A moment of parting could be the time for hard truths. On December 23, the US administration of President Barack Obama for the first time allowed the UN to censure Israel’s accelerating seizure of Palestinian land as a “flagrant violation under international law”. Five days later, US Secretary of State John Kerry used his last major policy address to berate Israel’s continuing intransigence, which he warned was clear and present danger to its survival as a Jewish and democratic State.

Democracy is a term grossly misapplied to a State whose six million citizens hold a like number under military occupation. That is the hellish reality of Palestine today which Kerry chose to acknowledge — not as accomplished fact, as much of the world sees it — but as culmination of Israel’s current trajectory.

Yet for all his ire at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ruling coalition, which he described as “the most right-wing” ever with “an agenda driven by the most extreme elements”, Kerry took care to detail how the Obama administration had been more generous than any other in offering it comfort. That summed up the fraught status of the US-Israel nexus, a strategic partnership that has frayed, where pragmatism has given way to militarist fantasy and illusions of unending strength.

There’s a Nobel peace award awaiting anybody who dares puncture these fantasies. To his credit, Kerry did try, at frequent risk of public derision from the Israeli leadership.

In retrospect, it seems that Kerry’s boss won his Nobel rather too easily, just nine months into his first term, with no substantive entry in his presidential curriculum vitae. More than being a recognition of achievement, Obama’s Nobel seemed a huge sigh of relief by the awards committee at seeing the back of the baneful Bush presidency.

During the transition period after his 2008 election, Obama had been mute witness to Israel’s brutality in Gaza. “Operation Cast Lead”, launched ostensibly to interdict supply routes used by the population of the world’s largest open-air prison, led to well over a thousand Palestinians killed, in actions held by a UN inquiry to be war crimes.

In the dying days of the Bush presidency, Israel was given one final chance to impose a military solution. It was consistent with the culture of the right-wing cabal that held power, to seek release from real-world frustrations in a radical military transformation of the map. The messy legacy of this policy was what Obama, in his first months in office, signalled his determination to reverse.

Obama’s most significant speech from his first year was a June 2009 address in Cairo, designated as an occasion to restore the tattered US compact with the Arab world. As he prepared to speak, Max Blumenthal, a young US national well connected with the New York liberal intelligentsia, was in Jerusalem working on a book about Israel’s prolonged crisis of identity and territory. He was asked by a friend who edited a progressive Jewish American blog, to gather popular reactions on the Israeli street to Obama’s upcoming speech.

The outcome was a brief recording that exposed the vicious racist undertow in the Zionist project. Subtle indications of this virus lurking in the Zionist soul had for long been available, but Blumenthal was able to capture a veritable orgy of racist animus, directed at Obama and the Palestinians.

Within 12 hours, as Blumenthal later narrated it, “the video was ricocheting across cyberspace, generating half a million hits and counting”. A young journalist for the liberal Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz commented that the video had been linked to a hundred political blogs and was “circling the internet at a critical velocity on a mission to humiliate the Jewish people”. Within 12 hours, after a half-million hits on YouTube, the censors at Google stepped in to take the video down.

A vivid testament to the dangers of the mood within Israel was removed from public view. But there has since been a further darkening of the mood through two bitterly contested election cycles.

In 1975, with US power at a low ebb and Israel still smarting from the wounds of the Ramadan war, the UN General Assembly had, with some prescience, resolved that Zionism is a form of racism. Daniel Moynihan, then US ambassador at the UN, had angrily warned that the resolution made international law of “anti-Semitism”.

In 1991, with the ghosts of Vietnam laid to rest in the resounding victory over Iraq and the pretence of sincerity about justice for Palestine, the US forced the revocation of this resolution. Since then, despite its obduracy about yielding the slightest inch of space to Palestine — a Semitic people — Israel has shown little hesitance about using its ultimate “weapon of mass deception”.

As the Columbia University scholar Hamid Dabashi puts it, this weapon is “the charge of ‘anti-Semitism’ that (Israel’s) legion of propaganda officers readily level against anyone daring to question the armed robbery of Palestine”.

David Friedman, appointed US ambassador to Israel under the incoming Donald Trump administration, has shown a certain fondness for this weapon, often referring to Jewish critics of Israel as ‘kapos’, or Nazi concentration camp guards chosen from among the prisoners.

With a cabal of unreconstructed racists designated to soon take power in the US, the fraying strategic relationship with Israel may be restored. The consequences could be devastating, even more than those the Bush administration bequeathed the region and the world.

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