Exclusive: Secretary of State Kerry gets to say whatever half-truth or fiction comes into his head about Syria, Russia or other “designated villains,” but when he cites the inconvenient truth of Israeli “apartheid,” he must scramble as fast as he can to retract and apologize, Robert Parry reports.
By Robert Parry
It is a mark of how upside-down Official Washington has become over facts and evidence that Secretary of State John Kerry, who has developed a reputation for making false and misleading statements about Syria and Russia, rushes to apologize when he speaks the truth about the danger from Israeli “apartheid.”
After public disclosure that he had said in a closed-door meeting of the Trilateral Commission last week that Israel risked becoming an “apartheid state,” Kerry hastily apologized for his transgression, expressing his undying support for Israel and engaging in self-flagellation over his word choice.
Secretary of State John Kerry speaking to the AIPAC conference on March 3, 2014.
“For more than 30 years in the United States Senate, I didn’t just speak words in support of Israel,” Mr. Kerry said in his statement. “I walked the walk when it came time to vote and when it came time to fight.”
He then sought to clarify his position on the A-word: “First, Israel is a vibrant democracy and I do not believe, nor have I ever stated, publicly or privately, that Israel is an apartheid state or that it intends to become one. Anyone who knows anything about me knows that without a shred of doubt.”
Kerry added: “If I could rewind the tape, I would have chosen a different word to describe my firm belief that the only way in the long term to have a Jewish state and two nations and two peoples living side by side in peace and security is through a two state solution.”
Kerry scurried to make this apology after his remark was reported by The Daily Beast and condemned by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which said: “Any suggestion that Israel is, or is at risk of becoming, an apartheid state is offensive and inappropriate.”
The only problem with AIPAC’s umbrage and with Kerry’s groveling is that Israel has moved decisively in the direction of becoming an apartheid state in which Palestinians are isolated into circumscribed areas, often behind walls, and are tightly restricted in their movements, even as Israel continues to expand settlements into Palestinian territories.
Key members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud government have even advocated annexing the West Bank and confining Palestinians there to small enclaves, similar to what’s already been done to the 1.6 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip where Israel tightly controls entrance of people and access to commodities, including building supplies.
In May 2011, Likud’s deputy speaker Danny Danon outlined the annexation plan in a New York Times op-ed. He warned that if the Palestinians sought United Nations recognition for their own state on the West Bank, Israel should annex the territory. “We could then extend full Israeli jurisdiction to the Jewish communities [i.e. the settlements] and uninhabited lands of the West Bank,” Danon wrote.
As for Palestinian towns, they would become mini-Gazas, cut off from the world and isolated as enclaves with no legal status. “Moreover, we would be well within our rights to assert, as we did in Gaza after our disengagement in 2005, that we are no longer responsible for the Palestinian residents of the West Bank, who would continue to live in their own, unannexed, towns,” Danon wrote.
By excluding these Palestinian ghettos, Jews would still maintain a majority in this Greater Israel. “These Palestinians would not have the option to become Israeli citizens, therefore averting the threat to the Jewish and democratic status of Israel by a growing Palestinian population,” Danon wrote.
In other words, the Israeli Right appears headed toward a full-scale apartheid, if not a form of ethnic cleansing by willfully making life so crushing for the Palestinians that they have no choice but to leave.
Just days after Danon’s op-ed, Netanyahu demonstrated his personal political dominance over the U.S. Congress by addressing a joint session at which Democrats and Republicans competed to see who could jump up fastest and applaud the loudest for everything coming out of the Israeli prime minister’s mouth.
Netanyahu got cheers when he alluded to the religious nationalism that cites Biblical authority for Israel’s right to possess the West Bank where millions of Palestinians now live. Calling the area by its Biblical names, Netanyahu declared, “in Judea and Samaria, the Jewish people are not foreign occupiers.”
Though Netanyahu insisted that he was prepared to make painful concessions for peace, including surrendering some of this “ancestral Jewish homeland,” his belligerent tone suggested that he was moving more down the route of annexation that Danon had charted. Now, with the predictable collapse of Kerry’s peace talks, that road to an expanded apartheid system appears even more likely.
But apartheid already is a feature of Israeli society. As former CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar wrote in 2012, “the Israeli version of apartheid is very similar in important respects to the South African version, and that moral equivalence ought to follow from empirical equivalence. Both versions have included grand apartheid, meaning the denial of basic political rights, and petty apartheid, which is the maintaining of separate and very unequal facilities and opportunities in countless aspects of daily life.
“Some respects in which Israelis may contend their situation is different, such as facing a terrorist threat, do not really involve a difference. The African National Congress, which has been the ruling party in South Africa since the end of apartheid there, had significant involvement in terrorism when it was confronting the white National Party government. That government also saw the ANC as posing a communist threat.
“A fitting accompaniment to the similarities between the two apartheid systems is the historical fact that when the South African system still existed, Israel was one of South Africa’s very few international friends or partners. Israel was the only state besides South Africa itself that ever dealt with the South African bantustans as accepted entities. Israel cooperated with South Africa on military matters, possibly even to the extent of jointly conducting a secret test of a nuclear weapon in a remote part of the Indian Ocean in 1979.”
Yet, Official Washington can’t handle this truth, as the capital of the world’s leading superpower has become a grim version of Alice’s Wonderland in which speaking truth about the well-connected requires immediate apologies while telling half-truths and lies against “designated villains” makes you a proud member of the insider’s club.
When Kerry makes belligerent claims about Syria and Russia even when his statements are later shown to be baseless or false there is not an ounce of pressure on him to issue a correction or apology. [See “John Kerry’s Sad Circle to Deceit.”] Yet, when he says something that is palpably true about Israel indeed a pale version of the ugly truth he cannot run fast enough to issue a clarification and beg forgiveness.
While Kerry and other longtime inhabitants of Official Washington have become accustomed to this madness this politicized disdain for reality their overly militarized fantasyland has become a nightmare for the rest of the planet.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com). For a limited time, you also can order Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy includes America’s Stolen Narrative. For details on this offer, click here.
From the lies told about WW2 to the lies told about Tonkin and everything before and after, this “hole” is pure evil. From the legislative branch crowding one another to reach an AIPAC “teat”, like mindless hungry swine after mama, to the, (arguably – [barely]), denizens who truly act as though arrogance and stupidity are virtues, for the sake of the world and U.S. victims globally, the sooner this evil sore is cut and drained, the better.
Israel defines itself as a Jewish state, a racist state, and will never accept a non apartheid democracy with a Jewish minority. Continuing illegal annexations, settlement expansion and ethnic cleansing have also precluded any negotiated two state solution. Justice may now be served only by imposing resolution just as involuntary, disruptive and humiliating to Israel as Israel has wreaked upon occupied Palestine for generations. The Jewish State must be forced, by whatever means necessary, to recognize an armed Palestine with externally enforced autonomy, eviction of all settlers, true contiguity encompassing Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem together, neither pinched nor parceled, and pay punitive reparations. American foreign policy may then again serve American interests, not the Jewish state’s paranoid pursuit of invulnerability, territorial conquest and racist empire in and beyond the Mideast.
Israel defines itself as a Jewish state, a racist state, and will never accept a non apartheid democracy with a Jewish minority. Continuing illegal annexations, settlement expansion and ethnic cleansing have also precluded any negotiated two state solution. Justice may now be served only by imposing resolution just as involuntary, disruptive and humiliating to Israel as Israel has wreaked upon occupied Palestine for generations. The Jewish State must be forced, by whatever means necessary, to recognize an armed Palestine with externally enforced autonomy, eviction of all settlers, true contiguity encompassing Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem together, neither pinched nor parceled, and pay punitive reparations. American foreign policy may then again serve American interests, not the Jewish state’s paranoid pursuit of invulnerability, territorial conquest and racist empire in and beyond the Mideast.
More accurate than “apartheid” would be “ethnic cleansing”.
Israel will never voluntarily make peace. It was established by war profiteering bankers, using Jewish supremacists from Eastern Europe as boots on the ground. It was not intended to be a safe haven for anybody, but rather to be a perpetual religious war zone, stirring conflict and threats of conflict, thereby fertilizing the profits of the arms industry. To enable their brutal invasion, they took over the mainstream media of Britain and America, and have blacked out central facts ever since. They also dominate election funding, resulting in virtually all national politicians being required to pledge allegiance to their war zone. To save their democracy, Americans need to learn the simple facts.
http://examine.webs.com
Jewish state of Israel
Bishop Desmond Tutu, after a visit to the “disputed territories” (sic) remarked that apartheid in Israel was worse than in South Africa. After all, it was not uncommon for white South Africans to have an African nanny or housekeeper who might be entrusted to care for their children, prepare their food or perform responsible duties. No such patriarchal relationship relationship exists in Israel, where Palestinians are routinely treated as a subspecies of humanity.
The most telling aspect of Kerry’s hypocrisy is that his remarks would not have surprised any of the Trilateral meeting’s guests; they all fully understand and support Israel’s tacit policy of emargination and ethnic cleansing through apartheid. Moshe Dyan’s famous quote about making them “live like dogs if they choose to stay” is a matter of public record. But the reporter who slipped past “security” stripped them of their double standard: one “truth” for the power elite, and a completely different one for the American public.
We are not entitled to the truth. The arrogance of Kerry’s “apology” is mind-boggling. What it should reveal to Americans is that he is falling on his sword NOT because he misspoke, but to deflect attention from the fact that this is the routine, chronic and habitual manner in which Washington insiders operate. There’s the farmhouse reality to which Orwell’s pigs are exclusively entitled, and then there’s the barnyard bullshit in which the rest of us must wallow in gratitude.
They’re not at all mad that Kerry said it. It’s like a bunch of old white men using the “N” word when they think they’re in private. But once it’s on tape, everybody’s busted. Serves the bastards right.
“…he had said in a closed-door meeting of the Trilateral Commission last week that Israel risked becoming an “apartheid state,â€
What an idiot! If there is one thing you NEVER say at a meeting or the Trilateral Commission is ANYTHING truthful about Israel.
Unless of course Kerry wants to actually HELP someone besides the plutocrat class, truth is poison to them, like sunlight to vampires. Does Kerry have the strength? They didn’t call him a flip flopper for nothing, so I’m thinking flop.
John was a asslicker in the Nam, and a lot of the enlisted in the Riverine Force knew this man would make up his own version of history, placing him in the jockey’s seat. He is totally self serving and always has been. He is not a bit different than that other John from Arizona that ran for president with the other idiot also.. Personally, I believe that the only difference between the 2 parties is their Logo’s
Everything in the USA is run by the Zionists. Look back to the beginning of this complete cluster fuck. It has been foisted upon the world by the Zionists who are not of semitic origins but eastern Europeans who saw another path to power.
I for one am for the total destruction of Israel, “Remember the USS Liberty!”, and if you do not know about that shameful moment in our history you should learn it. That was the moment I decided that my real military career was over and the only reason I was stayin in was for the retirement, and to look for a country that actually held ethics and morals as true goals.
The Zionists have already created an apartheid state, and a country sized prison for its real owners and citizens. There are good jews out there but there are NO good Zionists. These people, (Zionists) are as evil as those who wrote the books they believe in.
Just this old Chiefs 2 Cents
I couldn’t have said it better. Zionists are scum. Unfortunately, in Canada we have a government that consists of Zionists and who take their marching orders straight from Tel Aviv. But Zionist a-holes like Stephen Harper can’t stop the boycott campaign against Israel. Netanyahu and other Israelis Zionists are shaking in their boots when they see the world turn against Israel and there is nothing they can do about it. Eventually, Israel’s history of genocide against the Palestinians is going to came back and bite it on the ass.
I wondered how long it would take to backtrack. This happens all the time: a politician in an unguarded moment states the truth, and then is forced to disavow his remarks.
It is apparently God’s will that fat men in camo and body armor should inherit the earth.
You work for me! “”
The famous USA say – either you do what the boss wants or else you will be fired
Kerry works for Obama.
Hear the brilliant public relations advisor!
He found the solution!
When you don’t have successful actions to show invent one successful justifying slogan!
Wait a minute- solution to what?
President Obama has a huge issue how to sell his disaster international policy.
How to package as a colossal success the followings:
*North Korea does whatever wants.
*EU is precautious with USA motives.
*Islamism is on the march.
*USA is on the way of a new cold war with Russia.
*Islamist Iran is advancing to NUK while USA gives away the successful sanctions.
*China is not taking seriously USA.
*USA allies don’t trust USA anymore.
And what is the brilliant public relation selling package to the overall faults?
!!!!! THEY DON’T FOLLOW THE 21 CENTURY POLICY!!!!
Obama is a prophet president ahead of our times by centuries.
Unfortunately, the 21 century people- that don’t follow his 21 CENTURY POLICY–will have 85 years in the 21 century to try fixing Obama legacy!
(One example– Mysterious are prophetObama ways.
The USA court is wrong- he knows better (where from?). The 22 century will prove how far reaching was his vision.
Obama legitimized the Muslim Brotherhood the USA enemy preaching to destroy America form i USA court revealed Muslimbrotherhood mission in a sixteen-page Arabic document:
“The Ikhwan must understand that their working America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and DESTTROYING WESTREN CIVILIZATION FROM .â€
http://jcpa.org/the-muslim-brotherhood-a-moderate-islamic-alternative-to-al-qaeda-or-a-partner-in-global-jihad/#sthash.vg65vopj.dpuf)
When Obama goes away….
When Obama goes away…
—–
When Obama goes away
the vultures will fly high!
The values will be low!
The friends walked away!
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When Obama goes away…….
When Obama goes away……….
People will need a big hammer and a long hard working time fixing
When Obama goes away!