The Big Picture

Here's the little picture:

"Imagine if, an hour from now, a robot-plane swooped over your house and blasted it to pieces. The plane has no pilot. It is controlled with a joystick from 11,000km away, sent by the Pakistani military to kill you. It blows up all the houses in your street, and so barbecues your family and your neighbours until there is nothing left to bury but a few charred slops. Why? They refuse to comment. They don't even admit the robot-planes belong to them. But they tell the Pakistani newspapers back home it is because one of you was planning to attack Pakistan. How do they know? Somebody told them. Who? You don't know, and there are no appeals against the robot. Now imagine it doesn't end there: these attacks are happening every week somewhere in your country. They blow up funerals and family dinners and children. The number of robot-planes in the sky is increasing every week. You discover they are named 'Predators' or 'Reapers' - after the Grim Reaper. No matter how much you plead, no matter how much you make it clear you are a peaceful civilian getting on with your life, it won't stop. What do you do? If there was a group arguing that Pakistan was an evil nation that deserved to be violently attacked, would you now start to listen?

"This sounds like a sketch for the next James Cameron movie - but it is in fact an accurate description of life in parts of Pakistan today, with the sides flipped. The Predators and Reapers are being sent by Barack Obama's CIA, with the support of other Western governments, and they killed more than 700 civilians in 2009 alone - 14 times the number killed in the 7/7 attacks in London. The floods were seen as an opportunity to increase the attacks, and last month saw the largest number of robot-plane bombings ever: 22. Over the next decade, spending on drones is set to increase by 700%. The US Government doesn't even officially admit the program exists... But [the Obama] administration says, behind closed doors, that these robot-plane attacks are 'the only show in town' for killing suspected jihadis... True, the program has certainly killed some real jihadis. But the evidence suggests it is creating far more jihadis than it kills - and is making an attack on you and me more likely with each bomb.

"Drone technology was developed by the Israelis, who routinely use it to bomb the Gaza Strip. I've been to Gaza during some of these attacks. The people were terrified - and radicalised. A young woman I know who had been averse to political violence and an advocate of peaceful protest saw a drone blow up a car full of people - and she started supporting jihad and crying for the worst possible revenge against Israel. Drones have bombed much of Gaza, from secular Fatah to Islamist Hamas, to the brink of jihad. Is the same thing happening in Pakistan?" (Rise of the killer drones, Johann Hari, The Weekend Australian Magazine, 30/10/10)

And here's the Big Picture:

"Few Zionists would deny the escalating violence that has attended the insertion of Jewish colons into the Middle East. Mostly, however, the Zionists draw attention to the Arabs as the source of this violence and blame it on their rejection of Israel. Moreover, they maintain that Arab rejection of Israel is rooted in their ancient and religiously inspired hostility toward Jews. The Zionist movement in Palestine has generated endemic violence between Jewish settlers and Palestinians. Since 1948, this violence has repeatedly pitted Israel against the Palestinians and its Arab neighbors. It has dragged Western societies, especially the United States, into ever widening and deepening conflicts with the Islamicate.* It is the thesis of this... book that the history of these ever-expanding circles of conflict and instability was contained in the Zionist idea itself. Instability and violence are integral to Zionism: they have flowed from its inner logic. They are not incidental to it." (Israeli Exceptionalism: The Destabilizing Logic of Zionism, M. Shahid Alam, 2009, pp 25-26)

"This study has employed a dialectical framework for analyzing the destabilizing logic of Zionism. We have examined this logic as it has unfolded through time, driven by the vision of an exclusionary colonialism, drawing into its circuit - aligned with it and against it - nations, peoples, forces, and civilizations whose actions and interactions impinge on the trajectory of Zionism, and, in turn, who are changed by this trajectory. It would be a bit simplistic to examine the field of interactions among the different actors in this historic drama on the essentialist assumption that these actors and their interests are unchanging. Instead, we need to explore the complex ways in which the Zionists have worked - and, often have succeeded - to alter the behavior of the other political actors in this drama: and, how, in turn, the Zionists respond to these changes. Most importantly, we need to explore all the ways in which the Zionists have succeeded in mobilizing the resources of the United States and other Western powers to serve their specific objectives. Consider a list of the political actors who have had more than a passing connection to the Zionist project and, who, at one time or another, have affected or have been affected by this project. First, there are the different Zionist factions, the Jewish diaspora, and, later, the state of Israel. These entities are overlapping, with the degrees of overlap between any two of them changing over time. The second set of actors consists of Western powers - especially, the United States, Britain, and France - the Christian Zionists especially in the United States, and the Soviet Union and its allies in Eastern Europe. Finally, there are actors who are direct and indirect victims of the Zionist project, those who have paid the costs of Zionist success. They form four concentric circles around Israel, including the Palestinians, the Arabs, the Middle East, and the Islamicate. These three sets of actors make up the dramatis personae in the unfolding tragedy of the Zionist project. Clearly, the number of actors involved, their variety, and, not least, the multilayered power commanded by the Zionists and their allies would indicate that Zionism is no sideshow. Directly, it has involved much of the Western world, on one side, and the global Islamicate on the other side, who will soon make up one-fourth of the world's population." (ibid, pp 213-214) [*Following Marshall Hodgson, 'Islamicate'... will refer to a society comprising mostly of Muslims.]