Uncoupling

 

In the final frames of Erich von Stroheim's butchered, pitiless masterpiece Greed (1924) we see the murderous dentist McTeague in Death Valley, handcuffed to a corpse.*  One wonders if General Erich Ludendorff had read Frank Norris's 1899 novel McTeague when he described Germany's Great War alliance with the Habsburg Empire as being "shackled to a corpse."  The United States may learn how that feels if it cannot persuade Israel to see sense or unlock itself from one of its oldest and closest alliances.

American support for Israel was already waning when the bombing of Iran's consulate in Damascus occurred.  It was certain that Iran would retaliate, surprising that its response would be so measured -- several hundred slow-moving drones almost all rebuffed by the "Iron Dome" defense system.  The damage to some buildings by the one that got through has been played over and over to demonstrate that Israel is in jeopardy and must not be abandoned now, with no reference to the seven dead Iranian Revolutionary Guard officers.  This follows a well-established pattern of selective history:  tell Americans what it's good for them to know because most of them know nothing.  Who could forget the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, endlessly described without reference to the attempted invasion at the Bay of Pigs a year earlier?  No, Castro just decided out of the blue to invite the USSR to install some missiles in his country.  Remember "America Held Hostage" of 1979-80, the assault on the US embassy in Tehran?  Why should Iranians hold a grudge about their elected prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh being unseated by the CIA in 1953?  (Something about nationalizing the country's oil to benefit Iranians instead of British and American stockholders -- socialism!)  History is a continuum, not a series of isolated incidents.  What Americans are told is as dangerous and useless as Putin's fairy tales about how Ukraine has always been Russian.  

Now the narrative is "Israel under attack" by Iran, part of Bush's "Axis of Evil."  We can't possibly abandon them now, or even ask for restraint.  Nor should we even mention the stepped-up killings in the West Bank, unrelated and unrelatable to October 7 or Hamas.  Nor do we.  Today the story is whether Mike Johnson can cling to the speakership long enough to pass a bill linking unlimited support for Israel to limited support for the democracies Ukraine and Taiwan.  Meanwhile AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups spend lavishly to try to unseat progressives like Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush (fine when Israel interferes in our elections, not so fine for Russia or China).  Their ultimate goal, of course, would be the second coming of Trump, who presumably would encourage Netanyahu, like Putin, to "do whatever the hell you want."  

There are only two options on November 5, Biden or catastrophe.  Whether you cast your vote for Cornel West, Robert Kennedy, Junior, Dick Cheney or Zombie Ronald Reagan, you're voting for catastrophe.  Polls suggest that voters are slowly beginning to see this.  Joe Biden needs to unshackle himself from the corpse, the outlaw state we have always regarded as our ultimate ally.  There needs to be one non-negotiable condition for further military support:  Netanyahu must go.  Most of the world already recognizes a two-state solution.  Start the paperwork.

*A fanatic for authenticity, Stroheim insisted on filming in Death Valley.  Only one crew member died.