This is the first of a Ten Part Series I will be publishing over the next two weeks as part of Israel's 60th birthday. In particular I focus on the biases inherent in Culture Warrior analyses
As the state of Israel celebrates its sixtieth birthday, Israel’s character is presented across a broad spectrum. At one end, Israel is a democratic and occasionally laudable state that has lost its way since 1967. In this view Israel can make amends and produce peace by satisfying the demands of international law and various peace agreements it has entered into with its neighbours. Towards the middle of the spectrum, Israel is seen as a nation born in the original sin of ethnically cleansing the Palestinians in 1948, for which it must acknowledge and make amends. At the other extreme, Israel was born in the original sin of 19th century Zionism; Zionism’s logic has always been to ethnically-cleanse the Palestinians, and thus Israel’s atonement can only be achieved with the dismantling of Israel in favour of a single state of Palestinians and Jews living together in a secular democracy. Regardless of where along the spectrum any of these characterizations of Israel lies, the powerful and insidious influence of foreign Zionist lobbies is taken as a given.
Over the past twelve months a slew of publications has cranked up the volume of anti-Zionism: I will focus on four of them. In March, 2006 an eighty page working paper appeared on Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government homepage. Co-authored by the school’s Academic Dean, Professor Stephen Walt, and University of Chicago Professor of Politics, John Mearsheimer The Israel Lobby and Foreign Policy was instantly zapped across cyberspace. The paper was republished on blogs, websites, cyzines, and became a mandatory item in the email inboxes of news junkies across the globe. A condensed version of the paper was published on 23/03/06 in London Review of Books. For those who spend little time in the blogosphere, the paper might as well never have been published.
On the other hand, as an habitue of the blogosphere, even I was surprised when, within days, cyberspace fulminated with outrage at the supposed ‘over the top attempts to silence legitimate debate.’ In fact, the first the Australian MSM registered the paper’s existence was when The Australian - more than a month later - published an article by blogger, Antony Loewenstein. Four months, four broadsheet articles and two television appearances later, Loewenstein’s own book, My Israel Question was published. During that same four months, the M&W paper received coverage in most mainstream press including lengthy extracts and commentary in various News Ltd. and Fairfax Features and op-ed sections. Towards the end of 2006, Israeli historian Ilan Pappe published Palestine: Ethnic Cleansing. The momentum has apexed with the publication of former U.S. President, Jimmy Carter’s Palestine: Peace, not Apartheid.
M&W and AL cover the same ground, use similar sources, and reach similar conclusions: the U.S. and its allies - such as Australia - are making significant strategic errors in their middle east priorities. M&W focus their critique on the U.S. and advocate the withdrawal of its diplomatic and financial support of Israel or at least using its influence to demand substantial changes in Israeli foreign policy. With all the authority that comes with tenured professorships at two of the world’s top schools of foreign affairs, they insist that pro-Israel and Zionist lobbies have a stranglehold over U.S. foreign policy and have had so for decades, particularly since 1973.[1] As a consequence of this stranglehold the U.S. has been backing the wrong horse, Israel, in the middle east. As two Cold-War era international relations scholars from the realist school, M&W warn these lobbies function as a destabilising fifth column in U.S. politics: indeed, “this situation has no equal in American political history.”[2]
AL agrees with this position, but throws the line out even further to explore the benefits of dismantling Israel. His book marinades in the autobiographical journey of a young Jewish Australian growing to reject Zionism. His reportage combines confrontations with Australian-based Zionist lobbies, his coverage of the contretemps surrounding Hanan Ashrawi’s award of the Sydney Peace Prize, and his four week trip to Israel and the U.S. in 2006. Loewenstein is defiant in the face of a perceived campaign against him; he sees himself as a “dissenter” who obdurately resists those who denounce him as a “self-hating Jew.” He warns “the undeclared war in the Middle East is the abiding conflict of our era, with little apparent hope of resolution despite years of peace talks.” He asks “how much Zionism - the ideology of Jewish nationalism - is to blame for this intractable conflict?”[3]
M&W explore why “since the Six Day War in 1967 the centrepiece of U.S. Middle East policy has been its relationship with Israel.”[4] This question is crucial to U.S. security “given the strategic importance of the Middle East and its potential impact on others both Americans and non-Americans.” For M&W, the answer to his question lies in ‘understanding and addressing the Lobby’s influence on U.S. policy.’[5]
Both M&W and AL claim to prosecute their theses in the language of scholarship; au fait with the considerable historiography of the Middle East during the twentieth century, and the role of the U.S. in that history. Both also boast of their heavy reliance on Israeli sources. M&W reinforce their case with assurances that “the facts recounted here are not in serious dispute among scholars;” reassuring readers they “may reject our conclusions, of course, but the evidence on which they rest is not controversial.”[6] Similarly, Jimmy Carter wailed at a University of Georgia conference
I have been called a liar. I've been called an anti-Semite. I've been called a bigot. I've been called a plagiarist. I've been called a coward. Those accusations, they concern me, but they don't detract from the fact that the book is accurate, and that it's needed.[7]
AL assures the reader that his history major from Melbourne’s Monash university reinforced “as a liberal Jew, I was brought up to question the established historical narrative.”[8] Fired up since what he describes as “the Hanan Ashrawi Affair” AL has passionately burrowed into the world of Australian lobby groups, published bits and pieces in on-line magazines, and established his own blog devoted to the Arab-Israel conflict, the machinations of Diaspora Jews, and other geostrategic hot buttons such as Hugo Chavez and Tibet. All this was topped by a four week trip to Israel and the U.S. in 2005.
I conclude that Stephen Walt did not write the U.S. article. He seems merely, inadvisedly, to have put his name on it. Secondly, I agree wholeheartedly with AL that “it is time for a radical rethink of the conflict.” However, the conclusions I draw on motives and the peculiarly selective sources used by both and AL and M&W are not pretty. My conclusions, while not prognostic, hopefully will inform the real “radical rethinking of the conflict” we must have. I also show how neatly the ideological lenses through which AL and M&W present their theses nicely match the frames worn by the postmodern history warriors in Australia’s own identity debates; debates sparked by the Mabo decision and Keith Windschuttle’s accusations of the ‘fabricators of Australia‘s history.’[9]
1. Why do so many westerners care about the Palestinian issue?
Since the 1947 UN Partition of British Mandate Palestine, the global geopolitical theatre has been far from dull; yet in 2008 the Israeli-Arab conflict enters its seventh decade: it has evolved from a conflict between Israelis and, firstly Arabs to secondly Palestinians, and today Islamists;[10] And yet, in the same year of partition, the Muslim state of Pakistan was carved out of imperial India. As blogger and Crikey contributor Irfan Yusuf says, the formation of Pakistan led to population transfers affecting several million, with a loss of one million lives[11]; Mao Zedong and his “Long March” unified China into a Communist power that, via the death of tens of millions in the subsequent “cultural revolution,” has evolved into the world‘s second superpower[12]; More than two million Vietnamese, fifty thousand Americans and five hundred Australians lost their lives in the first military defeat ever experienced by the U.S; civil war in Indonesia achieved a non-Communist autocracy, yet fledgling democracy, at the cost of one million lives; Iran and Iraq went to war for eight years at the cost of over half a million lives; Egypt and Jordan signed peace treaties with Israel; Afghan and Pushtan mujahadeen repelled the Soviet Union; the Soviet Union collapsed and morphed into a growing ally of the U.S; millions perished in civil wars in Rwanda and Darfur; And of course arguably the most profound geopolitical event of the post-WW2 period was the stunning success of the U.S. in rebuilding Japan and Germany into the economic, cultural, and political powerhouses they are today.
Off the bloody and rhetorical stage of geopolitics, other theatres produced revolutions in human organisation and potential: a lightly-moustached woman of Italian-Catholic origin emerged from Detroit to amass a nine figure fortune simulating sex with a burning crucifix singing “like a Virgin:” another woman, a descendant of African slaves, amassed a similar fortune and even more power with a globally-syndicated daily television talk-show with the message “You Go Girl!” Man landed on the moon; vaccines for small pox and a host of once mass-killers were developed, an openly gay man was appointed to the Australian High Court. Other great cultural achievements. Nobel Prizes were awarded to economists who invented “derivatives’ that have prevented a repeat of 1929. A black woman has replaced a black man as U.S. Secretary of State in Republican Administrations.
And yet in 2000 U.S. President Clinton, Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat, and Israeli Prime Minister Barak could not complete a seemingly simple real estate transaction. The subsequent second Intifada resulted in four thousand Palestinian and Israeli lives, surely an infinitesimal blip in the narrative of post-WW2 history? But to read AL and M&W, one feels as those who were receiving Orson Welle’s War Of the Worlds thunder over the ether in 1938 might well have felt. But then again, Welles would probably have agreed at the time that the chances of suicide bombers turning the Twin Towers into twin pillars of dust were, “like the chances of anything coming from Mars, a million to one, he said” Why the intractability of a seeming relatively minor dispute?
Given this tempest of the post-WW2 geopolitical soup, M&W’s credibility is questioned immediately on page one when they place Israel at the top of U.S. policy priorities in the Middle East. Wrong professors.
1. The dominant foreign policy of the United States from the end of WW2 until the collapse of the Soviet Union and the first Gulf War, was the threat of Communism; the Cold War. While the actual threat of Soviet and Chinese imperial designs is, and always has been, debatable, it was at least genuinely perceived by successive U.S. administrations as being number one.
2. The second strategic challenge in the middle east was securing a stable and cheap supply of oil, particularly from Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Iraq. To be sure, the U.S. was more than self-sufficient in oil during this period; its main priority was access to the oil needed to fuel the reconstructions of oil-poor Japan and Western Europe (the Marshall Plan). This challenge was partly met by President Roosevelt’s pact with Saudi Arabia’s King Faisal guaranteeing U.S. security for Saudi oil.[13]
3. From 1967 onwards, the third strategic priority was ensuring Israel’s on-going strength to address and deal with threats to stability within the middle east that might threaten U.S. oil interests.
Of course, these three imperatives inevitably collided with each other from time to time. At times, the U.S. had to balance support for Israel against Soviet incursions into neighbouring Arab countries; incursions that at various times involved combinations or all of finance, military technology and arms, and even actual Soviet physical presence. Surely, at least as much as the Zionist-lobby, it is against this multi-dimensional ebb and flow of U.S. strategic thinking that the PR problem must be analysed? Alarmingly, neither M&W, AL, Pappe, or even Carter address this fundamental geostrategic reality.
Part 2: Zionism and early Palestine (to be posted on 11/05/08)
Part 3: What the Culture Warriors do not tell you about Partition and Deir Yassan (to be posted on 12/05/08)
Footnotes:
These references will be flled in over the coming week.
[1]
[2] M&W at p.1
[3]
[4] p.1
[5]
[6] M&W p.2
[7]
[8]
[9]
[10] Of course the historical roots go back further, but this essay is concerned with the role of the U.S. in resolving the issue which is confined to the post-partition experience.
[11]
[12]
[13]
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