The latter could be seen as a minor down payment of blood money by Washington after decades of backing Israeli occupation and military policy, and especially Israel’s Gaza war over the last year. Not by Abrams, though; he was, well, outraged: “Perhaps it is too much, in the rough and tumble of international politics, to ask for or expect gratitude. But it is more than a little surprising to see the leader of the Palestinians say ‘America is the plague, and the plague is America’.”
How could any serious person be surprised at Palestinian criticism of Washington’s hostile policies?
There are plenty of analysts like Abrams, prepared to defend treating Palestinians as something less than human. (Actually, a lot less than human.) Yet the only rational response by those who suffer the consequences—living in territories that amount to war zones, open-air prisons, and militarized apartheid states—is anger against their oppressors and its main foreign backer. Washington’s willingness to provide buckets of cash to slightly ease people’s suffering isn’t going to change their view of Israel or America.
Nor is this just a Palestinian issue. Imagine you are a Yemeni, who suffered from years of attacks by Saudis and Emiratis dropping U.S.-supplied munitions from U.S.-supplied aircraft. Or you are a Bahraini democracy advocate imprisoned by the dictatorial Sunni monarchy ostentatiously backed by Saudi troops and implicitly supported by Washington.
You might be an Iraqi—a Sunni whose relatives were murdered by Shiite militiamen, a Shiite bombed by al-Qaeda in Iraq, an Assyrian Christian driven abroad by jihadists, or a Yazidi turned into a sex slave by ISIS—after the Dubya administration went to war on a lie and blew up your country. Or a rural Afghan Muslim whose relatives were killed by forces of a local warlord or distant national government backed by the American military. Or an Egyptian, whether Muslim Brotherhood member or democracy activist, imprisoned by the U.S.-subsidized al-Sisi government. Or a Libyan whose family died in the low-grade regime change war fomented by the U.S. and European NATO members in the name of humanitarianism.
Go back a few more years. Perhaps you are a Vietnamese who lost his or her family to bombing, battle, or other causes during America’s lengthy intervention. Or an Iranian tortured by SAVAK agents under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, empowered by a U.S.-backed coup. Or a Chilean imprisoned after Augusto Pinochet’s putsch, welcomed by Washington. Or a Bengali killed by the Pakistani military when the American government “tilted” toward Islamabad during its 1971 war with India. Or a regime critic who languished in prison under the U.S.-friendly Somoza dictatorship. Or—the list goes on and on.
Of course, one can argue that Washington’s policy was justified in every case. Sometimes hard decisions must be made. The Second World War was perhaps the most dramatic example of choosing an evil, the Soviet Union, over a greater evil, Nazi Germany. Washington feared hostile domination of Eurasia. Adolf Hitler was more aggressive and unhinged than Joseph Stalin, pursuing a horrific policy of Jewish genocide. Although Stalin’s murder toll was prodigious, Hitler was far more dangerous to people in other nations.
But rarely is the case for evil so clear. In fact, there often is no need to choose between evils. Doing so is more likely to harm Americans than standing aloof, dealing with awful regimes when necessary without officially backing or implicitly endorsing them. Terrorism demonstrates that blowback is common, perhaps inevitable, as victims of U.S. foreign policy strike civilians out of weakness in retaliation for American military and political actions against entire nations and peoples out of strength.
Why, then, shouldn’t those victimized by America view it as a plague? It doesn’t matter how policymakers view themselves or what they intend to achieve. Or that most Americans are blissfully unaware of what Washington does in their name and the sometimes devastating impact of its actions on others. Intentions don’t matter to those impoverished, imprisoned, or killed. Results do. And those results can be terrible. As the Palestinians learned, again and again.