Re: Edward Said - American Zionism (3) (fwd)

        My comments are interleaved.

On Fri, 10 Nov 2000, Boris Stremlin wrote:

> The conflict in the Middle East does not exist in a vacuum.  Israel exists
> not only because the victors of WWII refused to except refugee Jewish
> populations, but because one of these victors, namely the US, has opted to
> establish and maintain Israel as its strategic outpost in the Middle East
> region.  

        I agree, but it is not apparent to me that it is in the national
interest of the United States to make Israel into a "strategic outpost."
It does so for reasons of sentiment and healthy respect for the domestic
Jewish vote.  On the contrary, both before and after the Cold War, it has
always been in the national interest of the United States to cultivate
moderate and collaborationist elements in the Islamic Middle East, as, for
example, the Shah's Iran or Saudi Arabia.  We have tried to follow such
policies, but our unqualified endorsement of Israel has constantly
militated against their success and instead made us numberless enemies in
an area where we might otherwise have found many happy Quislings eager to
be Coca-Colonized.  Even Saddam Hussein was at least a quasi-Quisling
during the 1980s!

> As has been pointed out on numerous occasions, the occupation of
> Palestinian lands could not continue without continued US military and
> diplomatic support.  Knowledge of that unwavering support is responsible
> for the intransigent attitudes of Israelis who refused to deal squarely
> with the Palestinians.  Israel, in the final analysis, is not a colony of
> Worldwide Jewry, but just as much a Crusader state of the West.
 
        It is both a colony and a Crusader state.

> It is true that Jews who live in and support Israel bear responsibility
> for the just treatment of their Palestinian neighbors.  I have not seen
> any polling of worldwide Jewry that suggests that a majority of it
> supports continued construction of settlements and military occupation.  
> In as far as it does so, it is betraying its spiritual heritage.
> However, a spiritual heritage is not unique to Jews, and in fact those
> who stress it speciality are rightly regarded as Zionists who believe
> their own people are God's special gift to the world and are uniquely
> qualified to act as its moral conscience.  Christians and Muslims also
> have a spiritual heritage which requires them to bear witness to God, keep
> His commandments until the coming of messiah.  In the case of some
> Christians, adherence to a belief in the reestablishment of Israel is a
> necessary precondition to the unfolding of struggle of the Last Days.
> The support of Israel in this belief constitutes a violation of their
> spiritual heritage.   Last time I checked, the majority of the US
> population was not made up of Jews, and the decision-making bodies of the
> US government was not controlled by Worldwide Jewry.  Jews constitute an
> important, yet not overwhelming percentage of the US electorate, and
> Jewish financial strength, while disproportionate to their population, is
> not yet so overwhelming as to be able to dictate policy to the United
> States.  Finally, while no major party speaks out consistently against
> Israeli aggression in the press, there are countless other examples of
> uncritical acceptance of US foreign policy.  Just off the top of my
> head, there is no major party which has criticized the destructive
> American propping up of gangster capitalism in Russia since 1991 (Steven
> Cohen has a great article about the "journalistic malpractice", in which
> essentially the whole of the US media been complicitous, in a recent
> copy of _The Nation_.)  Much the same can be said about US policies in the
> Gulf and the Balkans.  It is no accident that there was a complete absence
> of debate on foreign policy between the major presidential candidates, and
> it is an absence which cannot be attributed to the power of the Israel
> lobby.

        Pro-Israeli sentiment is hardly the sole foundation of U.S.
foreign policy and I never suggested that it was.  It is a major factor in
U.S. Middle East policy, which, as I just said, helps to frustrate our
other goal of befriending and manipulating moderate Islamic regimes.  But
of course the over-all goal of U.S. policy since 1945 has been to build
and sustain U.S. global hegemony as a way of safeguarding the capitalist
world-economy.  The absence of any foreign policy debate in the 2000
elections reflected the absence of any significant difference between the
two major parties on foreign policy.  They also do not differ markedly in
their domestic policies, but they are more successful in masking this.

> In the final analysis, while Jews do bear the ultimate responsibility
> of the just treatment of their neighbors, the ultimate responsibility for
> US foreign policy, as well as American Zionism (what has been in question
> here) rests with Americans, Jews and non-Jews alike.  Complaining that
> fear of being labelled antisemitic for criticizing Israel keeps us from
> criticizing Israel is morally equivalent it seems to me, to Israeli Jews
> claiming that they need to expand settlements and maintain occupation
> because their Arab neighbors have sworn to annihilate them. It does not
> speak well for us to shunt the blame for American Zionism off on Worldwide
> Jewry.

        Zionism has been the most powerful and pervasive political
ideology among Jews over the past fifty years and more.  Nobody forced
them to adopt this caustic copy of European nationalist imperialism,
although in the mid- to late 1940s I can well understand its appeal to
the Jews of Eastern Europe and the Middle East.  But one cannot excuse
Jews from sharing the blame for the consequences of international Zionism.
Nor do I excuse Americans from consistently supporting imperialist leaders
and policies, or the English, or the French, or the Serbs, or the
Albanians, or anybody else.  I am a cosmopolitan socialist, and I abhor
all nationalisms.  At the same time I recognize the right of all
peoples to local self-determination within a wider context of global
governance and law.  Nationalism did help to bring a measure of
self-determination to many new polities in Europe and all over the world
in the 19th and 20th Centuries.  It had a historic role to play, but that
role has now, except in a few remaining corners of the world like
Palestine, been played to the full, and it is time to shift our
highest allegiance from bickering tribes to the commonweal of humanity. 

        Warren Wagar