“We were unable to come to any product,” said the American ambassador to the UN after three hours of discussion in the Security Council ended with nothing tonight. Unsurprisingly, since of course, the USA is intransigently and adamantly supporting its Middle Eastern client state. Though it looks now as though the US is nothing more than PR man and Financial Director for Rambo Israel Inc.: Israel the tail wagging the complaisant dog yet again.
I wondered after the invasion of Lebanon how much more both the USA and Israel actually wanted to be loathed and despised by almost the whole of the rest of the world? The answer appears to be the same as the length of a piece of string.
And the Americans and Israelis believe still that somehow they can package what is evidently to become an orgy of destruction of everything that makes any form of civilian existence in a state possible and probably this time beyond reconstruction for a decade as though it’s a new toy or Macdonalds meal.
Of course, the Israeli invasion of Gaza will be advertised by the Americans as another great success in their ‘war on terror’ in the TV commercial they and the Israelis are currently filming to a script that has obviously been on the shelf fo a year or more.
Hamas will have been rendered impotent, its militants killed, its leaders, civilian or military dead, imprisoned or deported. There will be supposed confessions, admissions of complicity with 'sponsoring states' allegations of all kinds of nefarious conduct, a new term for resistance fighters or homeland defenders instead of 'enemy combatants' now international pressure has finally made Guantanamo and its ethos unfashionable.
All to be introduced by some equivalent of Katie Couric wobbling her lower lip, pretending to be close to tears as it is explained to the sceptical purchasing public that all the deaths destruction misery and starvation were actually good for the Palestinians, probably for all Arabs too, and plucky little Israel has yet again smitten the anti-semites and the ungodly and heathen, ensured its survival and struck another blow for American-style democracy in the Middle East.
And the population of Gaza, including those newly forced in to exile by the destruction of their homes, reduced entirely to living on food aid in what could have been a country which made things and grew food and even exported both for the prosperity of its people had either the Ameriicans or Israelis ever been willing to allow it, will be assured by the the Americans that they have been ‘liberated’.
“Those who do not read history are condemned to repeat it.”
What puppet regime do the USA and Israel think they could install? Do they somehow even imagine Abbas returning in glory to Gaza City? Or does the USA have a friendly puppet-in-waiting for some renamed province like Kharzai or Chalabi?
Does the USA, however implausibly, see somewhere in their presentation a new opportunity for Haliburton and all those ‘security consultants’ left over from Iraq? Millions of dollars to be purportedly supplied to a Gaza ‘island’ to merely return to the US economy through a revolving door?
Or perhaps they have in mind the installation of some warlords, of factionalising Palestine so that groups go for each others throats, paid for by the CIA and Mossad with dollars out of suitcases, their macho viciousness made even more tumescent with free Viagara, until Palestine collapses into anarchy and ungovernability like Somalia or Afghanistan?
No doubt the scenario scripts a happy smiling Palestinian family driving into a sunset over Eilat waving a newly minted flag of two blue stripes and a Star of David with a small crescent inside it? To be broadcast on Fox, ABC and CBS, while the rest of the world goggles aghast and then screams with rage at the hypocrisy, absurdity, and above all cynical cruelty of the plan.
But then, this will be a ‘product’ labelled ‘made in Israel with ingredients from the United States of America’ and both the Israeli population and the American will be assumed to buy it as they would an SUV from those other bankrupt businesses Ford and GM. The rest of the world knows, of course, that an Israeli/American product is good for them, like Coca Cola for kids or a Uzi for gangsters.
But this time, that must be a delusion. Those times are past. No amount of millions spent on advertising in the end saves a bad company and a worse product. Or they may for a while, until the fancy product made of greed, exploitation and the complicity of governments, however subtly repackaged and sold by a Madoff or a Leahman Brothers brings three quarters of the world close to collapse.
The trouble is, the advertising agency’s view of the world does not always represent the truth, does not always correctly predict how people will react (or, since we are to use the jargon, ‘consume’) as we have seen with the attempt at taking over Afghanistan and regime change in Iraq. And, as the product goes bad or fails, it often damages or contaminates everything around it; so the shoddily made Afghan package has split open and spilled into Pakistan and India.
Of course, in the product specification for this war (which the manufacturers have in the background brief, but of course won’t make it into the final campaign posters, commercials and newspaper and magazine advertising) that the friends of Israel are so brilliant at disseminating, is the idea that hopefully, Iran, or Syria, angry and incensed at another onslaught on Palestinians and their destruction of a state will attempt to sabotage the product and the campaign perhaps by attempting to blow up the factory with a rocket or two and then these rivals can be taken out of the market and leave it free for the new one.
Even when advertising agencies spend a packet on market research and focus groups, the campaign can simply fail. Even if the product is a good one. If they ignore the market research (as both the Israelis and the USA are ignoring attitudes and opinions, let alone prospective new and yet more fanatical militancy developing around the world) the result can be an utter disaster.
All these years, the Palestinians and their Arab friends (what few there are: Egypt appears to have been almost subverted by the coca-cola dollar aid culture) have failed to 'package' their own 'product' (the same desire for nationhood, stability, prosperity and space in which to live and have their being expressed so loudly by others) effectively. Or, really, even at all.
It is the Israelis who adopted the marketing strategies and the campaign devices, created a whole international advertising agency to promote their cause and propaganda. Fundamentally, however, it is increasingly difficult to see it as a viable product for the late 21st century market. And it is certainly a dangerous one the way it keeps blowing up in innocent (if naive) consumers' faces.
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