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August 20, 2002
Kathleen Christison
Israeli
Tilt: the NYT
and Palestine
August 19, 2002
Bernard Weiner
Advance
Draft of Bush's 9/11 Anniversary Speech
Gavin Keeney
Auteur-Driven
Vehicles
Kurt Nimmo
Son of
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Peace
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August 14 / 18, 2002
Susan Davis
Played
Out: a Journey to Central City, Colorado
CounterPunch Staff
Our Favorite
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Jeffrey St. Clair
Usonian
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Gilad Atzmon
Sharon and the Iron Wall
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A Phone
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Wendy Brinker
Racism
is Alive and Well in the South Carolina Death House
Hamit Dardagan
The
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Ahmad Faruqui
The Legacy
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Philip Farruggio
Leading
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Anthony Gancarski
Union
Jackass: Richard Perle's UK Charm Offensive
Jeff Halper
Fortress
Israel: the Message of the Bulldozer
Robert Jensen
Our Failures
are Borne by the Palestinians
Gary Leupp
An Open
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Dave Marsh
Sing a
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Rashmi Mayur
To Johannesburg
in Search of Hope
Steve Perry
Another Fine Mess:
Martha Stewart and Paul Wellstone
Anis Shivani
What's
Next...Concentration Camps?
Edward Said
Punishment
by Detail
Jeff Taylor
Paul Wellstone's
Legacy
August 13, 2002
Robert Fisk
At the al--Qaeda
Cemetery
Mokhiber / Weissman
Corporate
Crime Time
Andrew Cockburn
Bono
Betrays Ireland
August 12, 2002
Messier / Dreier
The IDF
in Nablus:
Shooting at Kites;
Bulldozing Schools
Brian J. Foley
No Iraqi
Surprise: Look Now
at the Dangers of War
Fran Shor
Psychic
and Political Numbing
in Preparations for War
August 10/11, 2002
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Buffalo
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US Bombs
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Lawrence McGuire
How Does
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Ralph Nader
The Quest
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Frank Fugate
The Arabs
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Jan Oberg
Visit Iraq
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The Bush
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Death by
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Coin of the Realm
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Einstein's
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August 9, 2002
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Gul Agha:
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The Waning
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War,
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August 8, 2002
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Iraq:
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August
20, 2002
Protect
Me from My Friends
Pro-Palestinian Activists and
the Palestinians
by Michael Neumann
If the situation of the Palestinians seems hopeless,
it is not simply because of what Israel does. It is also because
most pro-Palestinian activists, while complaining unceasingly
about the American-Israeli alliance, spare no effort to maintain
it. They do so because they are wedded to conventional left-wing
assumptions.
How does this show? Confronted with the
fact that one of the most powerful countries in the world--I
refer, of course, to Israel--is crushing the Palestinians, the
left mistakes Israel for a little puppet, and the US must then
get drafted into the role of puppeteer. Since the puppeteer needs
to have some motive for the puppet show, Israel becomes a tool
for advancing American interests. This is a fatal step, because
it pretty well implies that any sane US government *should* support
Israel. Shouldn't any sane government advance its country's interests?
Like all catastrophic strategies, this
one is based on a truth. America's scandalous, extravagant involvement
with Israel should of course be stopped immediately. But it is
still Israel committing the crimes, not the US, and not at the
instigation of the US. America is a sap, a duped accomplice,
not a co-conspirator. The enormous, ignored fact of the Palestinian
story is that America is not, as the left so loves to think,
pursuing some vital interest in its alliance with Israel. On
the contrary, America is acting against its vital interests.
And by America I don't just mean the wonderful, real-as-dirt
Americans of Denzel Washington flicks. I also mean corporate
America and the American government.
Back when there were commies, the US
had a paranoid but at least vaguely plausible reason for allying
itself with Israel. Israel was going to keep Arab commies from
getting out of hand. The US badly wanted a strong military power
in the region, because 'getting out of hand' might include supplying
bases for the Red Army. But the commies are long gone. Everyone
cooperated to wipe them out: true nationalists like Nasser, entrenched
political forces like the Syrian Ba'ath party, reactionaries
like the rulers of the Gulf states, the Americans, Israel, and
the Moslem fundamentalists they cultivated.
That was then, the age of Vietnam and
the Yom Kippur war, a time when nothing was too evil if it fought
communism. The America of that age lives on in the frozen brains
of the left. How many vile regimes did the US back in the 1970s?
Israel was the best of them. There were the South Vietnamese,
the Greek Junta, Pinochet and a host of scum all over Latin America,
in Brazil, in Argentina, in Uruguay, in Paraguay, in Guatemala,
in El Salvador, in Panama, in the Dominican Republic. There were
the South Africans, in their own country and in Angola, Namibia,
Mozambique. There were the mass murderers of Indonesia, and there
was the Shah of Iran. No doubt I've forgotten many others.
But we don't live in 1975 any more. I'm
not sure America sponsors even one regime as bad as its clients
of yore. Sure, the US still does a roaring arms trade with all
sorts of awful governments, and, as ever, makes lopsided economic
agreements with them. But these governments, governments of states
like Indonesia or Kuwait or Argentina, are not American clients,
any more than they are clients of France, or Britain, or any
other states that do business with them. (And most of them aren't
as bad as the clients of the old days.) To someone preoccupied
with condemning US sins, the change seems insignificant. But
to anyone who really wants to influence the US government, it
is not. When one examines the political objectives involved,
there is a big difference between the sort of support America
gives Israel and the sort it gave its client regimes in the 1970s.
In 1975, America backed its despicable
friends because it wanted what they wanted. It wanted the communists,
dissidents and revolutionaries tortured and killed. It wanted
that done at arm's length, and it actively conspired with the
world's worst governments to do so. It no longer conspires with
such people, mostly because it got what it wanted. But American
support for Israel has always been very different.
America does not at all want what Israel
wants, and it never did. America never had the slightest desire
to kill Palestinians, take their land and homes, drive them to
despair. America tolerated these outrages as a mob boss might
tolerated the sadistic, deviant sexual tastes of an underling.
But, also like the mob boss, it did not share these tastes.
But if America doesn't share Israel's
goals, what does it get out of supporting Israel? The left has
become a contortionist in its efforts to explain that. Oil politics,
they say. This explanation assumes too much about the role of
oil in American foreign policy, and would make little sense even
if those assumptions were accepted.
The appeal to oil politics derives largely
from overly serious attention to the US government's expressions
of concern for America's long-term oil supply. Naturally, US
officials will express such concern from time to time. The oil
companies like that, and the concern is genuine enough. But there's
a big difference between having a concern and making it the driving
force of your foreign policy. Witness the supposed oil politics
driving American efforts in Central Asia. Much is made of the
(not overly enthusiastic) involvement of Unocal in Khazakhstan,
and the oil pipeline projects connected with its efforts. (see,
e.g., Ted Rall, "The New Great Game: Oil Politics in Central
Asia", <http://www.bradley.edu/las/soc/soc/classes/soc100/01valt55.
html>.) But Unocal is a second or third tier oil company,
a nine billion dollar enterprize dwarfed by Exxon's 270 billion
dollar stature. Moreover, it is more or less a pariah, currently
standing trial in Los Angeles for human rights abuses. Would
*they*--the great *they* of conspiracy analyses--allow this if
these Unocal folks were really the darlings of a US government
hell-bent on securing the Caspian oil?
Sure, the US government wants some Central
Asian oil, and conducts an oil politics to get it. But this is
hardly an obsession, and why should it be? We live in a world,
for now, in which oil suppliers are falling all over themselves
to sell as much as they can to the highest bidder. The business
press regards the oil weapon as unusable. The US lack of interest
in energy conservation and alternative energy supplies indicates
that the American government is not more far-sighted in its policies
than the business press. This should come as no surprise. The
world's strongest military and economic power knows it can easily
procure itself oil without anyone's help--especially not Israel's.
If America were so concerned about its
oil supplies, why would it ally itself with the one power in
the world that drives its suppliers to distraction? Were it not
for that alliance, the US would be able to apply much more direct
and finely tuned pressure on oil-rich governments. Israel is
(a) best positioned to pressure states which are *not* significant
oil producers--Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt--(b) utterly superfluous
for pressuring the very feeble Gulf states, and (c) politically
unsuitable, as the Gulf War showed, for pressuring militarily
strong producers like Iraq and Iran.
The portrayal of Israel as a America's
stationary aircraft carrier is equally unconvincing in this context.
Again, this made a certain paranoid sense when the enemy was
communism, because the states bordering on Israel were considered
the most likely to go communist. But the US does not need or
want Israel to strike through Jordan and Syria to Gulf oil fields.
This 'solution' would be much more of a problem than simply occupying
the oil fields with American troops. The US today would have
no more difficulty securing or controlling Middle East oil supplies
than the Allies did during World War I, long before Israel existed.
The one thing that might conceivably come in handy--lots of expendable
ground troops--only friendly Arab governments, not Israel, could
provide.
Occasionally one hears other accounts
of America's interest in supporting Israel. It is said that Israel's
persecution of the Palestinians will 'teach the Arabs a lesson'?
What lesson? Are they too stupid to see they're weaker than the
United States? And what are the Arabs to learn not to do? Resist
Israeli occupation? The Arab states have little sympathy and
less common interest with the Palestinians; they do not tremble
because Israel persecutes a people they fear or despise.
Or is American support for Israel somehow
connected with the war on terror? Yes, it certainly is. America's
alliance with Israel stands squarely in the way of better relations
with the Arab governments, the famed 'Arab street', and Pakistan.
It is the main obstacle to a US attack on Iraq. It blocks either
an attack on, or reconciliation with, Iran, the Sudan, or Libya.
America's alliance with Israel does even more damage to its war
on terror than to its oil politics.
Why then does America support Israel?
There is the pro-Israel lobby, I guess, and (a distinct factor)
the support of ordinary American Jews for Israeli policies. More
important may be the enormous prestige of Jews and Jewish culture
in American life. But most important of all is probably a force
never to be underestimated--plain old inertia. America supports
Israel because it once had a reason to do so, or thought it did,
and because it has done so in the past. Intellectuals may feel
cheated by such banal explanations, but offer no viable alternatives.
Whatever the reasons for American support, US interests aren't
among them.
This has large implications. The whole
Palestinian strategy of the left is in urgent need of drastic
change. First, the left's demonization of the US is excessive
and obsessive. America's current support for Israel is a world
away from its carefully contemplated, viciously evil support
for its cold-war client regimes. Today America is the puppet,
not Israel.
America is not using Israel to fight
against communism or for economic advantage. Israel is using
America to fight a race war, and America is too much of a dummy
to understand. It fawns on Israel, mostly because it is befuddled,
and partly because its politicians fear offending Jewish voters.
But America is not the enemy here; it is aiding the enemy. The
left is so fixated on American sinfulness that it treats present
US support for Israel like past US sponsorship of true proxy
regimes like Pinochet's Chile, and all but lets the real culprit
off the hook. American weapons inflict huge harm on the Palestinians,
but it is not America that is inflicting the harm: 'it's the
Israelis, stupid!' Even without American arms, plucky little
Israel would still manage to oppress the Palestinians and intimidate
their reluctant allies.
Though America is not the central villain
of Israel's drama, a change in American policy is still essential
to helping the Palestinians. The left is far more interested
in complaining about that policy than in changing it. Yet the
basis for a real strategy can be found in the innocuous leftist
belief that American policy is determined by America's strategic
and economic interests. If leftists really wanted to restrain
Israel rather than moralize about American complicity, they would
make clear that US policymakers are more stupid than evil, because
Israeli policies run entirely contrary to America's strategic
and economic interests. A genuinely pro-Palestinian strategy
would stress that backing Israel undermines not only to America's
war on terror, but also its oil politics. And a genuinely pro-Palestinian
strategy would not be anti-American for the sheer joy of it.
Instead it would emphasize that American foreign policy, however
reprehensible, has improved since 1975, and that America squanders
the political benefits of this improvement with its robotic support
for Israel. This is not flag-waving or apologetics; it is a matter
of making the appeal most likely to strike a chord with the US
government and public.
This strategy would do more than make
even the most conservative Americans question the wisdom of supporting
Israel. It would also force American Jews to reassess their involvement
with Israel, which up to now has in effect been certified impeccably
pro-American by the left as well as the right. At the very least,
it makes no sense for pro-Palestinian activists to pick up their
marbles and go home when appeals to morality prove ineffective.
Anyone convinced of the immorality of the US government has all
the more reason to appeal to American self-interest.
If one insists on a moral judgement here,
the obvious one would be that the anti-American hysterics of
the left are an inexcusable indulgence of prejudice, for which
the Palestinians are paying a terrible price. According to CNN
polls, as many as 43% of Americans have thought the US was too
pro-Israel. It is not without ingenuity that such a powerful
undercurrent of opposition to American policy has been left untapped.
Michael Neumann
is a professor of philosophy at Trent University in Ontario,
Canada. He can be reached at: mneumann@trentu.ca
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