Volume 58, Number 10


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March 2007

Israel in the U.S. Empire
by Bashir Abu-Manneh

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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).

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U.S. Imperialism and Israeli Settler Colonialism

The initial point of analysis of U.S. involvement in the region has to be oil. Nobody has made this point better and for longer than Noam Chomsky: “It has been a basic principle of international affairs since World War II that the energy reserves of the Middle East constitute an essential element in the U.S.-dominated global system. American policy towards affairs of the region cannot be understood apart from this fundamental principle.”37 And, more recently: “In 1945, State Department officials described Saudi Arabian energy resources as ‘a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history’; the Gulf region generally was considered ‘probably the richest economic prize in the field of foreign investment.’ Eisenhower later described it as the ‘most strategically important area of the world.’”38 Gilbert Achcar has been equally forceful in making this claim, and in arguing for the decisive role that the Open Door policy over oil plays in U.S. imperial grand strategy: “George W. Bush’s administration, like his father’s administration that waged the first U.S. war against Iraq, is as tightly linked to the oil industry as any administration in history. At the risk of annoying those who react to any explanation of U.S. foreign policy in terms of economic interests, and oil interests in particular, with cries of ‘reductionism,’ the oil lobby has traditionally played a key role in formulating U.S. foreign policy, at the very least since the Second World War.”39 The Cold War and post-Cold War confrontation with enemies (the Soviet Union, Arab independence and fundamentalist movements, Iraq after 1991, and Bin Laden), and U.S. relations with allies (Europe, Japan, and Israel), cannot be understood outside of this fact: control of oil is a decisive instrument of global policy.

“Regional stability” thus means a Middle East amenable to U.S. primacy. During the Cold War, Arab regimes had to be kept away from the Soviet Union (to prevent it from gaining a strategic presence in the region) and their independent political and economic initiatives had to be stifled, if not destroyed. “Moderate” Arabs are subordinate Arabs; “extremists” are independent ones who go against U.S. interests. Nasser became an extremist in the eyes of Washington: after 1956 he became an international symbol of Third World independence and Pan-Arabism. His Arab national project had therefore to be rolled back because it threatened U.S. dominance in the region. Mired in Vietnam, the United States wasn’t able to do this itself: Israel was brought in from the cold to perform this function. After having been forced by Eisenhower to return Gaza and Sinai in 1956, Israel was given the green light to attack; but this time to serve U.S. not British and French interests. As former U.S. ambassador to Israel Samuel W. Lewis has argued, the U.S. relationship with Israel changed from being “quite cool and distant,” as a result of “an acute sensitivity to America’s strategic interests, clearly identified with Saudi Arabia and its oil reserves,” to a strategic alliance in the period after 1967.40 Cheryl A. Rubenberg has also emphasized this change in policy, and has described it in the following terms: “The most important outcome of the June War was that for the majority in the policymaking elite, Israel’s spectacular military performance validated the thesis that Israel could function as a strategic-asset to the United States in the Middle East....The belief about Israel’s strategic utility was expressed in U.S. policy through the provision of virtually unlimited quantities of economic assistance and military equipment, a de facto alliance between Washington and Israel, and in American support for virtually every Israeli foreign policy objective.”41 Israel thus became a tool of regional stability for the United States: “In the context of the Nixon Doctrine, Israel assumed the role of preserving a regional balance of power favorable to American interests. This meant, above all, curbing Arab radicalism and checking Soviet expansionism in the Middle East. Israel’s local interest in keeping the Arabs in their place neatly converged with the Nixon administration’s interest in expelling the Soviets from the Middle East.”42

Nasser and Egyptian Pan-Arab nationalism were not the only victims of the U.S.-Israel convergence of interests. The period when this alliance was cemented was also the period of the rise of Palestinian nationalism. The battle of al-Karamah in which both Palestinian and Jordanian troops defeated an Israeli offensive in 1968 propelled the Palestinians onto the historical stage. Palestinians became the inheritors of radical nationalism: al-Karamah (dignity, in Arabic) turned the PLO into a mass organization. Calling for the liberation of Palestine from Zionist colonialism (backed by U.S. imperialism), the PLO, like Nasser, had to be crushed as well. This came to be called “Black September.” Here again the U.S.-Israel alliance proved essential. Nixon and Kissinger interpreted the Jordanian civil war with the Palestinian guerrillas as a global superpower confrontation not just a local or regional conflict and put the U.S. fleet in the Mediterranean on high alert.43 Israel backed the Jordanian monarchy against the PLO and mobilized its army to protect it from a Syrian tank invasion (which failed as a result). The Iraqi contingent in eastern Jordan failed to come to the assistance of the Palestinians. Nasser was equally constrained: having accepted the Rogers Plan, which called for the return of the territories occupied by Israel in 1967, he was ready to sacrifice his anti-imperialist stance for the return of Egyptian lands. The Saudis also stood with King Hussein. The Russians themselves, in actual fact, had no desire to destabilize the state system in the region. Even Arafat himself preferred a policy of non-interference with the Arab regimes and wanted to focus on liberating Palestine instead. Unlike the more radical Popular and Democratic Fronts, Fatah has always believed that Palestine will deliver Arab unity, not Arab unity Palestine: i.e., Palestinians should not actively seek to become social revolutionaries in the Arab world.

Fatah’s position became difficult to sustain when the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine was hijacking planes and exploding them in Jordanian airports: Jordanian sovereignty was clearly challenged. Palestinians had, therefore, to pay the price of their radicalism: all forces converged against them. At its moment of inception, then, the Palestinian revolution was defeated by its Arab enemies and their imperialist allies. Achcar describes it in the following terms:

The year 1970 in any case saw Arab nationalism finished off politically, so that the 1967 attack attained its political objectives with a three-year lag. This required crushing the other most advanced, most spectacular spearhead of the radicalization of the popular movement, which had temporarily counter-balanced the military victory of the U.S.-Israel alliance. In September 1970 (“Black September”) the Jordanian army drowned in blood the alternative, quasi-state power that the bloc of Palestinian armed organizations had built....Thus 1970 was the year of the final rout of radical Arab nationalism.44

1970 sounded the death knell of revolutionary transformation in the Middle East. Jean Genet, who was then with the guerrillas in Jordan, clearly understood what he was witnessing: “I’d already been told the Palestinian Revolution might be summed up in the apocryphal phrase, ‘to have been dangerous for a thousandth of a second.’”45

The events of 1970 in Jordan should be regarded as the most illuminating in the history of the post-1967 period. The interests of global and local actors become clearly visible, and the alliance between U.S. imperialism, Israel, and Arab reaction against revolutionary nationalism in the region was dramatically played out here. The Arab elites, it transpires, feared Arab radicalism much more than they feared the existence of Israel: the seeming contradiction between U.S. oil interests and supporting Israel turned out to be no contradiction at all. Both were objectively (if not subjectively) allied and worked towards the same outcome: anti-Arab independence and democracy, and pro-Arab authoritarianism and dependence on the United States. The Arab elite understood this fundamental lesson well. The Egyptian infitah policy (economic and political openness) and shift towards the West was a clear indication of that. It took the 1973 war to convince the United States of Sadat’s clear objectives: peace in return for Egyptian territory, while abandoning Palestinian and Arab rights and becoming a U.S. client regime.46 As Samir Amin concluded, after surveying these developments in his The Arab Nation: “the Arab bourgeoisie got what it was after: Washington was forced to take it seriously.”47

Sadat’s success in retrieving Egyptian territory by aligning with the United States in the region bred what can be described as a “political illusion” within the Palestinian camp, which would ultimately lead to Oslo. The belief was the following: national rights could only be retrieved by becoming politically “moderate” and gaining American acceptance. If Sadat could do it, why couldn’t Arafat? This logic came to justify future Palestinian capitulation, which was only fully realized in Oslo (it needed the second crushing of the PLO in Beirut in 1982, the Intifada, and the alienation and weakness of the PLO after the Gulf War to create the material conditions for its actualization). But this dangerous assumption neglected the fact that there was an important difference between Egypt and the Palestinians: strategic significance. Egypt was arguably the most important state in the Arab world (in terms of size, position, and capacity) while Palestinians were the weakest and most powerless group in the region: dispossessed, stateless, and fragmented. Arafat had very little to offer the United States (other than recognizing Israel), while Sadat could offer them peace with Israel and legitimation of the status quo. The only way that Palestinians could be strategically significant was by actively threatening U.S.-Israel domination. And that required getting organized and mobilized and gaining Arab mass support. In practice, this meant the following: lacking the objective capacity to achieve their national rights themselves the Palestinians needed the support and capacities of the Arab masses. To achieve their liberation, Palestinians had to mobilize Arabs behind their struggle and assume the position of progressives and radical nationalists in the Arab world. In short, they needed to become what they actually claimed they were: revolutionaries. As Amin put it: “the liberation struggle can only succeed if it is also a social revolution.”48

If anything, 1970 showed how difficult it would be for the Palestinians to get their national rights with effectively the whole world against them. How to overcome this impediment was a brief topic of debate within the PLO. Its outcome, however, never led to the desired structural-organizational changes that would empower a mass movement: bureaucracy and opportunism won out. There was to be no “revolution within the revolution” as Palestinian radicals (like Husam Khatib) wanted.49 In his powerful critique of Palestinian nationalism, Marxist philosopher Sadiq Jalal al-Azm blamed the PLO’s defeat in 1970 on its lack of ideological preparedness for the role Palestinians were in a position to assume in the Arab world: that of social revolutionaries. For al-Azm, the PLO ironically ended up replicating exactly the same mistakes of its Arab petty-bourgeois counterparts (like Nasser). Palestinians repeated rather than transformed Arab nationalist defeats: 1970 was like 1967.50 And like their Arab counterparts, the Palestinian elite ultimately ends up dependent on the United States for security, support, and patronage.

What this tells us about the Israeli role in the region is, therefore, quite clear. Israeli interventions have ended up pushing the whole geopolitical alignment of the Arab elite into the American sphere. And that has been an enormous and sustained effort. Control of oil in and of itself cannot achieve that: the United States needed an activist warring state to help it perform this task. For this service, Israel has been substantially rewarded. Since 1967, the United States has been Israel’s single-most important strategic ally. The United States supports Israel diplomatically, politically, and economically, and allowing it to continue to expand and colonize the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and to go unpunished for its countless violations of international law, including its invasion of Lebanon in 1982 (which cost 20,000 mostly civilian lives), its occupation until 2000 of a long stretch of Lebanese land (which it called its “security zone”), and its occupation and annexation of East Jerusalem and the Syrian Golan Heights. Without U.S. support, none of this would have been possible. Israel’s expansion would have been rolled back, as it had been in 1956.

Operating within the parameters and imperatives of U.S. empire frees Israel from conforming to the international consensus which all the world shares, bar the United States (with the momentary exception of the Rogers Plan of 1970, which was sabotaged by Nixon-Kissinger): a two-state solution based on full withdrawal to the 1967 borders, the dismantling of settlements, and the creation of a Palestinian state. To complete its mission of colonizing Palestine, Zionists had therefore to fulfill Theodor Herzl’s racist prophecy in The Jewish State: “form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.”51 To expand, Israel has had to subordinate itself to U.S. imperial imperatives and become dependent on the United States (which at times generates the occasional Israeli public resentment at the extent of U.S. control). Samuel W. Lewis has described this process well:

The 1950s and early 1960s fostered an illusion that Israel could be truly independent economically and politically, even surrounded by a sea of hostile Arab states. The 1973 War badly eroded that confidence. Since then, Israelis have come to understand that adequate modern weapons are too expensive for a small state to obtain without close allies and economic support from abroad. Their level of frustration has grown as has their realization of their inevitable dependency on Washington. That frustration periodically produces the tendency to lash out against the very American leaders whose continued support is most needed.52

Such moments aside (the most recent being Sharon’s accusation that in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Israel was being abandoned by the United States in the same way Czechoslovakia was abandoned by the allies in 1938), Israel has indeed understood that there is no occupation, no expansion, and no rejection of Palestinian national rights without U.S. support. As long as this agenda continues to be the dominant one in Israel, its reliance on the United States will continue. Chomsky describes this bind thus:

There can be little doubt that from shortly after the 1967 conquest, Israel has been moving in the directions indicated earlier: international isolation apart from pariah states, dependence on the U.S. with the concomitant pressure to serve U.S. interests, militarization of society, the rise of religious-chauvinist fanaticism, the internal “feed-back” from the policies of oppression and domination, an increasing sense of the inevitability of permanent conflict and with it, the perceived need to disrupt the region and establish a form of Israeli hegemony under the U.S. aegis.53

The United States has thus allowed, encouraged, and aided the continued Israeli colonization of Palestine. The expansion of 1967 is indeed a continuation of the 1948 logic of occupation and dispossession, which has defined the Zionist movement in Palestine from the beginning. What was novel about 1967 was that it went against the international consensus: Israel was seen as occupier where before it had been seen as victim. To legitimate this state of affairs, expansionism became the dominant doctrine of the Israeli elite. Colonialism was strengthened and consolidated in Israeli politics and society, breeding new political ideologies and practices of occupation and settlement. Nur Masalha has described this process well in his Imperial Israel and the Palestinians: The Politics of Expansion:

The war produced a spectacular territorial expansion. This territorial expansion made messianic religious and ultra-orthodox thinking seem highly credible. The 1967 conquests also made the historical Revisionist maximalist vision highly relevant. All the ingredients of Israel’s new right radicalism—militarism, ultra-nationalism, territorial expansionism, and neo-religiosity—produced political movements, including the new territorial maximalism of the Whole Land of Israel Movement and the fundamentalist settlements movement of Gush Emunim.54

Occupation, therefore, further fortified Israeli rejection of the Palestinian right of self-determination. Partition (albeit inequitable, leaving Palestinians 22 percent of their homeland) was actively rejected, bolstered by U.S. rejectionism.

It is also important to emphasize that 1967 both reinforced and transformed existing Israeli “national security” patterns of militarization. Baruch Kimmerling has shown that Israeli “civilian militarism” has always been dominant in Israel: “The situation arises when the civilian leaders and the led both regard the primary military and strategic considerations as being self-evidently the only or the predominant considerations in most societal and political decisions or priority ordering.” The military-political nexus rules over the Palestinians and defines the national objectives (including economic) of the Israeli collectivity.

After 1967, this prioritizing of national security was modified by the “amplification of the ideological-political sphere” of religious Zionism.55 The Greater Israel ideology became wedded to strategic state considerations, and the former was fostered and supported by the latter: “thus the new orientation spawned fringe variants that favored the expulsion of the entire non-Jewish population of the territories either immediately or as a result of a deliberate program that would create circumstances favorable to such dispersion (for example, war on a local-regional scale). Jewish settlements were established feverishly in regions of the occupied territories densely populated by Palestinians so as to guarantee control over the whole conquered area, and create ‘irreversible’ fait accompli.”56

Kimmerling has developed this line of analysis further in his recent Politicide: Ariel Sharon’s War Against the Palestinians. Here he argues that occupation has already corrupted Israeli democracy to such an extent that Israel can no longer be considered a liberal democracy: it is now a Herrenvolk democracy: “This term, coined to describe South Africa under Apartheid [OED dates it back to the Nazis], describes a regime in which one group of its subjects (the citizens) enjoys full rights and another group (the non-citizens) enjoys none. The laws of Israel have become the laws of a master people and the morality that of lords of the land.”57

While this reasoning is important to understanding Israeli policies in the Occupied Territories, it ignores the fact that Israel itself has always been defined by its particularist components. Post-1967 is a mere continuation of post-1948, but now in a new environment where decolonization is a powerful global ideological force (hence the UN response). The questions that Kimmerling never raises are: When was Israeli democracy ever uncorrupted by colonialism? When did Israel treat even its own citizens as equals? The military government of 1948-1966, which only applied to Palestinians citizens of Israel, is clear evidence that Israel has never actually been a liberal democracy: its continuing exclusionary definition as “Jewish and democratic” is further evidence of that.58 In the post-1967 period, then, Zionist exclusivism and racism have merely been extended, revitalized, and projected onto the West Bank and Gaza. For the Israeli elite, 1967 is like 1948: the similarities are more important than the differences.59

The dynamic of American Empire/Israeli colonialism is, therefore, circular: U.S. support reinforces Israeli colonialism and occupation, which bolsters Israeli militarization of state and society, which generates new ideological and political justifications and breeds new religious fanaticisms, leading to further indigenous resistance and to more U.S. interventions in the region. A cycle of violence if ever there was one, ultimately determined by U.S. imperialism. The United States thus becomes both a necessary and sufficient condition for Israel’s colonial expansionism. Without it, Israel would be a pariah state. Without it, conditions of peaceful coexistence in the region are much more likely. Without it, Israeli militarism and Jewish fundamentalism in Israel would be on the defensive; and the mobilization of internal domestic forces calling for the abandonment of the “national security” ethic and the rejection of living by the sword would have a real chance of gaining political ascendancy in Israel. Siding with, serving, depending, and even subordinating itself to the imperatives of U.S. empire in the region can only reinforce the Arab majority perception that Israel is a hostile presence. Militarized security can be no basis for peace and reconciliation. Real security can only be achieved if Israelis come to be seen as a part of the region and not as an imposition on it: in order for that coexistence to take place, the whole logic of the Jewish colonization needs to be questioned.

Which is exactly what didn’t happen in Oslo. On the contrary, Oslo was about further colonization, further expansion, and further domination and control. The early critics of Oslo (most prominently, Edward Said,60 Noam Chomsky, and Meron Benvenisti) were proven right: Oslo was a victory for Zionism and a humiliating defeat for Palestinian nationalism. The PLO aborted the Intifada (the main reason for Israel’s willingness to negotiate), legalized the occupation, and became Israel’s colonial enforcer. As Samih K. Farsoun has argued: “Israel achieved what it set out to do since at least the signing of the Camp David Accords with Egypt in 1978: It won limited functional civil autonomy for the Palestinians of the occupied territories and a legalized tight grip on the land, resources, economy, and security of the areas.”61 No sovereignty, no national rights, and no end of occupation: the U.S.-sponsored peace process was as rejection of Palestinians’ right to independence and self-determination as the post-Kissinger foreign policy consensus was.

If Israel consolidated its occupation in Oslo, the United States reaped the fruits of its victory over the Soviet Union and consolidated its hold over the Middle East. The New World Order declared by Bush Senior in 1991 set this process in motion. Iraq had to be tamed and cut back to size, and its invasion of Kuwait provided an excellent excuse for that. The end of the war with Iran had left it with a bloated army, a huge war debt, and resentment against Arab oil regimes and U.S. double-dealing.62 Saddam Hussein was perceived as a threat to U.S. global strategy: oil had to be protected and regional stability (i.e. a pro-U.S. status quo) reaffirmed. The “spectacle” of the Gulf War achieved this when Iraq was bombed back to the preindustrial era (as one UN report put it). It is doubtful that such a diminution of state capacities, economic and political independence, and military power could ever have been realized without force. Though there was clearly an element of “demonstration effect” for both global and U.S. domestic consumption in the projection of American military might, only war could significantly diminish Iraqi state power, consolidate American military presence, and safeguard the preeminence of U.S. political and economic interests in the region. Arab oil regimes were protected, and Israeli military supremacy was assured: Iraq would never be able to pose any sort of threat to either Saudi Arabia or Israel (and, if Bush Senior had had enough support for regime change then, the United States wouldn’t have had to wait for what Rice called the “opportunity” of post-9/11 to occupy Iraq). Only war, thus, could have satisfied the material and ideological requirements of U.S. imperialism.

The end of the Cold War generated a peculiar expectation with regard to U.S. policy towards Israel: Israel would become far less important for the United States. Because the Gulf War coalition excluded Israel (and included Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt), and because Bush Senior delayed a ten billion dollar loan-guarantee to Israel until it agreed to participate in the Madrid Peace conference, which came on the heels of the Gulf War, Israel’s role in the U.S. empire was perceived to have been diminished. The days of the “strategic asset” thesis were over, it was claimed: the United States was now freer to create a more balanced foreign policy strategy in line with the international consensus of the impermissibility of acquiring territory by force.

The reality was quite different, however: even during the Gulf War crisis the United States forcefully rejected Hussein’s (self-interested) linkage argument: Iraq would leave Kuwait, Israel would leave the Occupied Territories. No such universal standards were applied: double standards were the order of the day.63 The Madrid conference ended up in near total deadlock. Bush’s “peace and justice” were as elusive as ever. The 1990s would in fact prove to be the most fruitful time in U.S.-Israel relations. The alliance became stronger than ever, intensifying and deepening. It is to Chomsky’s realism that we owe this judgment: the end of the Cold War would only bring tactical modifications not substantial changes in U.S. global strategy. Anti-nationalism and hostility to social radicalism would continue to define its agenda, as he predicted. And this would also apply to Israel, as the following statement from Israeli military strategist Shlomo Gazit clearly shows:

Israel’s main task has not changed at all, and it remains of crucial importance. Its location at the center of the Arab Muslim Middle East predestines Israel to be a devoted guardian of stability in all the countries surrounding it. Its [role] is to protect the existing regimes: to prevent or halt the processes of radicalization and to block the expansion of fundamentalist religious zealotry.64

The New World Order is, then, very much like the old world order: the United States and Israel fighting common enemies and satisfying mutual elite interests. The only difference lies in the realization of more amendable conditions of operation. U.S. global primacy has been the main outcome of the Cold War, and after the Gulf War Israel’s regional military superiority was again reconfirmed. One other slight variation is relevant here: a new enemy. If Arab nationalism was the enemy of the Cold War period, major factions of Islamic fundamentalism are the enemies of the New World Order (and this is in no way to equate the social content of each ideology). Once a Cold War ally against nationalism, Islamic fundamentalism has turned into a foe. Examples abound. Two main ones will suffice: the Mujahideen in Afghanistan (the Taliban, Bin Laden, and al-Qaida) and radical fundamentalists in the Arab world. In the Palestinian context, the Muslim Brotherhood is an example of the latter. It went from being supported by Israel against nationalist Fatah to mutating into Hamas and becoming the main agent of anti-colonial struggle and Palestinian self-determination in the Occupied Territories. The cost of this shift is mainly paid by local societies: with the fundamentalists, regressive social agendas rule and the sphere of individual liberty (already severely curtailed by Arab secular nationalism) shrinks even more.

This is not a problem that worries Israel or the United States much, as long as the fundamentalists are suppressed or kept out of office (Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, etc). For U.S.-Israel, the problem with democracy in the Middle East today is the problem of Islamic fundamentalism: most free elections would result in fundamentalists getting into power, as recent victories by Hamas and the United Iraqi Alliance in Iraq (and by the Front Islamique du Salut [FIS] in Algeria before that) show. Denying real democratic sovereignty remains a fundamental premise of U.S. policy. So after the recent elections in Palestine (and the U.S. hope for a Fatah win), the United States now demonizes and boycotts majority-elected Hamas and seeks to punish and “starve” Palestinians for their democratic choice (as a recent New York Times headline put it).

The War on Terrorism is the New World Order unleashed and unbound. It replays the Cold War dynamic, aims to reproduce its oppressive structure, and continues to satisfy longstanding U.S. interests in the Middle East: control of oil and rejection of Arab radicalism, which have led to support for colonial Israel. And so it goes.

What this brief analysis of “imperialism-colonialism” teaches us is clear. The United States has been determining major economic and political outcomes in the Middle East since at least 1967, with Israel continuing to play a crucial role in their realization. In Israel-Palestine, this has meant that force and colonial peace have alternated as main instruments of policy, with the main objective being a constant: Jewish supremacy in Palestine—as much land as possible, as few Palestinians as possible. The United States has exploited this Zionist imperative for its own interests in the region, and has fostered a militarized and fundamentalist Israel in the process. This reality can be gauged in Israel’s most recent parliamentary elections. Gideon Levy has put it well: “An absolute majority of the MKs [Members of Knesset] in the 17th Knesset will hold a position based on a lie; that Israel does not have a partner for peace. An absolute majority of MKs in the next Knesset do not believe in peace, nor do they even want it—just like their voters—and worse than that, don’t regard Palestinians as equal human beings. Racism has never had so many supporters. It is the real hit of this election campaign.”65

For the Palestinians, the impact of U.S.-Israel has been much worse: collapse of the secular national project and national unity; continuing annexation of lands and resources; enclosure and “enclavization”; fragmentation, demobilization, and collective paralysis; and unending death and suffering. If for Levy Israelis are “One Racist Nation,” for Amira Hass Palestinians have become: “A Nation of Beggars”: “For it is not natural disasters that have transformed the Palestinians into a nation that lives on handouts from the world; it is Israel’s accelerating colonialist process.”66 This too is an outcome of the U.S.-Israel, imperialism-colonialism, relationship.

Between colonialism, looming starvation, and sumud (steadfastness), hope for real change seems remote, if not impossible. And this may yet prove to be imperialism’s most catastrophic effect.

Notes

  1. Glenda Abramson and S. Ilan Troen (eds.), “The Americanization of Israel,” Israel Studies 5, no. 1 (2000). Israel Studies is one of the leading academic journals specializing in Israeli history, politics, society, and culture.
  2. Laurence J. Silberstein, The Postzionism Debates (London: Routledge, 1999), 2. My interest here is not postmodern or postcolonial post-Zionism, for which see Silberstein; Ella Shohat, “The ‘Postcolonial’ in Translation: Reading Said in Hebrew,” Journal of Palestine Studies 33, no. 3 (2004), 55–75; Nada Matta, “Postcolonialism, Multiculturalism, and the Israeli Left,” Holy Land Studies 2, no. 1 (2003): 85–107.
  3. Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), xiii.
  4. See Walid Khalidi, “Plan Dalet,” Journal of Palestine Studies 18, no. 1 (1988 [1961]), 4–33.
  5. Simha Flapan, The Birth of Israel (London: Croom Helm, 1987); Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Ilan Pappe, Britain and the Arab Israeli Conflict, 1948–51 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988); Avi Shlaim, Collusion Across the Jordan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). Nur Masalha (in Expulsion of the Palestinians [Washington D.C.: Institute of Palestine Studies, 1992]) also participated in this debate. Unlike Silberstein, however, I don’t see the rationale of including Palestinians under the post-Zionist heading. The term should, I believe, also only refer to work from the late 1980s onwards, and not stretch back to inter-war figures or early Israeli nativist trends like the Canaanites.
  6. Whether it is a justified injustice is a political not a historical question. What is quite unique about many of the post-Zionist historians (Pappe excluded) is that while they do acknowledge what happened in 1948 they end up justifying it nonetheless in the name of Zionism-as-refugee from anti-Semitism. Edward Said has described this as “a profound contradiction, bordering on schizophrenia” (“New History, Old Ideas,” in Ephraim Nimni (ed.), The Challenge of Post-Zionism [London: Zed, 2003], 199-202). New Left Review has been much more generous. It not only republished Benny Morris’s recent racist interview with Haaretz (“Ethnic Cleansing,” New Left Review 26 [2004], 37–51), in which he advocated ethnic cleansing of the remainder of the Palestinians, but also preceded it with much praise and adulation (even defending him against his own outrageous statements). The following is particularly troubling: “The hallmark of Morris’s work has been a tough-minded realism—the inclination of a former paratrooper for the Israel Defense Force to call a spade a spade, whatever discomfort it might cause his co-nationals” (37). The suggestion of course is that Morris’s role in the Israeli army has provided him with a requisite dose of realism and historical clarity. But this doesn’t square with the fact that army histories of 1948 have been as complicit with Israeli myth making as any other Israeli historical narratives before the arrival of the “new historians.” Such praise diminishes Morris’s own contribution in uncovering the Israeli historical record on 1948.
  7. Said in Nimni, Challenge of Post-Zionism, 201.
  8. Baruch Kimmerling, “Academic History Caught in the Cross-Fire,” History and Memory 7, no. 1 (1995), 41.
  9. Uri Ram, The Changing Agenda of Israeli Sociology (Albany: University of New York Press, 1995), 6.
  10. Baruch Kimmerling, Zionism and Territory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); and Gershon Shafir, Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996 [1989]).
  11. Shafir, Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 8.
  12. Avishai Ehrlich, “Israel: Conflict, War and Social Change,” in Colin Creighton & Martin Shaw, eds., The Sociology of War and Peace (New York: Sheridan House, 1987), 121–42.
  13. Zeev Sternhell, The Founding Myths of Israel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).
  14. Gershon Shafir & Yoav Peled, Being Israeli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). On Israeli culture as colonial and exclusionary, see Yerach Gover, Zionism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).
  15. This is of course not to mention early Palestinian work: Sabri Jiryis, The Arabs in Israel (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976); and Elia T. Zureik, The Palestinians in Israel (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979).
  16. Ram, Changing Agenda of Israeli Sociology, 175.
  17. The much neglected Palestinian Marxist Jabra Nicola (1912–74) was a foundational influence on Matzpen. His most important work is: “Theses on the Revolution in the Arab East” (1972, unpublished?). Ernest Mandel dedicated his Revolutionary Marxism Today (London: New Left Books, 1979), to him in the following glowing terms: “Pioneer Arab Marxist & Palestinian Trotskyist, the most impressive internationalist I ever met.”
  18. An important film by Eran Torbiner which documents their history was released in 2003: Matzpen: Anti-Zionist Israelis. For a sample of their work see Khamsin, Forbidden Agendas (London: Al Saqi Books, 1984); and Khamsin, Palestine (London: Zed Books, 1989). See also Silberstein, Postzionism Debates, 84–87.
  19. Haim Hanegbi, Moshe Machover, & Akiva Orr, “The Class Nature of Israeli Society,” New Left Review 65 (1971), 3–26.
  20. Hanegbi, Machover, & Orr, “Class Nature of Israeli Society,” 11.
  21. Hanegbi, Machover, & Orr, “Class Nature of Israeli Society,” 7 (italics in original).
  22. Tom Segev, 1949 (New York: Henry Holt, 1998 [1986]) and The Seventh Million (New York: Henry Holt, 2000 [1991]).
  23. Tom Segev, Elvis in Jerusalem (New York: Metropolitan, 2002), 64 (my comments in parentheses).
  24. Fayez A. Sayegh, “The Camp David Agreement and the Palestine Problem,” Journal of Palestine Studies 8, no. 2 (1979), 3–40.
  25. Gershon Shafir & Yoav Peled, “Peace and Profits,” in Gershon Shafir & Yoav Peled (eds.), The New Israel (Boulder: Westview Press, 2000), 243–64.
  26. Yoav Peled & Gershon Shafir, “The Roots of Peacemaking,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 28 (1996), 391–413.
  27. Peled & Shafir, “The Roots of Peacemaking,” 409.
  28. Uri Ram, “‘The Promised Land of Business Opportunities,’” in Shafir & Peled, “Roots of Peacemaking,” 217–40.
  29. Meron Benvenisti, “An Agreement of Surrender,” Haaretz, May 12, 1994, quoted in Samih K. Farsoun, Palestine and the Palestinians (Boulder: Westview Press, 1997), 274.
  30. Avishai Ehrlich, “Zionism, Anti-Zionism, Post-Zionism,” in Nimni, Challenge of Post-Zionism, 63–97; “The Gulf War and the New World Order,” in Ralph Miliband & Leo Panitch (eds.), New World Order? Socialist Register 1992 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1993), 227–38.
  31. On what the author generously calls the “post-Zionist decade,” see Ilan Pappe, “The Post-Zionist Discourse in Israel, 1990–2001,” Holy Land Studies 1, no. 1 (2002), 9–35.
  32. Segev, Elvis in Jerusalem, 161.
  33. Shafir & Peled, Being Israeli, 336.
  34. Ehrlich, “Zionism,” 93–94. See also his “Palestine, Global Politics, and Israeli Judaism,” in Leo Panitch & Colin Leys (eds.), Fighting Identities: Socialist Register 2003 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002), 51–72.
  35. See the foundational works, Maxime Rodinson, Israel (New York: Pathfinder, 1973); Edward W. Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage: 1992); and Noam Chomsky, Fateful Triangle (Cambridge: South End Press, 1999). Recent examples include, from international relations: Vassilis K. Fouskas & Bülent Gökay, The New American Imperialism (London: Praeger, 2005); and Naseer H. Aruri, Dishonest Broker (Cambridge: South End Press, 2003); from urban studies: Derek Gregory, The Colonial Present (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004); from politics: Retort, Afflicted Powers (London: Verso, 2005). On Oslo and colonialism, see Tanya Reinhart’s excellent Israel/Palestine (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002), and Marwan Bishara, Palestine/Israel (London: Zed, 2002).
  36. Segev, Elvis in Jerusalem, 49.
  37. Noam Chomsky, Towards A New Cold War (New York: The New Press, 2003), 342.
  38. Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2003), 150.
  39. Gilbert Achcar, Eastern Cauldron (New York: Monthly Review Press), 36. See also Irene L. Gendzier, Notes from the Minefield (Boulder: Westview Press, 1999).
  40. Samuel W. Lewis, “The United States and Israel: Evolution of an Unwritten Alliance,” The Middle East Journal 53, no. 3 (1999), 364–66.
  41. Cheryl A. Rubenberg, Israel and the American National Interest (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 126.
  42. Shlaim, Iron Wall, 309–10.
  43. Seymour M. Hersh, The Price of Power (New York: Summit Books, 1983), 234–49.
  44. Achcar, Eastern Cauldron, 22.
  45. Jean Genet, Prisoner of Love (New York: New York Review of Books, 2003), 275.
  46. Sadat’s recourse to war was forced by Kissinger’s refusal to respond to his endless peace overtures in the early 1970s. see Chomsky’s Fateful Triangle, 64–75, Hegemony or Survival, 166–67.
  47. Samir Amin, The Arab Nation (London: Zed Books, 1978), 72.
  48. Amin, The Arab Nation, 67.
  49. Husam al-Khatib, a member of Fatah’s executive committee, wrote the most important radical critique of the Palestinian Revolution, On the Palestinian Revolutionary Experience [fi il-tajriba al-thawria al-falastinia] (Damascus: Manshurat Wizarat il-Thaqafa, 1973).
  50. Sadek Jalal al-Azm, Critical Study of Palestinian Resistance Thought [Dirasa Naqdiya li-Fiker al-Muqawama al-Falastinia] (Beirut: Dirasat il-Awda, 1973).
  51. Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State (New York: Dover Publications, 1988), 96.
  52. Lewis, “United States and Israel,” 376.
  53. Chomsky, Fateful Triangle, 462.
  54. Nur Masalha, Imperial Israel and the Palestinians (London: Pluto Press, 2000), 22.
  55. Baruch Kimmerling, “Patterns of Militarism in Israel,” European Journal of Sociology 34 (1993), 196–223.
  56. Kimmerling, “Patterns of Militarism in Israel,” 217–18.
  57. Baruch Kimmerling, Politicide (London: Verso, 2003), 39. My comments in parentheses.
  58. For the contradictions between liberalism and Zionism in relation to the state, see Ahmad Sa’di’s excellent: “The Peculiarities of Israel’s Democracy,” International Journal of Intercultural Relations 12 (2002), 119–33.
  59. See Sternhell, The Founding Myths of Israel, 335–36.
  60. Edward W. Said, Peace and its Discontents (New York: Vintage, 1996); The End of the Peace Process (New York: Vintage, 2001).
  61. Farsoun & Zacharia, Palestine and the Palestinians, 270.
  62. Donald Neff, “The U.S., Iraq, Israel, and Iran,” Journal of Palestine Studies 20, no. 4 (1991), 23–41.
  63. Norman Finkelstein, “Israel and Iraq,” Journal of Palestine Studies 20, no. 2 (1991), 43–56.
  64. Quoted in Noam Chomsky, Pirates and Emperors (New York: South End Press, 2002), 166.
  65. Gideon Levy, “One Racist Nation,” Haaretz, March 26, 2006,http://www.haaretzdaily.com.
  66. Amira Hass, “A Nation of Beggars,” Haaretz, March 1, 2006, http://www.haaretzdaily.com.

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