There is a well-known movie about a town in the Old West that is plagued by a band of ruthless outlaws. So, the townspeople decide to fight back, and end up with some hired guns willing to fight the outlaw gang. Seven brave men fight the outlaws, but at tremendous cost to themselves. At the end of the movie, several of the gunfighters are dead, but the townspeople are free of the outlaws and can continue their rural peasant ways.
The story captures the conservative American value of rugged individualism, and then puts this ethic into the service of a noble and heroic battle for the little guy, a somewhat more liberal value that supposedly justifies American intervention all over the world on behalf of “democracy” and other assorted “Western” ideals.
Photo: Petroglyph National Monument, Albuquerque, New Mexico, by Author
This is just fine and dandy as fiction, but when people start trying to apply this model to the real world, especially a part of the real world as entangled and knotty as the Middle East, the model turns into a recipe for calamity very quickly.
The “hired guns” in the modern case are the Americans who have ridden off into the sunset of Gaza on the backs of—not horses this time, but—Israeli tanks. So far, they are just rugged individuals doing this supposedly on their own hook, but now a bill in Congress would pay these hired guns from the taxes paid by you and me. In essence, these rugged individual Americans—or maybe just religious fanatic Americans?— would be mercenaries hired to genocide Palestinians. Americans already serving in the regular armed services of the United States who reportedly have been deployed to Gaza, but we aren’t supposed to know about them, either.
This is one aspect of the larger problem. While part of the international community, the “Global South,” is outraged by Israel’s genocide of Palestinians and has brought suit in the International Court of Justice in an effort to bring international law to bear on The Zionist state and its enablers in the West, one particular group of countries may yet create more angst among American policymakers, and that is the bloc of Muslim and Arab nations (the two are not identical), those both in the immediate vacinity of Gaza and those far away.
How are the peoples of Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon as well as Saudia Arabia and other Arab states going to react when it becomes known that Americans are genociding Gazans and are being paid to do so by the American government? The rulers of some of those countries are already in trouble with their restive subjects over their dalliance with Israel; what is going to happen to them when their peoples see Americans murdering Palestinian women and children on Instagram or TikTok? Dictator Al-Sisi in Egypt may not care about the people in Gaza, but he can no longer afford to let the genocide on his doorstep continue to provoke the anger of his people, even if no Gazans are forced to escape through the Rafa crossing in southern Gaza and into Egypt’s Sinai, as Israel seems bent on doing. And it is not just Al-Sisi who has a problem with his own people: Netanyahu and his coterie of fanatical, psychotic apparatchiks don’t seem to care that the King of Jordan also has had to engage in a delicate balancing act for many years: people in Jordan have taken to the streets in huge numbers in recent weeks to protest the genocide of their literal brothers and cousins in Gaza. Israelis ought to care, though, that the Saudis also can no longer play ball with them, at least in public.
Getting back to our analogy, the “townspeople” of Gaza emphatically did not invite Americans to come and do any shooting for them. On the contrary, far from earning the gratitude of any townspeople they have defended (except maybe a few Israeli townsfolk, but we’re not talking about them), the newly hired guns may well end up in the prisoners’ dock if the ICC continues to indict criminals of this war, the fear of which is clearly demonstrated by the hysterical reaction emanating from Washington in the form of a threat to invade The Hague (which BTW is in a fellow NATO country, the Netherlands) if it doesn’t stop it’s “ridiculous” (Netanyahu’s word) flirtation with law and decency. It’s almost as if “Hague Invasion” law was passed with this scenario—a threat to Israel—in mind
In the movie, there isn’t anything in the agreement the Magnificent Seven make with the townspeople about using white phosphorus or starvation against the Mexican bandits, and nobody uses anybody as human shields, and if this sentence seems bizarre to you, that’s because the whole notion of Americans fighting on the side of “little Israel,” the “only democracy in the Middle East” and being paid with our tax dollars for it is just that: bizarre.
Because freedom isn’t achieved by flattening hospitals and starving thousands of civilians to death. There is nothing courageous or manly about dropping bombs on a country with no army, navy or air force and so, I have to ask, “Will the American taxpayer also have to foot the bill for diapers for these American ‘soldiers,’ too?”
Sources
Wikipedia. “The Magnificent Seven. (n.d.) The Hollywood film, starring Yul Brynner, Charles Bronson and Steve McQueen, among others, is actually based on an Akio Kurosawa classic, The Seven Samurai, made in the early fifties. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magnificent_Seven
James Ray. “New bill seeks to extend U.S. military benefits to Americans serving in the Israeli army.” (2024) https://mondoweiss.net/2024/05/new-bill-seeks-to-extend-u-s-military-benefits-to-Americans-serving-in-the-idf
Wikipedia. “American Service-Members Protection Act of 2002. (Informally known as the “Hague Invasion Act.”) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Protection_Act#:~:text=This%20authorization%20led%20to%20the,or%20rescue%20them%20from%20custody.