. Marine “Antiterrorism Security Teams (FAST) have bolstered security across ‘several’ U.S. embassies in the Middle East.” Israeli military and police officials have been meeting to prepare their forces for potential protests and upheavals. The Israeli police commander for Jerusalem said, “Any second this place could be set on fire.”
All this takes place in a world where the U.S. and Islamic fundamentalist jihadism are locked in a reactionary clash. Bob Avakian has said:
What we see in contention here with Jihad on the one hand and McWorld/McCrusade [increasingly globalized western imperialism] on the other hand, are historically outmoded strata among colonized and oppressed humanity up against historically outmoded ruling strata of the imperialist system. These two reactionary poles reinforce each other, even while opposing each other. If you side with either of these “outmodeds,” you end up strengthening both.
While this is a very important formulation and is crucial to understanding much of the dynamics driving things in the world in this period, at the same time we do have to be clear about which of these “historically outmodeds” has done the greater damage and poses the greater threat to humanity: It is the historically outmoded ruling strata of the imperialist system, and in particular the U.S. imperialists.
BAsics 1:28
Should U.S. installations be attacked, either by reactionary Islamic jihadists, or by the masses of people, or by some combination of the two, Trump could well use this as a pretext to escalate U.S. military activity in the region—maybe going to war with Iran, maybe supporting Israel in reactionary suppression of fundamentally just rebellions in Palestine, maybe many other things, depending on the response and both the challenges these would pose to the U.S. and the openings the U.S. would perceive to wreak its violent suppression and strengthen its domination by doing so. Should he do so, the Democrats would almost certainly support such a war. And he could also use this as a pretext for a major fascist crackdown in the U.S. itself, including using such an “emergency” as a way to crack down on his rivals in the bourgeoisie, shut down the Mueller investigation and perhaps suspend constitutional rights. And that in turn would bring about a “reaction,” which the Trump/Pence regime would then move to crush…
No matter what the character of the resistance against the U.S.—and again, while it may very likely contain positive elements of Palestinian national resistance and anti-imperialist outpourings in other places, it will also almost certainly have reactionary jihadist elements mixed in too—people in the U.S. must act against any and all U.S. aggressive moves in response. The U.S. is by far the biggest oppressor in the region and has, with this act, committed new aggression.
It would be a terrible mistake to wait and see if any of the possible disastrous scenarios develops from this move. It is part of the whole direction, and momentum of a fascist regime moving domestically and internationally to tear up the way this system of exploitation and oppression has functioned for decades, and imposing an openly and virulently white supremacist, misogynist, rabid “USA#1” restructuring of U.S. society, and the world.
For those who have failed—or refused—to see up to now, this should serve as an extremely loud wake up call. It is not “more realistic” to sit on the sidelines and “let Bob Mueller do his work,” or “work to bring about change through the 2018 elections … or the ones after that … or the ones after that.”
No, it is wishful thinking verging on lunacy, in the form of leaving the fate of the world in the hands of lunatics and bloodthirsty monsters who have at their disposal truly world-destroying levels of military power, as well a vast and growing repressive apparatus. The need simply could not be more urgent for people to take history into our own hands, in the streets, in mass, nonviolent and determined action that will not stop until this regime is driven from power.
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