In aid of Israel

Israel was created by systematic recourse to terror but it leaders portray it as a peace-maker.

THE United States is set on a collision course in West Asia with the rest of the world looking on helplessly. Russia's overture to Hamas and China's bid for friendship with Arabs are reassuring signs. But neither will go beyond a point to risk American ire, least of all would India. It is locked in so close an embrace with Israel that it has abandoned its rhetoric of former years.

Realpolitik is understandable. Not so, intellectual dishonesty. Reporters and analysts owe a duty to their readers. They are guilty of a sordid betrayal when they become propagandists for the state. Recently two American academics of the front rank eminently discharged the duty which their noble calling imposes on them. On March 23, 2006, the London Review of Books published an essay titled "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy". John Mearssheiwen of the University of Chicago is a leading "realist", so is Stephen Walt of Harvard. They posted a longer 83-page version of the essay on the web site of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. If they invited, predictably, the charge of anti-Semitism, it is not because of their thorough exposure of the Israeli lobby in the U.S., nor because of their documented criticism of the U.S' blind support for Israel even to the detriment of its own interests; nor for exposing the lobby's malign influence on domestic issues and the integrity of the political process. It "stifles debate (in the U.S.) by intimidation". The techniques are carefully described.

It is because they have said home truths, which few outside Israel say. Israeli intellectuals censure the U.S. for its blind support to the right-wing regimes in Israel. An Israeli columnist in Ha'aretz, described American foreign policy advisers Richard Perle and Douglas Feith as "walking a fine line between their loyalty to American governments... and Israeli interests". Jerusalem Post described Paul Wolfowitz, the former Deputy Secretary of Defence and now World Bank chief, as "devoutly pro-Israel".

Daniel Levy, former adviser in the Israeli Prime Minister's Office, suggests that "Israel would do well to distance itself from our `friends' on the Christian evangelical right" and the "policing of academia by groups like Daniel Pipes' Campus Watch". It would serve Israel "if the open and critical debate that takes place over here, in Israel, was exported to the U.S."

What is the raison d'etre of this liaison? Tony Judt of the New York University remarks: "It will not be self-evident to future generations of Americans why the imperial might and international reputation of the U.S. are so closely aligned with one small, controversial Mediterranean client state. It is already not at all self-evident to Europeans, Latin Americans, Africans or Asians. Why, they ask, has America chosen to lose touch with the rest of the international community on this issue?"

He does not answer the question. Affinity between the religions (Christianity and Judaism) is a partial explanation. The secret lies in the affinity of interests between a Western outpost in a region which the West knew was surcharged with nationalism. Not all its rulers could be bought. Those bought had a limited shelf life. British Prime Minister Lloyd George and Foreign Secretary A.J. Balfour laid the foundations of Israel in 1918 before the Holocaust. After 1945, the U.S. took over and supports its client even if it means alienating its friends elsewhere.

What the former Prime Minister of Malaysia Dr. Mahatir Mohamed said at the Organisation of Islamic Conference on October 17, 2003, reflected a universally felt opinion in the Third World. "It is not surprising that they should excise Muslim land to create the state of Israel, to solve their Jewish problem." He is a noted moderate.

In the same month President George W. Bush met in Indonesia American-educated scholars "who embrace a tolerant vision of Islamic belief" as Daniel Sneider noted. They denounced terrorism and were opposed to the establishment of an Islamic state. Sneider reported: "In the meeting with Bush, Maarif began by arguing that as long as the Israel-Palestine conflict persists, `it would be difficult for us and for you to eradicate the phenomenon of terrorism.' Indonesian Muslims, he said, back the creation of `an independent, viable and sovereign Palestinian state by 2005'."

Hendrik Weiler, a correspondent, summed up in The Economist (October 4, 2003) "the three key grievances that drive political Islam. First is the history of Western imperialism, which denied Muslims independence and freedom for well over half a century. Second was the solution to the Holocaust perpetrated by Europeans on European Jews handing the British colony of Palestine to Jewish colonists, who then perpetrated their own programme of ethnic cleansing. Third was the exploitation of oil by the West, carried out with the connivance of local puppets who traded the independence of their people in return for being kept in power and skimmed off part of the oil profits for themselves (after the Western oil firms took their massive cuts). Historical grievances, not religious ones, are expressed today through religion - the only political route allowed."

It is a desperate situation. Ariel Sharon wrecked the Oslo accords and the U.S' much-vaunted road map. William Pfaff points out that his retreat from Gaza was "a military tactician's withdrawal from a vulnerable position, in exchange for international acquiescence in a further partition of the Palestinian territories that incorporated East Jerusalem into Israel by means of the security wall.

"After the Gaza withdrawal, he refused negotiations on the effectively defunct `road map' toward two states, on grounds that the Palestinian Authority has failed to disarm Hamas and crush resistance to its own authority. Collapse of the Authority would be to Israel's interest, from Sharon's perspective evidence to the world that Palestine is ungovernable, and that negotiating with Palestinians is futile." (International Herald Tribune, January 7, 2006).

President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah party and Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh's Hamas are locked in a confrontation. International donors boycotted the Palestinian Authority after the Hamas won the polls, to the U.S' chagrin.

Stephen Hadley, Bush's National Security Adviser, told the prime member of the Israeli lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), on October 31, 2005, that, "The spread of democracy will make the Middle East [West Asia] a safer neighbourhood for Israel." Hamas' victory at the polls induced second thoughts.

The results would be no different if free elections are held in the entire region The secular Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish told Le Monde (February 12, 2006): "If there were free elections throughout the Arab-Muslim world, the Islamists would win everywhere. It's as simple as that, The Arab-Muslim world lives with a deep feeling of injustice for which it holds the West responsible. And the West responds with a form of imperial fundamentalism that only strengthens that feeling."

This is the context in which the exposure of Israel's lobby appeared. Such voices had been heard before, to be sure. The first author to warn against its pervasive influence was Paul Findley, a Republican Congressman, in his stunning book They Dare to Speak Out. It was first published in 1985 by Lawrence Hill Books. Publisher after publisher had rejected the manuscript. Its theme was "too sensitive". It recorded how the AIPAC had pilloried Adlai Stenvenson, Charles Percy, J. William Fulbright and a host of others. The essay, however, touches a raw nerve by recalling that Israel was born in sin though the authors themselves hold its birth to be justified. "The country's creation was undoubtedly an appropriate response to the long record of crimes against Jews, but it also brought about fresh crimes against a largely innocent third party; the Palestinians." Appropriate even if it entailed seizure of others' lands? Why not a state in the U.S.?

David Ben-Gurion told Nahum Goldmann, president of the World Jewish Congress: "If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country... We come from Israel, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see the thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?"

Israeli leaders have repeatedly sought to deny the Palestinians' national ambitions. Not even Yitzhak Rabin was willing to offer the Palestinians a viable state. Ehud Barak's purportedly generous offer at Camp David would have given them only a disarmed set of Bantustans under de facto Israeli control. "The tragic history of the Jewish people does not obligate the U.S. to help Israel today no matter what it does."

Israel's backers portray it as a country that has sought peace at every turn and shown great restraint even when provoked. The Arabs, by contrast, are said to have acted with great wickedness. Yet, "on the ground, Israel's record is not distinguishable from that of its opponents. Ben-Gurion acknowledged that the early Zionists were far from benevolent towards the Palestinian Arabs, who resisted their encroachments - which is hardly surprising, given that the Zionists were trying to create their own state on Arab land. In the same way, the creation of Israel in 1947-48 involved acts of ethnic cleansing, including executions, massacres and rapes by Jews, and Israel's subsequent conduct has often been brutal, belying any claim to moral superiority. Between 1949 and 1956, for example, Israeli security forces killed between 2,700 and 5,000 Arab infiltrators, the overwhelming majority of them unarmed. The IDF [Israeli Defence Forces] murdered hundreds of Egyptian prisoners of war in both the 1956 and 1967 wars, while in 1967, it expelled between 100,000 and 260,000 Palestinians from the newly conquered West Bank, and drove 80,000 Syrians from the Golan Heights."

The U.S. is not out to spread democracy. Its "ambition ... is at least partly aimed at improving Israel's strategic situation". Iraq, Syria and Iran had to be de-fanged. This has not made the U.S. safer. "The U.S. has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel not the other way around" (emphasis added, throughout).

Israel is no David forcing Goliath. "The Zionists had larger, better equipped and better led forces during the 1947-49 war of Independence, and the IDF won quick sz956 and against Egypt, Jordan and Syria in 1967". It is the sole nuclear power in West Asia thanks to U.S., British and French support. The West rails against terrorism but Israel was created by systematic recourse to terror. Its Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir was a terrorist, when the British ruled Palestine. "The Palestinian resort to terrorism is wrong but it isn't surprising. The Palestinians believe they have no other way to force Israeli concessions. As Ehud Barak once admitted, had he been born a Palestinian, he `would have joined a terrorist organisation'." Terror is the only weapon left to the wronged impotent.

Democrats are, if any thing, worse than Republicans. In the Clinton administration, policy was largely shaped by officials with close ties to Israel or to prominent pro-Israel organisations; among them, Martin Indyk, the former deputy director of research at the AIPAC and co-founder of the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP); Dennis Ross, who joined the WINEP after leaving government in 2001, and Aaron Miller, who has lived in Israel and often visits the country. They were among the closest advisers at the Camp David summit in July 2000. The Bush administration's ranks have included such advocates of the Israeli cause as Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, Douglas Peith, I. Lewis (`scooter') Libby, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and David Wurmser. Think tanks are dominated by the lobby.

The authors hold that "the war [on Iraq] was motivated in good part by a desire to make Israel more secure. According to Philip Zelikow, a former member of the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, and now a counsellor to Condoleezza Rice, the `real threat' from Iraq was not a threat to the United States. The unstated threat was the threat against Israel, Zelikow told an audience at the University of Virginia in September 2002." Shortly after the war began The Wall Street Journal reported under the banner headline "A pro-US Democratic Area is a Goal that Has Israeli and Neo-conservative Roots".

However, the roots lie deeper, still. In different ways Robert Fisk, a legendary reporter in West Asia for The Independent and Zachary Lockman, a scholar at New York University, trace them to the West's blurred vision of the region - Orientalism in excelsis. Lockman, incidentally, also exposes the AIPAC's techniques. He renders a service by showing how helpless scholars were in influencing policy. "It is probably safe to suggest that much of the membership of the Middle East Studies Association, the field's main professional organisation, was not enthusiastic about U.S. support for Saddam Hussein's regime in its war against Iran in the 1980s, the U.S.-led Gulf War of 1991, the sanctions regime imposed on Iraq thereafter, the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 or, more broadly, the extent to which successive U.S. administrations countenanced Israel's ongoing occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, its continuing implantation of Jewish settlements there, and its rejection of a Palestinian state in those territories as endorsed by virtually the entire international community."

Ripped apart are shoddy performances of scholars like Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami. Lewis provided the elements of the theory of clash of civilisations, which Huntington propounded. Soon after September 11, Lewis was invited to meetings with President Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney, and members of the Defence Department's key Defence Policy Board, "to whom he offered his understanding of the Middle East [West Asia] and the Muslim world and of the role that the United States could and should play in them. Lewis now endorsed the use of U.S. military power to overthrow Saddam Husayn's regime and assured his listeners that after that was accomplished, the United States could without any great difficulty remould Iraq into a democracy which would serve as a beacon and model for the entire region."

Ajami's Arab origins made him "respectable". His views "were solicited and cited by high officials of the Bush administration. For example, in an August 2002 speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars laying out the case for war against Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Husayn's regime, Vice-President Dick Cheney declared that, `as for the reaction in the Arab street, the Middle East expert Professor Fouad Ajami predicts that after liberation, the streets, in Basra and Baghdad are sure to erupt in joy in the same way throngs in Kabul greeted the Americans'." Pupils like these get the tutors they deserve. On the McCarthyism that followed, Lockman writes: "Luminaries like Ajami and Lewis were seconded by a number of less well-known but more vociferous bulldogs of the right who, in the aftermath of September 11, seized the opportunity to try to delegitimise and silence those who disagreed with them."

The roots of bigotry lie deep in the West's Orientalist depiction of Islam formed over centuries. Lockman traces the dimensions of the development of Western study of Islam and of West Asia. "We are urged to be satisfied with stock depictions of bloodthirsty, fanatical Muslim terrorists who want to do us harm because they are evil and hate our way of life. Indeed, some do hate many of the things most Americans cherish about their country, and of course nothing justifies terrorism and murder. But we also very much need to understand what it is that motivates such people, what enables them to appeal for support and sympathy to a much larger number of Muslims, and why even a substantial number of non-Muslims in various parts of the world seemed to feel that September 11 was something the United States had coming to it." This is a work of solid scholarship.

In his commitment to the truth, Robert Fisk bridged the divide between scholarship and journalism. His book is a veritable encyclopaedia on recent politics in West Asia against the background of history; one of "the little army of historians who are writing history from beside the cannon's mouth", as a correspondent in Alfred Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent was described.

In this tour de force we become witnesses to wars and coups in several places only to be reminded, again and again, precisely what led to the turmoils. The result is more than reportage. It is a detailed and damning indictment of the West. Moral fervour does not obscure his vision; nor does it shape his judgment. "I suppose, in the end, the journalists try - or should try - to be the first impartial witnesses to history." An Israeli journalist corrected him. "No Robert, you're wrong. Our job is to monitor the centres of power." He does that all the way from Afghanistan to Israel.

The book begins with an interview with Osama bin Laden in 1997 and ends with the elections in Iraq in 2005. One gets some priceless nuggets of information. The British leader of the Anglo-American team which staged the coup in Iran in 1953 - Operation Ajax - was a scholar in Greek, C.M. Woodhouse. This is one of the all too few books to do justice to the 85 volumes of shredded documents that Iranian students seized from the U.S. Embassy in November 1979.

The revelations were shocking. Massoumeh Ebtekar, among the principal "invaders" of the embassy, saw it quite differently. "The CIA apparently believed that it could manipulate any revolution or political establishment if it could successfully infiltrate its top ranks early on," she wrote. "In Iran, the agency was particularly intent on doing so. After all, it had plenty of past experience." The "students of the Imam" found counterfeit identity cards and passports for CIA agents in the embassy, including stamps and seals for airport entry and exit visas in Europe and Asia, as well as 1,000 false Ghananian passports. Other documents dealt with pro-monarchists "who were involved in terror killings". Fisk aptly remarks: "If another Operation Ajax was ever considered in Washington, it surely died in November 1979."

One should not be surprised at Iraqi resistance in 2006. On September 23, 1919, The Times (London) correspondent reported: "I imagine that the view held by many English people about Mesopotamia is that the local inhabitants will welcome us because we have saved them from the Turks, and that the country only needs developing to repay a large expenditure of English lives and English money. Neither of these ideals will bear much examination... from the political point of view we are asking the Arab to exchange his pride and independence for a little Western civilisation, the profits of which must be largely absorbed by the expenses of administration."

Prof. Ahmed S. Haskin of the U.S. Naval War College has written an able account of Iraqi insurgency. He holds that the Iraqi state is a wreck. Warring groups will feast on "the carcass of the Iraqi state". That and a fierce civil war is what the U.S. achieved in Iraq.

Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein hated each other, a fact which U.S. intelligence glossed over and the pupils of Lewis and Ajami could not understand. But on February 13, 2003, Al Jazeera broadcast the former's message which showed that he was prepared to keep aside his hatred for Saddam and back resistance to the U.S. This was five weeks before the U.S. attack. The Pentagon paid a heavy price for ignoring it, policymakers the world over wreak harm when they shut their eyes to unpleasant realities.

It is a region with a deep sense of injury and wrong inflicted over the decades. Fisk concludes: "I think in the end we have to accept that our tragedy lies always in our past, that we have to live with our ancestors' folly and suffer for it, just as they, in their turn, suffered, and as we, through our vanity and arrogance, ensure the pain and suffering of our own children. How to correct history, that's the thing."

There can be no better guide to the fons et orego of the Palestine question than John Fisher's account of British policies during 1916-19. A Reader at the Public Record Office in London, he had delved into the archives in this study of Curzon's role during that period. He was acting Foreign Secretary before he was appointed Foreign Secretary. That was the high noon of British imperialism.

Many of the figures who shaped policy were Indian hands; Sir Henry McMahon of the McMahon Line, for instance. It was a war for the mastery of Asia. The book covers a vast region from Persia to Palestine extending to the Caucasus and includes Mesopotamia (the Iraq of today).

It sheds much light on the Balfour Declaration, which usurped Arab Palestine to be handed over to the Jews. Balfour rejected Arab interests as mere `prejudice'. It was Curzon who warned prophetically that Arabs would not be willing "to act merely as hewers of wood and drawers of water" to the Jews. Even then, he warned against the growing ambitions of Zionism which Chaim Weizmann made no effort to hide. Curzon wrote to Balfour on January 26, 1919: "I feel tolerably sure therefore that while Weizmann may say one thing to you or while you may mean one thing by a National Home, he is out for something quite different. He contemplates a Jewish State, a Jewish nation, a subordinate population of Arabs etc., ruled by Jews, the Jews in possession of the fat of the land, and directing the administration. He is trying to effect this behind the screen and under the shelter of British trusteeship. I do not envy those who wield the latter, when they realise the presence to which they are certain to be exposed."

Fisher points out that Curzon's disquiet regarding Zionism was understandable. "Reliable information suggested that in Palestine the Jews were outnumbered by Arabs by approximately nine to one. Moreover, Curzon had been alerted to Faisal's attempts to enlist Jewish support in his struggle with France and this additional dimension assumed growing significance in the following months. Above all, Curzon wished to prevent the sanctioning by his colleagues in Paris of an announcement along the lines of the programme outlined by Weizmann in his letter to Eder. In Curzon's view, this would lead to `disaster', to the establishing in Palestine of a `Jewish Empire', and to supplanting of Britain as the tutelary power."

That is just what came to pass 30 years later in May 1948 with consequences that are still unravelling before our eyes. The West held Arabs in contempt and trod over their lands and lives merrily.