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| Volume 58, Number 10 |
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John Bellamy Foster |
| March 2007 |
Israel in the U.S. Empire |
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Bashir Abu-Manneh teaches English at Barnard College. This essay is adapted from "After Iraq: Reframing Postcolonial Studies," eds. Priyamvada Gopal & Neil Lazarus, special issue New Formations, 59 (Fall 2006). |
Any reader of Israel Studies’s recent issue on the “Americanization of Israel” would be likely to conclude that the most important aspect of U.S.-Israel relations was cultural and religious exchange.1 U.S. commodification of Israeli consumption is a key focus here, as is the impact of U.S. religious trends on Israeli religious practices. Though politics does feature in the issue, its place is largely restricted to the influence of the United States on the Israeli party political system and to the ideological convergence between Christian fundamentalism and the Likud Party. The informing conception of the issue, then, seems to be the endeavor to pinpoint those aspects of Israel that have been “Americanized” in recent years. Contributors are thus preoccupied with determining how specific U.S. forms and norms have migrated to and been translated into Israeli culture and society. However valuable such an approach might be in tracing interesting connections between the United States and Israel, it is very poorly equipped to tackle a major dimension of U.S.-Israeli relations: U.S. state support for Israeli colonialism. The questions never raised include the following: What has U.S. support for Israel actually meant for the Israeli state? Which state capacities have been enhanced and which were curtailed as a result of this support (importantly, force or peace)? And what impact has this had on Israeli society and its economy at large? To answer such questions would involve specifying the nature of U.S. involvement in Israel-Palestine, spelling out the kinds of policies and objectives the U.S. state has allowed the Israeli state to pursue. It would, in fact, involve raising the specter of Israel as a colonial and occupying power, and this the various contributors to Israel Studies seem unwilling to do. Colonialism and occupation are far from mainstream concerns in the Israeli academy. This may sound strange since both practices have defined the history of Israel since 1967 if not before. Yet it is not so strange if one considers that in this respect the Israeli academy merely reflects the attitudes of wider Israeli society: academic evasion mirrors popular denial and indifference. One group of academics that has managed to break away from this stifling national consensus has been dubbed post-Zionist. Though by no means a unified or politically homogeneous trend, post-Zionism has come to characterize a certain critical engagement with Israeli history and society that has led to a re-examination of Israel’s “founding myths” and ideology. Broadly speaking, it has been defined as follows: “In a general sense, post-Zionism is a term applied to a current set of critical positions that problematize Zionist discourse, and the historical narratives and social and cultural representations that it produced.”2 Inherited Zionist versions of Israeli history and society have thus been debunked. In the field of history, their main contribution has been analyzing the “causes, character, and course of the Arab-Israeli conflict,” where Zionist historiography has been challenged and proven fallacious.3 Based on research conducted in newly opened Israeli archives, this revisionist history has clearly documented how, for example, Palestinians had actually been expelled in 1948, as they have always maintained (and were not asked to leave by Arab invading armies, as Israeli propaganda has it);4 Arab armies never intended to “liberate” Palestine, and Jordan colluded with the Zionists to divide it; Israel consistently shunned peace and settlement of the “refugee problem” at every opportunity in the early years; and, finally, that Israel has always been the powerful side in the conflict and has been the party responsible for denying Palestinian rights and national restitution.5 The picture that emerges here entirely reverses the conventional orthodoxy about victims and victimizers: Israel is seen as an ongoing perpetrator of a massive injustice against the Palestinians.6 Edward Said has summed up the collective contribution of this revisionism in the following terms: “It is certainly true that the great political importance today of the new Israeli historians is that they have confirmed what generations of Palestinians, historians or otherwise, have been saying about what happened to us as a people at the hands of Israel.”7 And this judgment also applies to Israel’s new critical sociologists. In the field of sociology, Jewish-Israeli history and society has for the first time been examined without the blinkers of Jewish particularism and Israeli exceptionalism.8 A crucial development here has been the analysis of Israel as a colonial-settler state and society, both in foundation and in continuing practice. Dubbed the “colonization model,” this literature “depicts Israel as a settler-colonial society driven by the needs of territorial acquisition and pressures of the labor market, and it regards the Israeli-Arab conflict as the most crucial determinant in the shaping of Israeli society.”9 Spearheaded by Baruch Kimmerling and Gershon Shafir, this research has been deeply preoccupied with both charting the specific features of Jewish colonization of Palestine and comparing it to other settler-colonies like America and South Africa.10 Jewish colonization should thus be understood as “a late instance of European overseas expansion.”11 Its unique features are the following: Jewish conquest of land and labor; pioneering and settlement; historical-biblical rights as justification; and the construction of what Avishai Ehrlich calls a “permanent war society.”12 Shafir, for example, has shown how the failure of capitalist settlement in Palestine gave impetus to the ideology and practice of Labor Zionism, in which national colonization was spearheaded by Jewish labor and supported by Jewish capital under the leadership of colonizing bureaucratic elites. The nation in Zionism thus emerges from this research as primary and determining. National primacy stifles class conflict, silences dissent and internal democracy, and sidelines social solidarity and egalitarianism, while Zionists conquer and dispossess Palestine.13 Israel is therefore seen as a colonial-nationalist state: colonialism is constitutive to state-formation and nation-building, and continues to determine the allocation of power, rights, and privileges in Israel to this day.14 For the first time in Israeli history, then, colonialism has become a serious topic of academic research and examination. Israeli economy, history, politics, and society can now be analyzed and studied using the colonization paradigm. What is important to note here, however, is that the academy was not the trailblazer on this front. Such analysis existed outside of the academy since at least the early 1960s in Israel.15 As Uri Ram has noted: “The agenda of the Matzpen (The Israeli Socialist Organization) group exemplifies the emergence of an explicit colonization perspective in Israeli society.”16 Founded in 1962, Matzpen (“Compass,” in Hebrew) was an anti-Stalinist, anti-Zionist splinter from the Israeli Communist Party which was particularly close to radical Palestinian activists and communists inside Israel.17 Collectively, it launched the “Israel as colonial-settler state” analysis, and continued to develop it in its magazine Khamsin: Journal of Revolutionary Socialists of the Middle East published from London, where many of its members ended up as a result of state persecution and repression.18 A specimen of their most important contributions can be gleaned in “The Class Nature of Israeli Society,” an essay they published in New Left Review in 1971. Here exactly the same emphases of the critical sociologists of the 1980s are clearly evident: labor colonization, class collaborationism in Zionism, and bureaucratic control: Israeli society is not merely a society of immigrants; it is one of settlers. This society, including its working class, was shaped through a process of colonization....The permanent conflict between settlers’ society and the indigenous, displaced Palestinian Arabs has never stopped and it has shaped the very structure of Israeli sociology, politics, and economics. In Israel the dominant ideology was never a capitalist one; it was a blend of bourgeois elements combined with dominant themes and ideas typical of the Zionist Labor movement, ideas derived from the socialist movement in Eastern Europe but transformed to express the aims of political Zionism.19 There is clearly much common ground between 1980s sociologists and 1960s Matzpen, and this is an important recognition of Matzpen’s critical rigor. There is also, however, one crucial divergence between them: their analysis of Western influence in the region after the establishment of Israel in 1948. For Matzpen, it takes the form of imperialism and is constitutive to the making of Israel and to shaping its role in the region. Israel’s policy towards Arabs and Palestinians cannot be understood in its entirety without considering the role and interests of Western powers, Matzpen contends: it is clear that Israel’s foreign and military policies cannot be deduced from the dynamics of the internal social conflicts alone. The entire Israeli economy is founded on the special political and military role which Zionism, and the settlers’ society, fulfill in the Middle East as a whole. If Israel is viewed in isolation from the rest of the Middle East there is no explanation for the fact that 70 per cent of the capital inflow is not intended for economic gain and is not subject to considerations of profitability.20 Imperialist subsidy, then, but for a reason: Israel’s role as watchdog of U.S. interests in the region after 1967: “Israel is a unique case in the Middle East; it is financed by imperialism without being economically exploited by it. This has always been the case in the past: imperialism used Israel for its political purposes and paid for this by economic support.”21 There is no reason at all to conclude from this analysis that everything Israel does is caused by external pressure or foreign interest in order to be able to appreciate the significant connection that Matzpen makes between imperialism and Israeli settler-colonialism. This is in fact what is novel about their argument: it combines those specific exogenous and endogenous factors in the analysis of Israeli state objectives and social dynamics. Israel is thus seen as a Zionist-colonial project that is constitutively aligned with Western interests in the region: the state structure and colonizing project are sustained and consolidated by Western powers while Western objectives are fulfilled and realized. Such a consistent geopolitical configuration has provided Israel with both opportunities (to avoid reversing colonial expansion) and constraints (being ready and willing to protect vital Western interests in the region): the wars of 1956 and 1967 constitute important markers in this pattern (as I argue below). In the shift from the 1960s to the 1980s, however, the “Western imperialism” part of the “colonization model” is dropped and forgotten. As “Israel as colonial-settler state” develops in the academy, Israel’s subsidy and support by U.S. imperialism loses its constitutive value in the analysis of the Israeli polity. In fact, a positive assessment of the U.S. role in the region is introduced in its place. For post-Zionists, the United States can do no wrong; it is in fact a model to emulate and a country that Israel should aspire to be. While being critical of Israel’s foundation and continuing practice, post-Zionists have been exceptionally uncritical of the United States. Tom Segev’s Elvis in Jerusalem: Post-Zionism and the Americanization of Israel is an excellent example in this regard. Segev, an independent historian who played a central role in shattering Israel’s “founding myth” and documenting its abuse of the Holocaust,22 has been completely blind to the question that U.S.-Israel relations may have had serious negative effects on Israel or have led to the consolidation of state-sponsored colonialism in the Occupied Territories. There is a strong correlation in his work between Americanization, erosion of old forms of Zionist collectivist values, and the freeing up of the individual from constricting structures. Israel, he argues, is becoming more like the United States in political, social, and cultural norms. Israel’s media has been Americanized, as has its protest movements (which he compares to American protest movements of the 1960s, no less), its multiculturalist pluralism, its new judicial civil rights activism, and its political culture. One particularly crucial connection between the United States and Israel that post-Zionists like Segev keep on repeating seems central to their worldview: the United States is good for Israel because it pushes Israel to compromise, accommodate to the region, and make peace. Segev puts it thus: This American [peace] spirit, which produced the Camp David agreements between Israel and Egypt, would later lead people to feel they had had enough of the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip [which miraculously continues]. It also produced Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 [not Hezbollah resistance]. The peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan and the agreements between Israel and the Palestinians were all signed under the sponsorship of the United States and due to intense personal involvement of the sitting president [not as a result of the October/Yom Kippur War of 1973, i.e., Arab readiness to use force]. All these agreements were made possible, to a large extent, because of the willingness of the American people to finance them. They also reflect Israel’s dependence on the U.S., and the depth of American penetration of all areas of Israeli life.23 The portrait Segev draws here is idealist in the extreme: after the 1960s the United States developed a peace culture, which it has been busy spreading in the Middle East ever since: no strategic interests, no geopolitical considerations or wars are relevant. In Segev’s world, such material factors seem to have no role to play in the U.S. presence in the Middle East. For post-Zionists, then, the association between the United States and peace is strong and pervasive. Peace with Egypt comes to emblematize U.S. intervention in the region, and breeds a certain “political illusion” in Israel (as well as for the Palestinians, as I argue below) that the United States is as interested in settling the Arab-Israeli conflict as it was in exchanging the return of Sinai to Egypt for Egyptian peace with Israel. What is never appreciated here is that Camp David (forcing Israel to reverse its occupation of Sinai, i.e., to decolonize Sinai) is an exception not the rule, and has come about mainly because of Egypt’s use of massive force in the 1973 war. The post-Zionists thus neglect the unique features of the Egyptian-Israeli peace settlement. They also, significantly, fail to recognize how unjust and totally rejectionist of Palestinian rights it was. Writing immediately after Camp David, Fayez Sayegh put it exceptionally well: “The Camp David Framework thus bestows American-Egyptian ‘legitimacy’ upon the continued Israeli occupation of the Palestinian areas in question for years to come.” It allows Israel to maintain and expand settlements in the Occupied Territories, and it leaves the Palestinians with no right of self-determination or sovereignty: “A fraction of the Palestinian people (under one-third of the whole) may attain a fraction of its rights (not including its inalienable right to self-determination and statehood) in a fraction of its homeland (less than one-fifth of the area of the whole).”24 No peace here, only more suffering, dispersal, and occupation. With the signing of the Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1993, the same correlation between the United States and peace emerges again among post-Zionists, even though the actors, powers, and circumstances are totally different here. Gershon Shafir and Yoav Peled see Oslo as a time of lasting American peace and decolonization. This structures their reading of the 1990s in Israel: economic liberalization, they argue, is inseparable from political liberalization and the ending of the occupation (a word never even mentioned in the Oslo Accords). Uncritically endorsing Bush Senior’s vision of the New World Order as a time of peace and prosperity for all, Shafir and Peled contend that: “Both globalization and decolonization may, then, be viewed as sharing the goal of replacing political mechanisms and forces, identified with the nation and the nation-state, with financial and commercial ties which, on their part, are global forces.”25 The frontier, exclusionary society that Zionism has built is thus on the decline, being slowly replaced by a liberalized nation, both economically and politically. And the Israeli business community plays a leading role in this new “neoliberal peace-and-privatization bloc”: “The liberal economic values of the Israeli business community are naturally more consonant with a liberal conception of citizenship than with the ethno-republican conception of pioneering civic virtue. Thus, these business leaders have been promoting liberal reforms not only in the economy, but also in civil rights, the electoral system, health care, education, mass communications, and other areas of social life.”26 And this puts Israeli business in the position of contributing to “emancipating the non-citizen Palestinians residents of the Occupied Territories.”27 The symbol of this triple process of economic privatization, political liberalization, and peace has been captured by Uri Ram: “A pamphlet of the Peace Now movement from the Oslo Accord period exposes explicitly the link between peace and prosperity. ‘From the seed of peace your economic growth will flourish,’ declares the pamphlet. The pamphlet is decorated with a figure of a flower cut from an American dollar bill. The flower symbolizes locality and life, the dollar globalization and wealth.”28 The “dollar flower” accurately captures the post-Zionist position, and it comes to obscure the fact that Oslo was neither about decolonization nor about the ending of conflict, Palestinian sovereignty, or halting the settlement drive. Meron Benvenisiti, an ex-Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem and contributor to Haaretz, recognized this from the beginning. Rather than reading Oslo from a post-national, globalization perspective, he stated unequivocally on reviewing the accords that: “one can hardly not recognize that Israeli victory was absolute and Palestinians defeat abject.”29 No dilution of Israeli nationalism here: a total victory versus a total capitulation. One nationalism is up, the other down. The only political sociologist to contest this post-Zionist association between the United States and peace, economic stability, and political liberalizations, is Avishai Ehrlich. Ehrlich has updated and developed the Matzpen connection between U.S. imperialism and Israeli colonialism and has argued that post-Zionism is “a local version of U.S. ideological globalization.”30 He strongly contradicts all the basic premises of this approach: end of conflict, peace of the business class, more democracy and secularism and less Judeocentrism, and the diminishing role of the nation-state. Ehrlich reads a crude reductionism and economism in the post-Zionist account of the 1990s. There is no peace, stability, or liberality under U.S. hegemony, he contends. The conflict will indeed intensify, and this everybody comes to recognize by the time of the outbreak of the al-Aqsa Intifada, which comes to mark the end of post-Zionism.31 If Segev blames this on “Palestinian terror,”32 Shafir and Peled are here much more cautious and recognize that it is Israeli colonialism which is to blame: “A clear indication that the colonial drive has not spent itself yet is the doubling of the Israeli settler population in the O[ccupied] T[erritories] since 1993. This was one of the main reasons for the resumption, in September 2000, of the intifada that the Oslo Accords were meant to end.”33 Ehrlich’s important reading thus holds: under U.S.-sponsored peace Zionism-as-colonialism continues and becomes entrenched, ending both the reigns of Labor and Revisionist Zionisms and transforming Zionism into a political religion: “Both [versions] have been replaced by religion as the source of political legitimation for the state of Israel and for its continued control and colonization of the whole of Palestine...political religion is the use of religion to explain the cohesion and uniqueness of the ethos, its history and ethos; it is the use of religion as an argument for the claim to territory and justification of political measures to defend the national project.”34 The hopes of the post-Zionists for a more liberal, less colonialist Israel are thus dashed. They turn out to be based on an illusory analysis of both the U.S. role in the region and its real impact on Israel. It is clear, then, that the categories of U.S. peace and decolonization have to be conceptually separated and the association between globalization and political liberalization broken. U.S. hegemony and market fundamentalism are in fact much more likely to breed religious fundamentalism than liberal values. My aim in the following is to show why this set of developments is neither unexpected nor surprising. Since 1967, U.S. imperialism and Israeli colonialism have, I argue, worked in tandem in order to produce both Israeli and U.S. nationalist outcomes. This is the only reasonable conclusion one can draw from a closer look at U.S. history in the region, which I consider below. By analyzing the roots and causes of U.S. support for Israel, its dynamic, limitations, and major consequences, I aim to show how Washington’s interests in the Middle East have become consistent with supporting the Jewish state and defending its colonialist objectives. My argument proceeds as follows: I first determine what those U.S. vital interests in the region have historically been, and how they have evolved over time. I then go on to utilize this structure of ongoing U.S. imperial interests in order to explain the substance of U.S. strategy during and after the Cold War, including our contemporary moment, and show how crucial Israel has been in the realization of the U.S. Empire in the Arab world. Before concluding with a brief description of the contemporary ramifications of U.S. empire in Israel-Palestine specifically, I trace the major impact that Israeli dependency on Washingon’s support has had on Israeli ideology and society. This, I hope, will clearly show why I believe it is imperative to extend the critical analytic engagement accorded to Israel by the academic practitioners of the “colonization model” to U.S.-Israel relations. Post-Zionism has successfully managed to integrate the Arab-Israeli conflict as a constitutive factor in the analysis of Israeli state and society, and this has been its greatest achievement. It is time to extend this theoretical framework to include relations between “actually existing U.S. imperialism” and “actually existing Israeli colonialism” in the period after 1967. U.S. imperialism should, then, come to be seen as an intrinsic factor in the shaping and development of both the Arab-Israeli conflict and the structure of the Israeli polity. Relevant here is a rich and growing tradition of analysis and radical critique exemplified in Israel by Matzpen and in the West by Said, Rodinson, and Chomsky.35 Utilizing this ”imperialism-colonialism” paradigm will not only make a more accurate approximation of U.S.-Israel relations and of U.S. interests in the Arab world. It will also actively contribute to opening up a public space for critical reflection and debate on the United States in Israel, a country that seems to be the last bastion of uncritical idealism about and identification with U.S. global power. As Segev puts it: “The full story of the Americanization of Israel has yet to be told, even though it is central to the country’s history.”36 I hope the following aids this process. Notes
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