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>From the Wilderness
Sept 23 2004
Jurassic Park, Psuedo-events, and Prisons:
The fallout from US Torture at Abu Ghraib in Baghdad;
Basra; Mosul; Bagram AFB in Afghanistan; Ad Nauseam
by
Stan Goff
(Part V)
[If the "war on terror" were real, it would involve the cessation of
American terrorism against everybody else. It would also require a
serious examination of anti-American motives, since nobody on Planet
Grownup can possibly imagine young people blowing themselves up for
some abstract hatred of American "freedom." The Israel-Palestine
war-of-attrition would have to be examined (preferably while We the
People are wearing our thinking caps, having taken off those
super-cool hats that hold two beer cans each). Only a carefully
historical reappraisal of thwarted Arab nationalism can return "our
enemies" to the one interpretive category in which they can possibly
be disarmed: human beings with grievances.
Here Stan Goff encapsulates that enormous story of betrayal,
disgrace, and disaster. The metaphor of hubristic monster-building
applies just as cogently as it has in previous installations of this
long-running FTW series: Jurassic Park. With the failure of
multi-polar geostrategic tension, every ancient hatred is astir,
goaded by water-scarcity, Peak Oil, an Israeli policy of brutality
and a century's diplomacy of lies. Today all the demons are awake,
and among the noises which woke them, the riot of American sadism
(lately manifest in the torture at Abu Ghraib, Basra, Mosul, Bagram
AFB, et cetera) has been the loudest.
Thus Stan Goff: "The key to the whole strategy was establishment of
permanent forward staging bases for the projection of US military
power into Southwest Asia - the heart that pumps the black blood to
the rest of the world. What was awakened by this plan was the Israeli
itch to expand." -JAH]
SEPTEMBER 22, 2004: 1200 PDT (FTW) -- In the film Jurassic Park,
there are four consultants who are brought to the island to write
testimonials for investors: a paleontologist, a paleo-botanist, a
lawyer, and a chaos theorist. When they have only just arrived, their
tour jeeps pull onto a grassy hill and stop. One at a time, their
startled heads turn to see a living brontosaur.
The chaotician and the lawyer are sitting together, and the
chaotician exclaims, "You crazy son-of-a-bitch, you did it." The
lawyer, who until now had been skeptical and preoccupied with issues
of liability, gasps sotto voce, "We're gonna make a fortune on this
place."
Perhaps he worked for Halliburton.
* * *
The Zionist invasion of Palestine began with the help of wealthy
Palestinians: absentee landlords, to be precise. While this can be
(and has been) overstated as a way to justify Zionist settlement in
Palestine, it was a pragmatic mechanism by which the Zionists gained
a geographical foothold.
Palestinian society was organized and stable, in a semi-feudal
structure with the effendi (big landowners) owning most of the
agricultural land, which was worked by peasant tenants. In the cities
there was a vigorous comprador trade, particularly with the Ottoman
Empire. Palestinian Jews dwelt in this society without any
overwhelming friction between Jew and Arab. As modernity began to
encroach, more and more landlords used their fortunes to transform
themselves into compradors, and some went abroad. It was this element
that began to sell parcels of land, where they no longer lived but to
which they held title, to Zionists - many of whom were giving support
to the Turks in their genocide against the Armenians to curry their
favor.
>From this foothold on land purchased from absentee landlords, the
Zionists aggressively pursued expansion. According to Ralph
Schoenman:
In 1917, there were 56,000 Jews in Palestine and 644,000 Palestinian
Arabs. In 1922, there were 83,794 Jews and 663,000 Arabs. In 1931,
there were 174,616 Jews and 750,000 Arabs...
Poet Ghassan Kanafani writes:
Ownership by Jewish groups of urban and rural land rose from 300,000
dunums in 1929 [67,000 acres] to 1,250,000 dunums in 1930 [280,000
acres]. The purchased land was insignificant from the point of view
of mass colonization and of the settlement of the "Jewish problem."
But the expropriation of one million dunums - almost one third of the
agricultural land - led to a severe impoverishment of Arab peasants
and Bedouins.
By 1931, 20,000 peasant families had been evicted by the Zionists.
Furthermore, agricultural life in the underdeveloped world, and the
Arab world in particular, is not merely a mode of production, but
equally a way of social, religious and ritual life. Thus, in addition
to the loss of land, Arab rural society was being destroyed by the
process of colonization.1
This kind of social uprooting will inevitably lead to strife, but
whether that strife leads to reorganization and progress or
demoralization and victimization depends on indigenous leadership.
Palestine was controlled by the troops of the British Mandate, but
they could not prevent a Palestinian revolt that lasted from
1936-1939. When the revolt overwhelmed the resources of the British,
they armed the Zionists.
I want to include a somewhat lengthy excerpt from Schoenman here,
because it lays out the class composition of the Palestinian struggle
so clearly, and hints at the reasons for the fabled Arab "disunity"
that western pundits so enjoy citing:
A Royal Commission was established in 1937, under the direction of
Lord Peel, to determine the causes of the 1936 revolt. The Peel
Commission concluded that the two primary factors were Palestinian
desire for national independence and Palestinian fear of the
establishment of a Zionist colony on their land. The Peel Report
analyzed a series of other factors with uncommon candor. These were:
1. The spread of the Arab nationalist spirit outside Palestine;
2. Increasing Jewish immigration after 1933;
3. The ability of the Zionists to dominate public opinion in Britain
because of the tacit support of the government;
4. Lack of Arab confidence in the good intentions of the British
government;
5. Palestinian fear of continued land purchases by Jews from absentee
feudal landowners who sold off their landholdings and evicted the
Palestinian peasants who had worked the land;
6. The evasiveness of the Mandatory government about its intentions
regarding Palestinian sovereignty.
The national movement consisted of the urban bourgeoisie, feudal
landowners, religious leaders and representatives of peasants and
workers.
Its demands were:
1. An immediate stop to Zionist immigration;
2. Cessation and prohibition of the transfer of the ownership of Arab
lands to Zionist colonists;
3. The establishment of a democratic government in which Palestinians
would have the controlling voice...
...Ghassan Kanafani described the uprising:
"The real cause of the revolt was the fact that the acute conflict
involved in the transformation of Palestinian society from an Arab
agricultural-feudal-clerical one into a Jewish (Western) industrial
bourgeois one, had reached its climax ... The process of establishing
the roots of colonialism and transforming it from a British mandate
into Zionist settler colonialism ... reached its climax in the
mid-thirties, and in fact the leadership of the Palestinian
nationalist movement was obliged to adopt a certain form of armed
struggle because it was no longer able to exercise its leadership at
a time when the conflict had reached decisive proportions.
"The failure of the Mufti and other religious leaders, of feudal land
owners and the nascent bourgeoisie to support the peasants and
workers to the end, enabled the colonial regime and the Zionists to
crush the rebellion after three years of heroic struggle. In this the
British were aided decisively by the treachery of the traditional
Arab regimes, who were dependent upon their colonial sponsors."
The "disunity" of Arabs has become a western academic and media
legend because it fits so comfortably with western racial
stereotypes, both of the crafty and clannish Jews and the backbiting,
venal Arabs.
It is important to note in this regard that these racial-religious
explanations serve to conceal the very real economic and
politico-strategic agendas that are behind them. The British, and
then the Americans who helped destroy British imperialism then moved
to replace it, were concerned first and foremost with the threat of
independence (Arab nationalism) in the region. And Palestinian
resistance to Jewish immigration was not based on those immigrants'
being Jewish, but on the expropriation of land.
That does not preclude the use of anti-Semitism (i.e., hatred against
Jews in particular) by enemies of Zionism. It is this wrinkle that
makes the Zionist demagogy equating anti-Zionism to anti-Semitism
even more effective. One can point to instances of Arabs and others
using blatantly anti-Jewish language. As Maxime Rodinson pointed out
in his comprehensive study of Zionism:
Arab propaganda against Zionism also frequently utilizes arguments
and images borrowed from European anti-Semitism. That is deeply
disagreeable, but it does not justify one in identifying the two
phenomena. European anti-Semitism, in the sense of hatred of the Jews
in their very essence, considering them as possessed of a
fundamentally maleficent nature, was not born of any actions or
initiatives on the part of Jews. Whatever its real motives, the
reproaches it leveled against the Jews were purely mythical or, if
they referred to anything concrete, it was to phenomena and
activities connected with the humiliating situation imposed on the
Jews for more than a thousand years by European society. The prime
responsibility lay with the latter. Arab anti-Zionism, on the
contrary, even if it sometimes led to a comprehensive hatred of the
Jews, originated in a concrete initiative taken by some Jews, to the
detriment of the Arabs, namely, the plan to transform an Arab land
into a Jewish state.
The class contradictions inherent in a struggle of this type were not
limited to the Palestinians, but were characteristic of every
national liberation struggle against imperial domination. These same
class contradictions are evident even in the struggles of internal
oppressed nationalities in the United States, from Garveyism to the
American Indian Movement.
It is not possible to put Zionism and its relation to US foreign
policy into any perspective without relating it to the US struggle
against Arab nationalism and the consequences of the destruction of
Arab nationalism. Any meaningful sovereignty in the region explicitly
threatens US control over more than half the world's energy.
That is precisely why the word "sovereignty" is being so exquisitely
mangled by the Bush administration and the hack press right now to
describe as "sovereign" a US-appointed government, protected by a US
military occupation force.
Israel has been used as a weapon against Arab nationalism, while
paradoxically Zionist incursions were one of the catalysts of this
nationalism. Islamist political movements were supported by both the
US and Israel as a counterbalance to secular nationalist currents.
Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya, or the Islamic Resistance Movement
(Hamas), is a case in point. This year, an Israeli Apache helicopter
was used to assassinate Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the wheelchair-bound,
paraplegic, spiritual leader of Hamas. But Hamas was registered in
Israel by Yassin himself as a legal organization in 1978. That was
feasible because Israelis and Americans saw Hamas as a clerical
antagonist to the secular nationalism of the Palestine Liberation
Organization.
This same strategy led to the Taliban.
But things sometimes turn into their opposites. History has
transformed imperialist tools into anti-imperialists. How did
Islamism do this? What has been its trajectory?
At the same time that Hamas was first being organized, in the late
70s, there was a revolution forming in Iran against the US puppet
regime of Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi in the face of an economic
crisis created in large part by Pahlavi's grandiose schemes at a time
of terrible inflation and massive in-migration to the urban centers.
Because of the Shah's devastating policies and the extreme repression
he used to quell social unrest, and because he was identified with
his American sponsors, the Iranian revolution took on an
understandably bitter anti-American character. This animosity toward
the US was shared by both secular and clerical sectors within the
anti-Pahlavi movement. The exiled Shia cleric, Ayatollah Khomeni, who
was well regarded in Iran as a personality who could bridge these
sectors, was nurtured by the French to derail the Iranian communists
who had been extremely instrumental in the resistance to Pahlavi.
When we consolidated his power, he had 6,000 communist activists
killed and transformed the Iranian state into a theocracy.
It is easy to lose the forest for the trees here by focusing overmuch
on personalities, but bear in mind that this is the same period when
the Carter Administration's CIA had begun to draw the Soviets into
the Afghan trap, where the CIA was supporting the anti-communist
theocratic militias of the future Taliban, just as they had recently
supported Hamas as a counterweight to secular nationalism in
Palestine.
Suddenly, Islamists were at the center of a revolution in a key oil
state, Iran, and they had captured the US embassy on November 4,
1979, and taken 66 Americans hostage. Thirteen were released, but the
other 53 were kept captive until dear departed Ronald Reagan was
inaugurated on January 20, 1981.
This precipitated a political crisis for the Carter administration,
and Jimmy Carter's fate was sealed with the failure of Operation Rice
Bowl in April, 1980, the spectacular failure of Delta Force at its
first real mission. Partisans of the future Reagan administration,
veterans of the Bay of Pigs and others, were already in motion before
the election cutting deals with the Iranians that eventually leaked
as the Iran-Contra scandal. The Reagan administration veterans that
followed have been largely put back into play today by Bush II, with
Reagan's death-squad supporting Ambassador to Honduras, John
Negroponte, now taking over as the "ambassador" (read: Viceroy) in
Iraq.
The Islamists of the Iranian government moved to endorse Islamist
Hamas in Palestine as well as Hezbollah in Lebanon, and there was a
tectonic shift in regional forces. Friends were to be declared
enemies, and enemies, friends.
Hamas was drawn into an anti-American orbit against their old
supporters in the CIA as formerly anti-communist forces were
transformed by events into anti-Americans.
Ronald Reagan's emissary, Donald Rumsfeld, was then sent to make
friends with an Arab nationalist in order to cajole him into a war
with Iran. That nationalist was Saddam Hussein. By 1990, with the
Soviet Union crumbling, we would glimpse the new realignment of
forces in the world, a world where something would have to replace
imperial multilateralism just as imperial multilateralism had
replaced colonialism. Then Saddam - not because of his considerable
crimes, but precisely because of the Ba'ath Party accomplishments in
developing Iraq into a "modern" nation - would be transformed back
into our enemy. In fact, during the Iran-Contra hearings, it became
apparent, that the US betrayal of friend-Saddam was already being
planned by 1985.
Hamas became effective first through the provision of badly needed
social services in Gaza. This service provision has been the key to
expansion of Hamas influence and prestige among Palestinians. The
other event that contributed to their expansion was the decision by
the PLO, under extreme pressure, to displace its headquarters from
Palestine to Lebanon in the 80s, effectively ceding geographic
Palestine to Hamas.
There is one factor, however, that has contributed more than any
other to the increased standing of Hamas in recent years. That has
been the consistent perfidy and betrayal of the Israeli government in
every negotiation with the PLO and the Palestinian Authority. With
the launching of the Intifada in the 90s, the ranks of Hamas swelled
with new fighters, attracted by the unequivocal language of Hamas
about an independent Palestinian state and the necessity to wage a
protracted armed struggle against Israel.
Said Larry Johnson, a former State Department counter-terrorism
advisor, "The Israelis are their own worst enemies when it comes to
fighting terrorism. They are like a guy who sets fire to his hair,
then tries to put it out with a hammer."
But the facts are more subtle than that. The Israelis had already
heavily infiltrated Hamas when they were supporting it against
Arafat. While many of the collaborators inside Hamas have been
identified and eliminated, some remain, and this accounts for the
brutal efficacy of many Israeli operations against Hamas. Moreover,
the right-wing within the Israeli government prefers a strong Hamas
vis-à-vis the PLO, because they have no genuine intention of signing
treaties worth any more than the treaties signed between the US
government and the Indians. Hamas provides a better pretext for the
creeping holocaust that will depopulate expanding Israel of those
troublesome Arabs.
With Arab nationalism now apparently in tatters, with the Soviet
counterbalance consigned to history, a new vision was conceived by
the likes of Douglas Feith and Richard Perle and Dick Cheney. The
"New American Century" of unbridled American power in which a Pax
Americana presides over the shrinking world in which, like the
Titanic, there are too few lifeboats and hard choices must be made.
The key to the whole strategy was establishment of permanent forward
staging bases for the projection of US military power into Southwest
Asia - the heart that pumps the black blood to the rest of the world.
What was awakened by this plan was the Israeli itch to expand.
In October, 2003, as Ariel Sharon accelerated the slaughter of
Palestinians and the destruction of ever more Palestinian homes,
Lieutenant General "Jerry" Boykin, with whom I served in Delta in the
early 80s, a quietly crazed evangelical religious fanatic, as a token
of his deep appreciation of the necessity to win the hearts and minds
of the region, was publicly declaring that Muslims did not worship a
"real" God.
In the cases of both Sharon and Boykin, wrists were lightly slapped,
and business went on as usual - damn the consequences. Some might say
that this attests to the intractable stupidity of the Bush
administration, which it very well might, but I want to post an
alternative hypothesis.
There is seldom a singular cause for political policy. Most decisions
are "over-determined," that is, made in the face of a relationship of
forces originating in more than one phenomenon. It is very common
knowledge that the Republican Party is lashed to a frighteningly
large constituency of millenarian theocrats that believes with all
its heart that the End Time is nigh, and that for Jesus to come and
take them all home with him, Israel has to reclaim all the territory
under the crown of David, bulldoze the Dome of the Rock, and rebuild
the Temple that the Romans destroyed. This "mainstream" religion,
which claims Bishop Boykin as one of its own, is far larger than the
much-ballyhooed (even by proto-fascists like Buchanan) "Jewish
Lobby."
This does not, however, take into account that Democrats are just as
rabid in their support for Zionism as Republicans. When Congresswoman
Cynthia McKinney dared to criticize unqualified US support for
Israel, it was her own party that torpedoed her seat by running an
AIPAC-financed Primary smear campaign that was unparalleled in its
audacious mendacity and unbridled nastiness.
To coin a phrase, it's the region, it's the region, it's the region.
Translated, that means, it's the oil, it's the oil, it's the oil.
The US government does not see Israel primarily as a political asset
(or liability, for that matter). It sees it for what it is: a force
multiplier. For a few billion a year, Uncle Sam can maintain a lethal
modern surrogate military on the very border of the world's biggest
oil patch; one that is hostile in its very essence to the brown
people who have the audacity to have encamped for these few centuries
upon all that gasoline and fertilizer and plastic.
It should surprise no one that US troops have been trained by the
Israelis for the occupation of Iraq, including in the fine arts of...
ahem... interrogation.
It is not "Muslim paranoia" that invariably associates the occupation
of Palestine with the occupation of Iraq. In a very real sense, if
you just back up enough to get the whole perspective, this is
absolutely accurate. That the Israelis want lebensraum and the water
to live on it, and that the Americans want to control the oil to hang
onto their doddering empire, does not negate the fact that these
agendas are absolutely symbiotic.
US dependency on the Israelis as a mercenary force has only deepened
as the grand strategy of Cheney, Perle, Wolfowitz, and Rumsfeld has
sunk into the quagmire of an increasingly generalized Iraqi, and
regional, resistance.
The resistance is fueled by anti-Zionism, and so the Bush
administration now finds itself locked inside its own burning
automobile, with what might be a lake or might be a mirage in the
distance, and their only choice is to stamp down on the accelerator
to try and get there in time to prevent their own immolation.
Perhaps the UN can rescue them. It is standing alongside the road.
But standing there with it are a billion pissed-off human beings.
>From the Wilderness
Sept 23 2004
Jurassic Park, Psuedo-events, and Prisons:
The fallout from US Torture at Abu Ghraib in Baghdad;
Basra; Mosul; Bagram AFB in Afghanistan; Ad Nauseam
by
Stan Goff
(Part V)
[If the "war on terror" were real, it would involve the cessation of
American terrorism against everybody else. It would also require a
serious examination of anti-American motives, since nobody on Planet
Grownup can possibly imagine young people blowing themselves up for
some abstract hatred of American "freedom." The Israel-Palestine
war-of-attrition would have to be examined (preferably while We the
People are wearing our thinking caps, having taken off those
super-cool hats that hold two beer cans each). Only a carefully
historical reappraisal of thwarted Arab nationalism can return "our
enemies" to the one interpretive category in which they can possibly
be disarmed: human beings with grievances.
Here Stan Goff encapsulates that enormous story of betrayal,
disgrace, and disaster. The metaphor of hubristic monster-building
applies just as cogently as it has in previous installations of this
long-running FTW series: Jurassic Park. With the failure of
multi-polar geostrategic tension, every ancient hatred is astir,
goaded by water-scarcity, Peak Oil, an Israeli policy of brutality
and a century's diplomacy of lies. Today all the demons are awake,
and among the noises which woke them, the riot of American sadism
(lately manifest in the torture at Abu Ghraib, Basra, Mosul, Bagram
AFB, et cetera) has been the loudest.
Thus Stan Goff: "The key to the whole strategy was establishment of
permanent forward staging bases for the projection of US military
power into Southwest Asia - the heart that pumps the black blood to
the rest of the world. What was awakened by this plan was the Israeli
itch to expand." -JAH]
SEPTEMBER 22, 2004: 1200 PDT (FTW) -- In the film Jurassic Park,
there are four consultants who are brought to the island to write
testimonials for investors: a paleontologist, a paleo-botanist, a
lawyer, and a chaos theorist. When they have only just arrived, their
tour jeeps pull onto a grassy hill and stop. One at a time, their
startled heads turn to see a living brontosaur.
The chaotician and the lawyer are sitting together, and the
chaotician exclaims, "You crazy son-of-a-bitch, you did it." The
lawyer, who until now had been skeptical and preoccupied with issues
of liability, gasps sotto voce, "We're gonna make a fortune on this
place."
Perhaps he worked for Halliburton.
* * *
The Zionist invasion of Palestine began with the help of wealthy
Palestinians: absentee landlords, to be precise. While this can be
(and has been) overstated as a way to justify Zionist settlement in
Palestine, it was a pragmatic mechanism by which the Zionists gained
a geographical foothold.
Palestinian society was organized and stable, in a semi-feudal
structure with the effendi (big landowners) owning most of the
agricultural land, which was worked by peasant tenants. In the cities
there was a vigorous comprador trade, particularly with the Ottoman
Empire. Palestinian Jews dwelt in this society without any
overwhelming friction between Jew and Arab. As modernity began to
encroach, more and more landlords used their fortunes to transform
themselves into compradors, and some went abroad. It was this element
that began to sell parcels of land, where they no longer lived but to
which they held title, to Zionists - many of whom were giving support
to the Turks in their genocide against the Armenians to curry their
favor.
>From this foothold on land purchased from absentee landlords, the
Zionists aggressively pursued expansion. According to Ralph
Schoenman:
In 1917, there were 56,000 Jews in Palestine and 644,000 Palestinian
Arabs. In 1922, there were 83,794 Jews and 663,000 Arabs. In 1931,
there were 174,616 Jews and 750,000 Arabs...
Poet Ghassan Kanafani writes:
Ownership by Jewish groups of urban and rural land rose from 300,000
dunums in 1929 [67,000 acres] to 1,250,000 dunums in 1930 [280,000
acres]. The purchased land was insignificant from the point of view
of mass colonization and of the settlement of the "Jewish problem."
But the expropriation of one million dunums - almost one third of the
agricultural land - led to a severe impoverishment of Arab peasants
and Bedouins.
By 1931, 20,000 peasant families had been evicted by the Zionists.
Furthermore, agricultural life in the underdeveloped world, and the
Arab world in particular, is not merely a mode of production, but
equally a way of social, religious and ritual life. Thus, in addition
to the loss of land, Arab rural society was being destroyed by the
process of colonization.1
This kind of social uprooting will inevitably lead to strife, but
whether that strife leads to reorganization and progress or
demoralization and victimization depends on indigenous leadership.
Palestine was controlled by the troops of the British Mandate, but
they could not prevent a Palestinian revolt that lasted from
1936-1939. When the revolt overwhelmed the resources of the British,
they armed the Zionists.
I want to include a somewhat lengthy excerpt from Schoenman here,
because it lays out the class composition of the Palestinian struggle
so clearly, and hints at the reasons for the fabled Arab "disunity"
that western pundits so enjoy citing:
A Royal Commission was established in 1937, under the direction of
Lord Peel, to determine the causes of the 1936 revolt. The Peel
Commission concluded that the two primary factors were Palestinian
desire for national independence and Palestinian fear of the
establishment of a Zionist colony on their land. The Peel Report
analyzed a series of other factors with uncommon candor. These were:
1. The spread of the Arab nationalist spirit outside Palestine;
2. Increasing Jewish immigration after 1933;
3. The ability of the Zionists to dominate public opinion in Britain
because of the tacit support of the government;
4. Lack of Arab confidence in the good intentions of the British
government;
5. Palestinian fear of continued land purchases by Jews from absentee
feudal landowners who sold off their landholdings and evicted the
Palestinian peasants who had worked the land;
6. The evasiveness of the Mandatory government about its intentions
regarding Palestinian sovereignty.
The national movement consisted of the urban bourgeoisie, feudal
landowners, religious leaders and representatives of peasants and
workers.
Its demands were:
1. An immediate stop to Zionist immigration;
2. Cessation and prohibition of the transfer of the ownership of Arab
lands to Zionist colonists;
3. The establishment of a democratic government in which Palestinians
would have the controlling voice...
...Ghassan Kanafani described the uprising:
"The real cause of the revolt was the fact that the acute conflict
involved in the transformation of Palestinian society from an Arab
agricultural-feudal-clerical one into a Jewish (Western) industrial
bourgeois one, had reached its climax ... The process of establishing
the roots of colonialism and transforming it from a British mandate
into Zionist settler colonialism ... reached its climax in the
mid-thirties, and in fact the leadership of the Palestinian
nationalist movement was obliged to adopt a certain form of armed
struggle because it was no longer able to exercise its leadership at
a time when the conflict had reached decisive proportions.
"The failure of the Mufti and other religious leaders, of feudal land
owners and the nascent bourgeoisie to support the peasants and
workers to the end, enabled the colonial regime and the Zionists to
crush the rebellion after three years of heroic struggle. In this the
British were aided decisively by the treachery of the traditional
Arab regimes, who were dependent upon their colonial sponsors."
The "disunity" of Arabs has become a western academic and media
legend because it fits so comfortably with western racial
stereotypes, both of the crafty and clannish Jews and the backbiting,
venal Arabs.
It is important to note in this regard that these racial-religious
explanations serve to conceal the very real economic and
politico-strategic agendas that are behind them. The British, and
then the Americans who helped destroy British imperialism then moved
to replace it, were concerned first and foremost with the threat of
independence (Arab nationalism) in the region. And Palestinian
resistance to Jewish immigration was not based on those immigrants'
being Jewish, but on the expropriation of land.
That does not preclude the use of anti-Semitism (i.e., hatred against
Jews in particular) by enemies of Zionism. It is this wrinkle that
makes the Zionist demagogy equating anti-Zionism to anti-Semitism
even more effective. One can point to instances of Arabs and others
using blatantly anti-Jewish language. As Maxime Rodinson pointed out
in his comprehensive study of Zionism:
Arab propaganda against Zionism also frequently utilizes arguments
and images borrowed from European anti-Semitism. That is deeply
disagreeable, but it does not justify one in identifying the two
phenomena. European anti-Semitism, in the sense of hatred of the Jews
in their very essence, considering them as possessed of a
fundamentally maleficent nature, was not born of any actions or
initiatives on the part of Jews. Whatever its real motives, the
reproaches it leveled against the Jews were purely mythical or, if
they referred to anything concrete, it was to phenomena and
activities connected with the humiliating situation imposed on the
Jews for more than a thousand years by European society. The prime
responsibility lay with the latter. Arab anti-Zionism, on the
contrary, even if it sometimes led to a comprehensive hatred of the
Jews, originated in a concrete initiative taken by some Jews, to the
detriment of the Arabs, namely, the plan to transform an Arab land
into a Jewish state.
The class contradictions inherent in a struggle of this type were not
limited to the Palestinians, but were characteristic of every
national liberation struggle against imperial domination. These same
class contradictions are evident even in the struggles of internal
oppressed nationalities in the United States, from Garveyism to the
American Indian Movement.
It is not possible to put Zionism and its relation to US foreign
policy into any perspective without relating it to the US struggle
against Arab nationalism and the consequences of the destruction of
Arab nationalism. Any meaningful sovereignty in the region explicitly
threatens US control over more than half the world's energy.
That is precisely why the word "sovereignty" is being so exquisitely
mangled by the Bush administration and the hack press right now to
describe as "sovereign" a US-appointed government, protected by a US
military occupation force.
Israel has been used as a weapon against Arab nationalism, while
paradoxically Zionist incursions were one of the catalysts of this
nationalism. Islamist political movements were supported by both the
US and Israel as a counterbalance to secular nationalist currents.
Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya, or the Islamic Resistance Movement
(Hamas), is a case in point. This year, an Israeli Apache helicopter
was used to assassinate Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the wheelchair-bound,
paraplegic, spiritual leader of Hamas. But Hamas was registered in
Israel by Yassin himself as a legal organization in 1978. That was
feasible because Israelis and Americans saw Hamas as a clerical
antagonist to the secular nationalism of the Palestine Liberation
Organization.
This same strategy led to the Taliban.
But things sometimes turn into their opposites. History has
transformed imperialist tools into anti-imperialists. How did
Islamism do this? What has been its trajectory?
At the same time that Hamas was first being organized, in the late
70s, there was a revolution forming in Iran against the US puppet
regime of Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi in the face of an economic
crisis created in large part by Pahlavi's grandiose schemes at a time
of terrible inflation and massive in-migration to the urban centers.
Because of the Shah's devastating policies and the extreme repression
he used to quell social unrest, and because he was identified with
his American sponsors, the Iranian revolution took on an
understandably bitter anti-American character. This animosity toward
the US was shared by both secular and clerical sectors within the
anti-Pahlavi movement. The exiled Shia cleric, Ayatollah Khomeni, who
was well regarded in Iran as a personality who could bridge these
sectors, was nurtured by the French to derail the Iranian communists
who had been extremely instrumental in the resistance to Pahlavi.
When we consolidated his power, he had 6,000 communist activists
killed and transformed the Iranian state into a theocracy.
It is easy to lose the forest for the trees here by focusing overmuch
on personalities, but bear in mind that this is the same period when
the Carter Administration's CIA had begun to draw the Soviets into
the Afghan trap, where the CIA was supporting the anti-communist
theocratic militias of the future Taliban, just as they had recently
supported Hamas as a counterweight to secular nationalism in
Palestine.
Suddenly, Islamists were at the center of a revolution in a key oil
state, Iran, and they had captured the US embassy on November 4,
1979, and taken 66 Americans hostage. Thirteen were released, but the
other 53 were kept captive until dear departed Ronald Reagan was
inaugurated on January 20, 1981.
This precipitated a political crisis for the Carter administration,
and Jimmy Carter's fate was sealed with the failure of Operation Rice
Bowl in April, 1980, the spectacular failure of Delta Force at its
first real mission. Partisans of the future Reagan administration,
veterans of the Bay of Pigs and others, were already in motion before
the election cutting deals with the Iranians that eventually leaked
as the Iran-Contra scandal. The Reagan administration veterans that
followed have been largely put back into play today by Bush II, with
Reagan's death-squad supporting Ambassador to Honduras, John
Negroponte, now taking over as the "ambassador" (read: Viceroy) in
Iraq.
The Islamists of the Iranian government moved to endorse Islamist
Hamas in Palestine as well as Hezbollah in Lebanon, and there was a
tectonic shift in regional forces. Friends were to be declared
enemies, and enemies, friends.
Hamas was drawn into an anti-American orbit against their old
supporters in the CIA as formerly anti-communist forces were
transformed by events into anti-Americans.
Ronald Reagan's emissary, Donald Rumsfeld, was then sent to make
friends with an Arab nationalist in order to cajole him into a war
with Iran. That nationalist was Saddam Hussein. By 1990, with the
Soviet Union crumbling, we would glimpse the new realignment of
forces in the world, a world where something would have to replace
imperial multilateralism just as imperial multilateralism had
replaced colonialism. Then Saddam - not because of his considerable
crimes, but precisely because of the Ba'ath Party accomplishments in
developing Iraq into a "modern" nation - would be transformed back
into our enemy. In fact, during the Iran-Contra hearings, it became
apparent, that the US betrayal of friend-Saddam was already being
planned by 1985.
Hamas became effective first through the provision of badly needed
social services in Gaza. This service provision has been the key to
expansion of Hamas influence and prestige among Palestinians. The
other event that contributed to their expansion was the decision by
the PLO, under extreme pressure, to displace its headquarters from
Palestine to Lebanon in the 80s, effectively ceding geographic
Palestine to Hamas.
There is one factor, however, that has contributed more than any
other to the increased standing of Hamas in recent years. That has
been the consistent perfidy and betrayal of the Israeli government in
every negotiation with the PLO and the Palestinian Authority. With
the launching of the Intifada in the 90s, the ranks of Hamas swelled
with new fighters, attracted by the unequivocal language of Hamas
about an independent Palestinian state and the necessity to wage a
protracted armed struggle against Israel.
Said Larry Johnson, a former State Department counter-terrorism
advisor, "The Israelis are their own worst enemies when it comes to
fighting terrorism. They are like a guy who sets fire to his hair,
then tries to put it out with a hammer."
But the facts are more subtle than that. The Israelis had already
heavily infiltrated Hamas when they were supporting it against
Arafat. While many of the collaborators inside Hamas have been
identified and eliminated, some remain, and this accounts for the
brutal efficacy of many Israeli operations against Hamas. Moreover,
the right-wing within the Israeli government prefers a strong Hamas
vis-à-vis the PLO, because they have no genuine intention of signing
treaties worth any more than the treaties signed between the US
government and the Indians. Hamas provides a better pretext for the
creeping holocaust that will depopulate expanding Israel of those
troublesome Arabs.
With Arab nationalism now apparently in tatters, with the Soviet
counterbalance consigned to history, a new vision was conceived by
the likes of Douglas Feith and Richard Perle and Dick Cheney. The
"New American Century" of unbridled American power in which a Pax
Americana presides over the shrinking world in which, like the
Titanic, there are too few lifeboats and hard choices must be made.
The key to the whole strategy was establishment of permanent forward
staging bases for the projection of US military power into Southwest
Asia - the heart that pumps the black blood to the rest of the world.
What was awakened by this plan was the Israeli itch to expand.
In October, 2003, as Ariel Sharon accelerated the slaughter of
Palestinians and the destruction of ever more Palestinian homes,
Lieutenant General "Jerry" Boykin, with whom I served in Delta in the
early 80s, a quietly crazed evangelical religious fanatic, as a token
of his deep appreciation of the necessity to win the hearts and minds
of the region, was publicly declaring that Muslims did not worship a
"real" God.
In the cases of both Sharon and Boykin, wrists were lightly slapped,
and business went on as usual - damn the consequences. Some might say
that this attests to the intractable stupidity of the Bush
administration, which it very well might, but I want to post an
alternative hypothesis.
There is seldom a singular cause for political policy. Most decisions
are "over-determined," that is, made in the face of a relationship of
forces originating in more than one phenomenon. It is very common
knowledge that the Republican Party is lashed to a frighteningly
large constituency of millenarian theocrats that believes with all
its heart that the End Time is nigh, and that for Jesus to come and
take them all home with him, Israel has to reclaim all the territory
under the crown of David, bulldoze the Dome of the Rock, and rebuild
the Temple that the Romans destroyed. This "mainstream" religion,
which claims Bishop Boykin as one of its own, is far larger than the
much-ballyhooed (even by proto-fascists like Buchanan) "Jewish
Lobby."
This does not, however, take into account that Democrats are just as
rabid in their support for Zionism as Republicans. When Congresswoman
Cynthia McKinney dared to criticize unqualified US support for
Israel, it was her own party that torpedoed her seat by running an
AIPAC-financed Primary smear campaign that was unparalleled in its
audacious mendacity and unbridled nastiness.
To coin a phrase, it's the region, it's the region, it's the region.
Translated, that means, it's the oil, it's the oil, it's the oil.
The US government does not see Israel primarily as a political asset
(or liability, for that matter). It sees it for what it is: a force
multiplier. For a few billion a year, Uncle Sam can maintain a lethal
modern surrogate military on the very border of the world's biggest
oil patch; one that is hostile in its very essence to the brown
people who have the audacity to have encamped for these few centuries
upon all that gasoline and fertilizer and plastic.
It should surprise no one that US troops have been trained by the
Israelis for the occupation of Iraq, including in the fine arts of...
ahem... interrogation.
It is not "Muslim paranoia" that invariably associates the occupation
of Palestine with the occupation of Iraq. In a very real sense, if
you just back up enough to get the whole perspective, this is
absolutely accurate. That the Israelis want lebensraum and the water
to live on it, and that the Americans want to control the oil to hang
onto their doddering empire, does not negate the fact that these
agendas are absolutely symbiotic.
US dependency on the Israelis as a mercenary force has only deepened
as the grand strategy of Cheney, Perle, Wolfowitz, and Rumsfeld has
sunk into the quagmire of an increasingly generalized Iraqi, and
regional, resistance.
The resistance is fueled by anti-Zionism, and so the Bush
administration now finds itself locked inside its own burning
automobile, with what might be a lake or might be a mirage in the
distance, and their only choice is to stamp down on the accelerator
to try and get there in time to prevent their own immolation.
Perhaps the UN can rescue them. It is standing alongside the road.
But standing there with it are a billion pissed-off human beings.