As the vote on full U.N. membership for Palestine shows, the only way to understand the U.S.-centralized global power structure is to watch what its officials do, not say.
Robert A. Wood, U.S. deputy ambassador to the U.N., during Thursday’s Security Council meeting on the admission of new members. (UN Photo/Manuel Elías)
By Caitlin Johnstone
CaitlinJohnstone.com.au
Listen to Tim Foley reading this article.
The U.S. doesn’t support a two-state solution, the U.S. only supports saying the U.S. supports a two-state solution.
We know this because the U.S. just vetoed Palestine’s bid to become a full U.N. member state, after lobbying other countries to vote against the resolution — despite continually saying it supports the foundation of a Palestinian state. Washington’s words say one thing, but its actions say the opposite.
This is because if the U.S. admitted its actual position, it would greatly damage its reputation on the world stage.
What the U.S. actually wants is the same thing the Israelis want: for the Palestinians to go away, or lie down and submit completely, or otherwise stop being an inconvenience until they’re a forgotten footnote in the dustbin of history.
But the U.S. can’t come right out and say this, so it pretends to support a two-state solution that Israel has spent years doing everything it can to ensure never happens.
It’s a completely fictional resolution to a very real problem, but the alternative to supporting it is to admit you support continued apartheid, oppression, ethnic cleansing and genocide.
So the U.S. maintains this ridiculous charade where it keeps pretending to support this fake non-solution, even while taking concrete actions which make it clear that it does not.
Immediately after vetoing the Palestinian bid for U.N. membership, Deputy U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Robert Wood declared, “The United States continues to strongly support a two-state solution. This vote does not reflect opposition to Palestinian statehood,” saying the emergence of a Palestinian state can only come about through direct negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians. We can see right now how things are going on that front.
U.S. at the UN: what we just voted no on is something that we strongly support pic.twitter.com/9psBUIzcP7
— Hamza M Syed (@HamzaMSyed) April 18, 2024
As always, the only way to understand the U.S.-centralized global power structure is to ignore what its officials say and watch what they actually do instead. This is good advice for understanding geopolitics and government dynamics in general, and it’s good advice for sorting out fact from fiction when dealing with any manipulator in your personal life. Ignore their words, and watch their actions.
The Washington Post put out a good investigative report on the IDF’s murder of 6-year-old Hind Rajab along with her family in Gaza earlier this year, showing that evidence points to Israeli forces being behind the attack.
Washington Post editors immediately undercut this report by giving it the obnoxious headline “Palestinian paramedics said Israel gave them safe passage to save a 6-year-old girl in Gaza. They were all killed.”
This headline is carefully crafted to suggest that Israel kindly granted safe passage to Palestinian healthcare workers, who were then killed by some unknown assailant. Imagine going through all the work of putting out a hard investigative report, and then having your editor slap this on it. Disgusting.
Gaza Death Toll
And it’s so stupid how everyone’s felt the need to keep pretending to believe the Gaza death toll has legitimately hovered around 30,000 for months now just because Israel supporters have even been calling the official death count a Hamas-driven exaggeration.
We all know the Gaza Health Ministry hasn’t had the infrastructure or ability to count all the dead throughout the Gaza Strip for months and that the official number doesn’t include people killed by starvation and disease due to the Israeli blockade, but because Israel supporters (including the U.S. president) threw shade on the Health Ministry’s numbers from the beginning they succeeded in dragging the Overton window all the way down to this ridiculously conservative estimate just through sheer vitriol and denialism — even though we know the killing never stopped.
Ralph Nader wrote in early March that the real number is probably more like 200,000. There’s no good reason to discount this. It’s certainly more likely than the number just continuing to sit around 30,000 for no reason.
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This article is from CaitlinJohnstone.com.au and re-published with permission.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
The American Big Lie is revealed as soon as you realize which words are missing from the American plan for Palestine.
— “democracy”, and “self-determination”.
Blinkin Blinken is looking to recruit a dictator to rule the Palestinians for America-Israel. There is not a snow-ball’s chance of the American-Israelis ever allowing ‘democracy’ in Palestine because Hamas won the only elections in Gaza, and today would defeat the pro-Isreali Abbas-faction badly in the West Bank. So, no democracy for the Palestinians, because as is so often the case in the modern world, those people would vote for the wrong people and not someone who’s goal is to make Wall Street even richer.
To America, ‘self-determinaion’ is a dirty word, and one they want to be banned from the face of the earth. America believes that America gets to decide who rules everyone in the world, from Donetz to Gaza City to Hong Kong.
How about, from the sea to the river, Palestine will be one, free, inclusive, truly democratic and actually sovereign state?
It almost seems like Trump is running the show. Certainly, everything Genocide Joe is doing now seems calculated to lose him the election.
“America needs a strong Republican Party” – Joe Biden, on multiple occasions.
Abbas said a couple of years back that if Israel didn’t move toward a 2SS, he would shift to the original PLO position, a single state with equality under law.
IMO, Abbas’s following through would dampen the narrative that Palestinians want the elimination of Israeli Jews. The fewer who believe the objective is to murder Jews, the better politically.
Additionally, so much positive world opinion would flow behind the idea, that doing so would reopen the plausibility of a 2SS.
A true American Plan.
One nation, where all people have certain unalienable rights, and that among these, but not limited to these few examples, are the rights to Life, Liberty, the Pursuit of Happiness, and Freedom of Religion.
If America was the America that was to be, instead of failing to become the America that must be, then the above would be the American Plan. (if this sentence seems odd, I suggest you read the poetry of Langston Hughes).
Thanks to CN and Caitlin Johnstone for having the courage to tell the truth.
The US government is driven by bribes through political parties, not by principles or public interest.
That is how officials are elected and they protect that mechanism, in league with the Israel Lobby.
Likely at least ten percent of US “aid” to wealthy Israel comes back as bribes.
The US investigative agencies absolutely refuse to investigate proven theft by political parties.
Our government consists now of traitors/subversives at the top, and bought-off careerists below them.
All three branches of the federal government and the mass media are completely corrupted.
The morally corrupt unregulated market economy elevates only its lowest scammers.
The US is ruined and rotted. It has grown this way for more than a century.
Mark Twain: “I can say… with pride, that we have some legislatures that bring higher prices than any in the world.”
H.L. Mencken: “The average man avoids truth as diligently as he avoids arson, regicide, and piracy on the high seas, and for the same reasons: it is dangerous, no good can come of it, and it doesn’t pay.”
Certainly the people of the US must abandon the major political parties and the commercial mass media.
One proposed reform is the CongressOfDebate dotcom, which will conduct balanced text debates and provide summaries commented by all sides. Its administration may be a model for an incorruptible democracy of the future.
“The average man avoids truth as diligently as he avoids arson, regicide, and piracy on the high seas, and for the same reasons: it is dangerous, no good can come of it, and it doesn’t pay.”
This is incorrect. It is correct that it is dangerous. But, it is incorrect when it says that “no good can come of it” and that “it doesn’t pay”. This is illustrated by the following words “Liberty” “Equality” “Fraternity (now gender equal)” “Peace” “Bread” Land”.
“Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” did not involve regicide, but only put a local upper class into power in place of a more distant monarchy. Which might be why America today kisses the feet of a royal British Princess and sends representatives to the King’s Coronation?
Yes, the H.L. Mencken quote is intended to be humorous, reflecting what the “average man” believes.
Who is this poor excuse for a man in the photograph? Who are the poor excuses for women behind him? At least the US has diversity. No need for dignity.
Yes, America has achieved history, a truly historic achievement … America has proved beyond a shadow of a doubt people of color and people of genders other than male, can be just as good a fascists as the white boys.
This is exactly the sort of “historic achievement” that the Democrats and the Progressives have promised us. They told us that the things that matter most are skin color and gender, and that we should pay no attention at all to their appallingly low values for the content of their character.
The American left needs to remember to vote for content of character. Evil is still evil, no matter which ‘identity’ won the prize of getting the top job and the mansion and limo that comes with it.
The U.S. has an endless supply of African-Americans, Latino-Americans, and women willing to pay obeisance to the Empire as they scramble for money and position. And of course rich old white men like to hide behind their mammies (their butlers as well?).
The wprst part is they put black faces on the wmpire when it is clearly a european colonial empire.