Daily Times

The US-Israel alliance is
harmful to the US strategic interest of maintaining access to the control of Middle Eastern oil, for which purpose the US secretly supports authoritarian Arab states on the one hand and on the other encourages democratic movements when the same states become bellicose and appear to threaten US and Israeli interests in the region. Israel and oil could embroil the US in regional conflicts perpetually in the Middle East, and endless entanglements could, in the view of the author, deform not only the character of US nationalism but also adversely affect its democracy. US nationalism could warp into more radical and chauvinist positions. The lessons from Vietnam are that prolonged wars divide society and push leaders “in the direction of secretive, paranoid, authoritarian and illegal behaviour.”

It was the experience of the Holocaust that convinced most Jews that they needed a national state but Israel originally was an idea — conceived by a coterie of very rich Jews — that did not have much traction with the Jewish people generally. Throughout the history of the Jewish Diaspora, Jerusalem and the land around it was open for settlement and neither the Arabs nor the Ottomans who succeeded them as rulers prevented Jews from settling in Palestine but there was no great desire in Jewish hearts to return to the region. In the late 19th century the Ottoman Sultan did not give them permission to settle in Palestine but this was when he realised that their intention was to establish a state of their own within his empire. A petition to the British for the same resulted in a land offer for a Jewish state in the then British-ruled area in Africa, which later became Kenya and which the Jewish leaders rejected. Lieven says that the idea of Israel as a state became popular in the Jewish Diaspora communities due to Jewish fears of dissolution through intermarriage, decline of religious belief and practice, Jewish traditions, and the Yiddish language.

Palestinians were forcibly evicted from their homeland and their land was stolen to make way for the Jewish state. Denied for two generations by the Israelis, it is common knowledge now that the exodus of the Palestinians from their ancestral homeland in 1948 was not voluntary. It was planned and orchestrated by the Jewish leadership, who approved massacres of entire villages to terrorise Palestinians into evacuating the area. Menachem Begin, who became Israel’s prime minister in 1977, was the head of the Jewish terrorist group Irgun, which together with another such group massacred 107 Palestinians in the village of Deir Yassin in 1948. In addition to the cover up of Israeli crimes the Israeli government, for decades, refused to admit that the Palestinians ever existed as a separate nation as indicated by Golda Meir’s pernicious remark: “It was not as though there was a Palestinian people…and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.” In 1978 the Carter administration was criticised for using the words “homeland” and “legitimate rights” with reference to the Palestinian people. The consequence of Israeli lies was that Muslim reaction, violent as it was and continues to be, had to be explained as innate anti-Jewish savagery of the Arabs in particular and demonisation of Muslim societies and culture in general. The Jews did suffer persecution in the past and the persecution made Israelis paranoid, embittered and chauvinistic. Blind support for Israel extends these fears and sentiments to the US. It also distorts the US worldview by casting world opinion as “irredeemably malignant, anti-Semitic, and by extension anti-American.” The ill effects continue to US agencies and departments; prejudices against the CIA and State Department officials considered sympathetic to the Muslims — the ‘Arabists’ — prevent accurate analyses on the Middle East.

Perhaps the Israeli crimes against the Palestinians are not so damning in American eyes because there are parallels to Israeli behaviour in what the Americans themselves did to the Red Indians or Native Americans as they are now called. The last episode of American cruelty to the Red Indians was enacted at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in December 1890; it is described in detail in Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee (1970), by Dee Brown, an excellent book on the American Indian tragedy. Michael Moore, author of Stupid White Men (2001) and producer of Fahrenheit 9/11, lists Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee as one his favorite books and it is worth reading.

Writer’s note: The ideas in this piece of writing are mostly from Anatol Lieven’s edifying work America Right or Wrong. I have mostly paraphrased his views and added only a few of my own.

The writer is a freelance writer and an electrical engineer. He can be reached at shahid.rafi@yahoo.com