The Aging Gaza Activists: Mesmerized by the Aura of 1968
Israel’s War in Gaza is Nothing like America’s Vietnam Imbroglio, and People Liken the two because of a Romantic Yen to Relive the Flames of Lost Youth
By
David Gottfried
Bernie Sanders recently said that he thought the Gazan conflict may become Biden’s Vietnam.
I once lauded and lionized Bernie. I was enamored of him because he had the foresight and guts to focus attention on income inequality.1
Somehow whenever a war breaks out, many Americans ask themselves whether it is, or is not, like Vietnam, as if Vietnam was the only other war America ever fought. 2
Somehow, that once brilliant and brave man, Comrade Bernie, has, in his dotage, imagined he can relive the gallantry and zest of youth by singing the lyrics of an old song by County Joe and the Fish:
Enough pussyfooting with fun music and fancy pants language. I’ll get to the point:
Vietnam was 10,000 miles from California; Gaza is next door to Israel.
In the 60’s, the left could rightfully complain that the US should not kill hundreds of thousands of civilians by indiscriminately using napalm, crop defoliants, anti-personnel weapons and free fire zones (large swaths of Vietnam where we killed anything that moved) given that no Vietnamese communists ever committed terrorist acts on US soil, no Vietnamese communists ever said that America had no right to exist, and Vietnam was 10,000 miles from California.
However, Gaza sits next to Israel, and last October 6, they swept across the border to commit unspeakable atrocities. And Hezbollah, with over 10,000 missiles, is breathing down Israel’s neck and borders Israel in the North, and Iran seethes like a witch from the East, and all it takes is one coup and Egypt may revert to what it was in the days of Nassar, who, like a hurricane, whipped the Arab masses into such a frothy wave of raging hate they seemed poised to rush across the Jewish state like a Tsunami.
Whose Government is Despicable
In the 1960’s, the left could persuasively argue that America was supporting a grotesque, fascistic regime. Colonel Key, the Vice president of South Vietnam, and a real favorite of Lyndon Johnson, said that what Vietnam really needed was 5 Adolf Hitlers. The regime we supported put 40,000 political prisoners in tiger cages. The regime we supported continually persecuted the Buddhists as it believed that Catholicism was the only proper faith. (I thought the First Amendment says something about the free expression of religion.) The regime we supported prevented free elections in 1956 because they knew the communists would win. The regime we supported, very simply supported the landlords, the obscenely rich, and all the things that turn people into red radioactive communists.
The regime in Gaza is somewhat like the regime we supported in South Vietnam, only it’s a whole lot worse. Just as South Vietnam spat on Buddhism, in Gaza it is not legal to utter a Christian or Jewish prayer.
In Gaza, homosexuals are routinely put to death. A Jewish gay guy I know, who has a rapport with some Arab homosexuals and activists, told me that the Arabs have devised a way for gay men to be respectable in the Arab world. Gay guys are loved when they become suicide bombers.
In Israel, by contrast, plenty of Arab Muslims are sitting in the Knesset, the equivalent of the Senate of the United States.
There are a host of other reasons why the Zionist position is valid. I don’t like repeating myself. I refer you to my prior posts 3 .
Bernie, I know the Sixties were fun. Hell, ever since I was 10 years old and Mick Jagger first sang “Street Fighting Man,” my holiest, most glorious dream was to run through the streets, throwing Molotov cocktails into windows and singing “Street Fighting Man.”
However, not every rebel is an ardent lover of the true and the good. Not every bearded, unkept vagabond is Rousseau’s “noble savage,” sublimely in harmony with John Lennon. Sometimes that bold and brave man is nothing but a beast born of the same wicked spirit that bewitched the world with Adolf Hitler.
Although Bernie is rather left wing, he reminds me of the most charismatic Tory of the 20th Century, Winston Churchill. Most of Churchill’s ideas were absurd, but one of his ideas was so magnificent that it more than made up for all the archaic cobwebed ideas of his aristocratic background. That gem of an idea was his clarion call to fight Hitler. Likewise, most of Bernie’s mental output is cracked, but his demands for economic justice are spot on.
Actually, one of America’s wars was a lot like Vietnam. I am referring to our attempt to subdue the Philippines, in the first decade of the 20th Century, after we had inherited it from Spain in the sequela of the Spanish American War.