Americans are constantly told that they have to defend themselves
against people who “hate them”, but without understanding
why they are hated. Is the cause our secular democracy? Our appetite
for oil? There are lots of democracies in the world that are far
more secular than the United States (Sweden, France ...) and lots
of places that want to buy oil at the best possible price (China)
without arousing any noticeable hatred in the Middle East.
Of course, it is true that, throughout the Third World, Americans
and Europeans are often considered arrogant and are not particularly
liked. But the level of hatred that leads a large number of people
to applaud an event like September 11 is peculiar to the Middle
East. Indeed, the main political significance of September 11 did
not derive from the number of people killed or even the spectacular
achievement of the attackers, but from the fact that the attack
was popular in large parts of the Middle East. That much was understood
by Americans leaders and infuriated them. Such a level of hatred
calls for explanation.
And there can be only one explanation: United States support for
Israel. It is indeed Israel that is the main object of hatred, for
reasons we shall describe, but since the United States uncritically
supports Israel on almost every issue, constantly praises it as
"the only democracy in the Middle East" and provides its
main financial backing, the result is a "transfer" of
hatred.
Why is Israel so hated? The constant stalling of "peace plans"
in favor of more settlements and more war aggravates that hatred,
but the basic cause lies in the very principles on which that state
is build. There are basically two arguments that have justified
establishing the State of Israel in Palestine: one is that God gave
that land to the Jews, and the other is the Holocaust. The first
one is deeply insulting to people who are profoundly religious,
like most Arabs, but of another creed. And, for the second, it amounts
to making people pay for a crime that they did not commit.
Both arguments are deeply racist, with their claim that it is right
for Jews, and only Jews, to set up a state in a land that would
obviously be Arab, like Jordan or Lebanon, if not for the slow Zionist
invasion. This is illustrated by the "law of return":
any Jew, anywhere, having no connection with Palestine whatsoever,
and not suffering from the slightest persecution, can, if he so
wishes, emigrate to Israel and easily become a citizen, while the
inhabitants who fled in 1948, or their children, cannot. Add to
that the fact that a city claimed to be Holy by three religions
has become the "eternal capital of the Jewish people"
(and only them) and one should start to understand the rage that
all this provokes throughout the Arab and Muslim world.
It is precisely this racist aspect that infuriates most Arabs,
even if they do not have any personal connection to Palestine (if
they live, say, in the French banlieues). This situation delegitimizes
the Arab regimes that are impotent in the face of the Zionist enemy
and, after the defeat of the region's two main secular leaders,
Nasser and Saddam Hussein (the latter thanks to the US), leads to
the rise of religious fundamentalism.
Now, people often find racism far more unacceptable than "mere"
economic exploitation or poverty. Consider South Africa: under apartheid,
the living conditions of the Blacks were bad but not necessarily
much worse than in other parts of Africa (or even than in South
Africa now). But the system was intrinsically racist, and that was
felt as an outrage to Blacks everywhere, including in the United
States. This is why the conflict over Palestine goes beyond the
second class status of Israeli Arabs or even the treatment of the
Occupied Territories. Even if a Palestinian state were established
on the latter, and even if full equality were granted to Israeli
Arabs, the wounds of 1948 would not heal quickly. Arab leaders,
even religious ones, can of course sign peace agreements with Israel,
but they are fragile so long as the Arab population considers them
unjust and does not accept them wholeheartedly. Palestine is the
Alsace-Lorraine or the Taiwan of the Arab world and the fact that
it is impossible to take it back does not mean that it can be forgotten
. (I am not arguing here in favour of « wiping Israel off
the map », or in favor of a « one state solution »
but simply underlining what seems to me to be the root and the depth
of the problem. In fact, I am not arguing for any solution partly
because none seems to me to be attainable in the short term, but,
more fundamentally, because I do not think that outsiders to the
Middle East should propose such solutions.)
There is no sign that any of this is understood in Israel by more
than a few individuals; if Arabs hate them, this is just another
instance of the fact that everybody hates Jews and it only proves
that they have to "defend themselves" (i.e. attack others
pre-emptively) by any means necessary. That is bad enough, but why
isn't this understood in the United States either? There are traditionally
two answers to that: one is that the population is manipulated into
supporting Israel by the government, the arms merchants or the oil
industry, because Israel is a strategic U.S. ally; the other answer
is that the United States is manipulated by the Israel lobby. The
idea that Israel is a strategic ally, if by that one means a useful
ally (useful to, say, the oil interests, broadly understood), although
widely accepted, specially in the Left, does not survive a critical
examination. That may have been the case in 1967 or even during
the Cold War period, although one could argue that, even then, the
Arab states were attracted by the Soviet Union only because it might
support them in their struggle against Israel, albeit ineffectively.
But both in 1991 and in 2003, the United States attacked Iraq without
any help from Israel, even begging Israel not to intervene in 1991,
in order for its Arab coalition not to collapse. Or consider the
post-2003 occupation of Iraq, and suppose that the goal of that
occupation is control over oil. In what sense does Israel help in
that respect? Everything it does (the currents attacks on Gaza and
Lebanon for example) further alienates the Arabs, and U.S. support
for Israel makes the control of oil harder, not easier. Even the
Iraqi parliament, Malaki and Sistani, who are the closest to allies
that the United States can find there, condemn Israel's actions.
Finally, just imagine that the United States would make a 180 turn
and suddenly side with the Palestinians, as they did with the Kosovars
against the Serbs — who, by the way, were, like the Israelis,
richer and more "Western" than their Albanian adversaries
. Such a change of policies is by no means impossible : when Indonesia
invaded East Timor in 1975, the US supported the invasion by providing
most of Indonesia's weapons. Yet, 25 years later, the US supported,
or at least did not oppose, East Timor's accession to independence.
What effect would that have? Can anyone doubt that such a change
of policy would facilitate U.S. access to oil fields and help it
gain strategic allies (if any were still needed) throughout the
Muslim world? In the Middle East, the main charge against the United
States is that it is pro-Israel, because it lets itself be "manipulated
by the Jews". Therefore, if Washington switched sides, there
would be no more basis for hostility to U.S. presence, including
its control over oil. Thus the notion of Israel as "strategic
ally" makes no sense.
This leads us to the "Israel lobby" answer, which is
closer to the truth, but not the whole truth. To get a complete
picture, one has to understand why the lobby works as effectively
as it does, and that depends on factors lying outside the actions
of the lobby itself. After all, the militant Zionists constituting
the lobby are a minority among Jews, who themselves form a small
minority of the American population. The Israel lobby does not work
like other lobbies, for example, the arms and the oil industry lobbies
(which is one of the reasons why it is easy to dismiss it as irrelevant,
as long as one does not understand how it really exerts its influence).
Of course, like the latter, the Israel lobby does fund electoral
campaigns and its power derives in part from its ability to target
people in Congress who deviate from its "line". But if
that was all, it could easily be defeated indeed, there are
other sources of electoral funding, the big industrial lobbies for
example, and if the pro-Israel candidates could be shown to be paid
to serve the interests of another State, their opponents could denounce
the people who receive money from the lobby as some sort of agents
of a foreign power. Just imagine a pro-French, pro-Chinese or pro-Japanese
lobby that would try to significantly influence the US Congress.
Certainly, money alone cannot suffice.
What protects the Israel lobby is the fact that anyone who would
denounce an opponent funded by the Lobby as a quasi-agent of a foreign
power would immediately be accused of anti-Semitism. In fact, imagine
that Big Business is unhappy with the current U.S. policies (as
it well may be) and wants to change them--how could they do it?
Any criticism of Lobby influence on U.S. policy would immediately
trigger the anti-Zionism-is-anti-Semitism accusation.
So the strength of the Israel lobby resides in part in this second
line of defense, which itself is linked to its influence on the
media. But even that could easily be defeated — not all the
media are under the lobby's influence, and, more importantly, the
media is not all-powerful: in Venezuela, it is anti-Chavez, but
Chavez regularly wins elections. In France, the media were overwhelmingly
in favour if the "yes" vote to the referendum on the European
Constitution, yet the "no" won. The problem, and that
is why the Israel lobby is so effective, is that it expresses a
world view that is accepted too easily by too many Americans. After
all, nothing could be more ridiculous than accusing someone of anti-Semitism
because he wants or claims to put America's interests above those
of Israel. Yet, the accusation is likely to be effective, but only
because years of ideological brainwashing have predisposed people
to consider U.S. and Israeli interests as identical — although
instead of "interests" one speaks of "values".
Associated with this identification comes a systematically hostile
view of the Arab and Muslim world, which both increases the lobby's
effectiveness and is in part the result of its propaganda. Despite
all the talk about anti-racism and "political correctness",
there is an almost total lack of understanding of the Arab viewpoint
on Palestine, and, in particular, of the racist nature of the problem.
It is this triple layer of control (selective funding, the anti-Semitism
card, or rather canard, and the interiorization) that gives the
lobby its peculiar strength. (And that is also why it is easy to
dismiss its strength by saying, for instance, that, obviously, Jews
don't control America. Sure, but direct control is not the way it
works.)
People who think that it is the arms or the oil industry that are
running the show in Washington as far as foreign policy is concerned,
should at least answer the following question: how does it work?
There is no evidence whatsoever that the oil industry, for example,
pushed for the Iraq war, the threats against Iran or the attack
on Lebanon . (There is a lot of evidence that the Israel lobby pushed
for the Iraq war; see Jeff Blankfort, A War for Israel.)
They are supposed to act secretly, of course, but where is the evidence
that they do? And if they is no evidence, even no indirect evidence,
how does one know? Profits from the war, at least for major corporations,
haven't materialized yet, and there are many indications that the
U.S. economy will suffer a lot from war-related expenses and the
associated deficits. On the other hand, it is enough to open any
mainstream U.S. newspaper or TV and read or hear opinions expressed
by Zionists calling for more war. War needs war propaganda and a
supporting ideology, and the Zionists provide it, while none of
this is offered by Big Business in general or the oil industry in
particular.
One may also think of historical precedents, like the China lobby
(made of post-1949 Chinese exiles and ex-missionaries, supported
by their domestic churches) in the 1950's and 1960's. That lobby
led the United States to maintain the ridiculous claim that a billion
people were represented by a government (Taiwan) that had no control
over them whatsoever. It was also very influential in bringing on
the Vietnam war. Whose interests were they serving? The ones of
the American capitalists? But the latter make huge profits in post-Nixon
recognized China. And the same is true in Vietnam.
In fact both countries, as well as most of Asia, were anti-colonialist
and anti-imperialist, as well as anti-feudal (partly because the
feudal structures did not allow them to resist foreign invasions).
But they were anti-capitalist (in the rhetoric, since capitalism
barely existed there) mostly because their aggressors --the West--were
capitalist. So that the main lesson to be drawn from the tragic
history of the China lobby is that it held, during decades, the
US policies hostage to revanchist feudal and clerical forces that
were alien to mainstream America, and actually harmful to capitalist
America. But they worked to the extent that their ideology —
mixing fear with racist contempt for the "Asian mind"
— was in sync with Western prejudices. Replace the China lobby
by the Israel one and the Asian mind by the Arab one and you get
a fair picture of what is going on right now in the U.S.-Middle
East relation.
What should the Left do? Well, simple: treat Israel as it did South
Africa and attack the Lobby. The reason Israel acts as it does is
that it feels strong and that, in turn, is for two reasons: one
is its "all-powerful army" (currently being tested in
Lebanon, not conclusively yet); the other is the almost complete
control over Washington policy-making, specially the Congress. Peace
in the Middle East can only come when this feeling of Israeli superiority
is shattered, and Americans have a great responsibility is doing
half of the job, the one concerning kneejerk U.S. support.
Now, there are, in principle, two ways to do that: one is to appeal
to American generosity, the other is to appeal to their self-interest.
Both ways should be pursued, but the latter is not enough emphasized
by the Left . (See Michael Neumann, What is to be said?,
for a discussion of the ethical aspects of that choice.) That's
probably because self-interest does not appear to be "noble"
and because the pursuit of the "U.S. national interest"
has all too often been interpreted as overthrowing progressive governments,
buying elections etc. But, if the alternative to self-interest is
a form of religious fanaticism, then self-interest is far preferable:
if the Germans had followed self-interested policies in the 1930's,
even imperialist policies, but rational ones, World War II could
have been avoided. Also, if the United States were to distance itself
from Israel, it would pursue policies opposed to the traditional
ones, and far more humane. The other problem is that a large part
of the Right (from Buchanan to Brzezinski) correctly sees American
interests as being opposed of those of Israel, and the Left (understandably)
does not like to make common cause with such people. But if a cause
is just (and, in this case, urgent) it does not become less just
because unsavory people endorse it (the same argument applies to
genuine anti-Semitic hostility to Israel). The worst thing that
the Left can do is to leave the monopoly of a just cause to the
Right.
The Left cannot expect the American people to change radically
overnight, abandon religious fundamentalism, give up oil addiction
or embrace socialism. But a change of perspective in the Middle
East is possible: the strength of the lobby is also its weakness,
namely the naked king effect-everybody fears it, but the only reason
to fear it is that everybody around us fears it. Left alone, it
is powerless. To change that, one should systematically defend every
politician, every columnist, every teacher, who is targeted by the
lobby for his or her views or statements, irrespective of their
general political outlook (to take an analogy, act as civil libertarians
do with respect to free speech).
When people in the antiwar movement divert attention from Israel
by blaming Big Oil or Big Business for the wars (specially the one
in Lebanon, or the threats against Iran) one should demand that
they provide some evidence for their claims. Challenge all the apologists
or excuse makers for Israel or its lobby within progressive circles.
When politicians and journalists claim that Israel and the United
States have common interests, ask what services exactly has Israel
rendered to the United States recently. Of course one can always
point to some (minor) services; but, then, ask them what a cold-blooded
cost-benefit analysis would reveal and why such an analysis is impossible
to undertake publicly. If they speak of common values (the fallback
position), provide a list of discriminatory Israeli laws for non-Jews.
Rolling back the lobby would necessitate a change of the American
mentality with respect to the people of the Middle East, and to
Islam, like ending the Vietnam war required a change in the way
Asians were looked at. But that alone would have a greatly humanizing
effect on American culture.
It is true that a change in the U.S. policy with respect to the
Israel-Palestine conflict would change nothing about traditional
imperialism — the United States would still support traditional
elites everywhere, and press countries to provide a "favorable
investment climate". But the conflict in the Middle East, involving
Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, has all the aspects of a
religious war-with Islam on one side and Zionism as a secular Western
religion on the other. And wars of religion tend to be the most
brutal and uncontrollable of all wars. What is at stake in the de-Zionization
of the American mind is not only the fate of the unfortunate inhabitants
of Palestine but also unspeakable miseries for the people of that
region and maybe of the rest of the world. The ultimate irony in
all this is that the fate of much of the world depends of the American
people exercizing their right to self-determination, which, of course,
they should.
Jean Bricmont teaches physics in Belgium. He is a member of the
Brussells Tribunal. His new book, Humanitarian Imperialism, will
be published by Monthly Review Press.
He can be reached at : bricmont@fyma.ucl.ac.be
From Counterpunch www.counterpunch.org
Subject Headings
