File spoon-archives/postcolonial.archive/postcolonial_2002/postcolonial.0208, message 37


From: "julian samuel" <jjsamuel-AT-vif.com>
Subject: Pro-Palestinian Activists and the Palestinians
Date: Wed, 21 Aug 2002 11:25:44 -0700


Dear List members:

Thought this might be useful. (Quebec ethnic nationalist taken a holiday?
UPF? Ita fell bate?)

Julian Samuel

http://www.counterpunch.org/neumann0820.html

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-AT-trentu.ca


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