America Right or Wrong

by Lieven, Anatol;

  This radical imbalance clearly makes Israel a special case. It makes the United States morally complicit in Israel’s crimes, not only in the eyes of the world, but in reality, and it gives Americans both the right and the duty to put pressure on Israel to end the occupation of the Palestinian territories.

  The United States’ need to bring about an end to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is also dictated on purely realist grounds, especially in the context of the “war against terrorism.” Israeli strategies and tactics in that conflict, and U.S. support for Israel, are central to how a large majority of Muslims view the United States and U.S. policies in the Muslim world. This fact has been attested to by an almost endless procession of opinion polls and media reports, including surveys by the State Department, and is not and should not be open to serious question.53

  This combination of factors also critically affects how Europeans view U.S. strategy in the region, and contribute enormously to European doubts about the wisdom and sanity of American leadership. The refusal among many Americans to recognize this, and the vilification by many of European motives for unease at Israel’s behavior, also help to drive a deeper wedge between the United States and Europe. One of the greatest hopes that Europeans invested in President Obama was that he would bring about peace between Israel and the Palestinians. He still receives credit for having tried, but his administration’s complete failure—as of 2012—to actually achieve anything has only increased European concerns about the U.S. political system as a whole.

  Thus the debate in Europe in 2003–2004 on Bush’s plan for developing the Middle East, the role of Israel, and unconditional U.S. support for Israel featured prominently as reasons for skepticism. This factor was barely mentioned in many U.S. reports and analyses of the difficulties over the issue between the United States and Europe—leaving the impression that European resistance was motivated chiefly by “petulance” or “anti-Americanism.”54

  The “Love Affair”

  The widespread failure in the United States to address these issues has become especially striking and especially dangerous since 9/11 emphasized with dreadful force the threat to the United States and the West from terrorist groups based within Muslim societies. To most outside observers, including ones in countries and governments closely allied with the United States, it is apparent—as implied by Tony Blair in the remark quoted earlier in this chapter—that Israel has ceased to be the “vital strategic ally” of the United States that it was during the cold war.55 It has become instead a very serious strategic liability to the United States and its allies in their effort to fight Islamist and Arab nationalist terrorism.

  This is indeed demonstrated by Israel’s role, or rather non-role, in the Iraq wars of 1991 and 2003, in which Israeli forces did not participate. They were, of course, begged by Washington not to participate openly, so as not to infuriate the Arab world and risk disastrously spreading these conflicts. Strategic allies are, after all, supposed to come into their own when there is a conflict in their region. It is a funny kind of ally that has to be asked to go away and keep quiet so as not to cause greater trouble.

  An even more astonishing insight into the nature of the relationship between Israel and the United States—and Israeli assumptions about that relationship—is to be found in the memoirs of Dov Zakheim, under-secretary and chief financial officer at the Department of Defense in the Bush administration from 2001 to 2004. Zakheim is an Orthodox Jew and a passionate supporter of Israel, but records the following exchange in 2003:

  The Israelis did offer to provide materiel support for the U.S. efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan and did not insist on taking credit for it publicly. Initially I was delighted by the offer on two counts. First, the Israeli military was reputed to be among the world’s best, and its systems would be a welcome addition to our own. And second, the United States provided Israel with billions of dollars worth of military assistance, and it seemed appropriate, at least to me, that Israel should offer to help America in its own time of need. But then the Israelis told me that the U.S. government would “of course” have to buy whatever it was that Israel made available. I was not amused, and told them “thanks, but no thanks.”56

  Before 1991, the major U.S. military intervention in the Middle East was that in Lebanon in 1983—a debacle that was made necessary by Israel’s prior invasion of Lebanon. This intervention led to hundreds of unnecessary American dead, and increased hostility toward America in the region, while bringing the United States no strategic or political gain whatsoever. The terms of the U.S.–Israeli alliance are not a case of the tail wagging the dog, they represent the tail whirling the unfortunate dog around the room and banging its head against a wall.

  In the context of either a realist or an ethical international tradition, there is of course nothing wrong in a U.S. commitment to Israel based on a sense of cultural and ethnic kinship, nor in U.S. willingness to make geopolitical sacrifices for the sake of defending Israel. This, after all, was the position of Britain vis-à-vis its former white colonies long after they had become politically independent from Britain, and even when some had ceased to be real strategic assets.57

  In the case of Israel’s role in the U.S.–Israel alliance, alas, a darker historical parallel suggests itself. If anything, the U.S.–Israel alliance is beginning to take on some of the same mutually calamitous aspects of Russia’s commitment to Serbia in 1914—a great power guarantee that encouraged parts of the Serbian leadership to behave with criminal irresponsibility in their encouragement of irredentist claims against Austria, leading to a war that was ruinous for Russia, Serbia, and the world.58

  One might almost say that as a result of the way in which the terms of the U.S.–Israel alliance have been set, the United States and Israel have changed places. The United States, which should feel protected both by the oceans and by matchless military superiority, is cast instead in the role of an endangered Middle Eastern state that is under severe threat from terrorism, and which also believes itself to be in mortal danger from countries with a tiny fraction of its power. Meanwhile, thanks largely to support from the United States, Israel has become a kind of superpower, able to defy its entire region, and Europe as well. This is not only bad for the United States, it is terribly bad for Israel itself, for reasons that will be set out later in this chapter. For Israel is not a superpower. It is rich and powerful, but it is still a small Middle Eastern country that will have to seek accommodations with its neighbors if it is ever to live in peace. Blind and largely unconditional U.S. support has enabled Israeli governments to avoid facing this fact, with consequences that are likely to prove utterly disastrous for Israel itself in the long run.

  As in the case of Serbia and powerful Pan-Slavist sections of pre-1914 Russian public and official opinion, so in the case of Israel have important portions of U.S. opinion (by no means only Jewish) over the past half century come to view the United States and Israel as almost one country, so tightly identified with each other as to transcend America’s own identity and interests. They genuinely believe in an “identity of interests between the Jewish state and the United States.”59 The relationship has been described as a “love affair,” or in the words of Governor Jerry Brown of California, “I love Israel. If you would show me a map and ask me to identify Israel, I probably wouldn’t find it. But Israel is in my heart.”60

  The roots of this “love affair” long precede the foundation not only of Israel, but of the United States itself, and lie ultimately in the Old Testament–centered religion of the American Protestant tradition. The acknowledgement (conscious or subconscious) of Israel as a form of chosen nation was closely related to the long tradition in American thought examined in chapter 2, and dating back to the first settlers, that identifies America as “God’s new Israel.” In the words of a sermon by the Reverend Abiel Abbot in 1799, “it has often been remarked that the people of the United States come nearer to a parallel with Ancient Israel, than any other nation upon the glo
be. Hence Our American Israel is a term frequently used; and common consent allows it apt and proper.”61

  This affinity has continued down the generations and must be set against the snobbish WASP anti-Semitism (directed mainly against the East European Jewish immigrants who arrived in the United States from the 1880s on, rather than the longer-established Germans and Sephardim). To it was added a strong liberal identification with the Western democratic culture of Israel’s founding generation.62

  Less openly acknowledged, but immensely important, has been a “Jacksonian” respect for Israel’s tough, militarist society and its repeated victories in war, and for the military achievements and the macho personal style of Israeli soldiers-turned politician, like Ariel Sharon. This became especially important after 1967, when Israel’s crushing victory over superior odds in a morally justified war of self-defense provided a measure of psychological compensation for America’s own defeat in Vietnam.63

  There is, however, a darker side to this, recalled by T. R. Fehrenbach’s words on Texan memory. The conquest of land from savage enemy peoples remains central to most of the history of white North America. Gordon Welty, among others, sees a strong affinity between the “muscular theology” of the Israeli Fundamentalist Right and that of the American pioneer tradition: “Since the ‘frontier’ of America is gone, they seek to re-create it elsewhere.”64 This tradition is reflected in Donald Rumsfeld’s notorious remark of 2002 concerning the Jewish settlements on the West Bank: “Focusing on settlements at the present time misses the point…Settlements in various parts of the so-called occupied area…were the result of a war, which they [the Israelis] won.”65

  The circumstances of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict since the 1930s, and the creation of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories since 1967, have also created a parallel between the situation of Israel and that of the American Indian frontier. In such cases, soldiers and civilians are mixed up together and fight, and the distinction between them often becomes blurred. Media attention has been focused on terrorism by Palestinians, but this takes place against a backdrop of continual low-level civilian violence on both sides: stone throwing and other attacks on settlers by Palestinian youths, and vigilante-style behavior by the settlers.66

  Thus Amos Elon described Meir Har-Zion, the famous paratrooper who combined his official military service in the 1950s with private freelance raids and reprisals against the Arabs: “Unsparing of himself and others, he was brutally indiscriminate in inflicting punishment upon his adversaries. He began to personify an Israeli version of the Indian Fighters in the American Wild West. Laconically killing Arab soldiers, peasants and townspeople in a kind of fury without hatred, he remained cold-blooded and thoroughly efficient, simply doing a job and doing it well.”67

  Of course, in this case as in that of the American frontier, to recall the ferocity of the Israeli fighters does not involve in any way glossing over the barbarity of their Palestinian and Arab opponents. These were and are savage wars on both sides. However, the chance to end the conditions that exacerbated such conflicts has been passed up by Israel through the settlement policy, as well as by Palestinian groups through their continued pursuit of terrorism.

  Israel’s development since 1967 into what Meron Benvenisti has called a herrenvolk Democracy, with power and status held by a ruling ethnicity, also corresponded to a core part of the “Jacksonian” ethos in the United States, at least until the 1960s.68 Such beliefs formed a strong subtext to works like Leon Uris’s fantastically popular novel Exodus (20 million copies sold by the 1990s, placing it in the same top category of success as the millenarian novels of Hal Lindsey and Tim LaHaye) and the film based on it.69

  This identification with Israel would not matter much to U.S. and Western security, except that over the same period the wider Arab (and to a lesser extent Muslim) worlds have come equally to identify with the Palestinians in their struggle with the Israelis. The United States has a separate hegemonic agenda in the region, which is focused on control of access to oil, the deterrence or removal of hostile states, and the attempt to develop states and societies so as to ward off state failure, anti-Western revolution, or both.

  This task would be difficult enough in itself, but it is made immeasurably more difficult by the embroilment of the United States in an essentially national conflict with the Palestinians and their Arab backers. The overthrow of pro-U.S. regimes in Egypt and Tunisia, and the electoral victories of Islamist parties in those countries, seems likely to worsen the U.S. position still further. This is especially true of Egypt, which because it borders on Israel and the Gaza Strip, may find itself drawn into new clashes with Israel even if its government would prudently wish to avoid these.

  So as a result of a combination of Israel and oil, the United States finds itself pinned to a conflict-ridden and bitterly anti-American region in a way without precedent in its history. In all other regions of the world, the United States has been able to either help stabilize regional situations in a way that broadly conforms to its interests (Europe, Northeast Asia, Central America), or, if regional hostility is too great and the security situation too intractable, to withdraw (as from Mexico in 1917 and Indochina in the early 1970s).

  If the result of U.S. entanglement in the Middle East is unprecedented embroilment in a series of conflicts, then this is likely to severely damage not only U.S. global leadership, but the character of U.S. nationalism, and even perhaps U.S. democracy. As the period of the Vietnam War indicated, prolonged war can bitterly divide American society and create severe problems for public order, and it may also help push the American government in the direction of secretive, paranoid, authoritarian, and illegal behavior.

  America’s regional position is not only worsened by the increased hostility that its support for Israel arouses among Muslims and in the former colonial world generally, equally important perhaps is that the violent nationalist passions that this conflict has engendered within U.S. society have made it much more difficult for that society to think clearly about its strategy in the Middle East and its relations with a range of countries around the world. The Obama administration attempted to rethink U.S. strategy in 2008–2012, and did manage to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq. However, elsewhere in the Middle East, it has found itself stuck with many of the same policies as the Bush administration—above all, because the attachment of the U.S. political elites to Israel made any wider and deeper rethink extremely difficult. As with Pan-Slavism’s role in Russian nationalism before 1914, the nature of the identification with Israel has become an integral part of the entire U.S. nationalist mixture and has helped influence U.S. nationalism in the direction of more radical and chauvinist positions.

  Once again, this is not to criticize the principle of American identification with and support for Israel, which is, in itself, entirely legitimate, just as it is in the case of Armenia, Poland, or other countries with which large numbers of Americans retain close ethnic ties.70 It is the combination of the unconditional terms of this commitment with Israeli policies that are so dangerous.71 Compare this issue with the role of other ethnic lobbies: partly as a result of the influence of the Polish lobby in the United States, the United States strongly supported the accession of Poland and other Central European countries to NATO and the European Union. A condition of these accessions, however, was that the countries concerned should be fully democratic, should give fair and equal treatment to their ethnic minorities, and should have no unresolved territorial disputes with their neighbors.

  A Tragic Imperative

  The above propositions would be assented to by the overwhelming majority of the educated populations of Britain and America’s other key allies in the world, and indeed by the great majority of people in the world who observe the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. They are very difficult to refute from the standpoint of the American Creed, at least as this has been defined during the decades since World War II.

  It may well be the difficulty
of defending their position within the scope of basic liberal principles that explains in part the hysteria among Israeli partisans that too often surrounds—and suppresses—attempts at frank discussion of these issues in America, and which is one of the most worrying aspects of the U.S. foreign policy scene. Of course, the principal reason for this atmosphere is the appalling crime and the terrible memory of the Holocaust, and its effects in deterring criticism of Israel and creating a belief in the legitimacy of Israeli demands for absolute security. The image of the Holocaust has been used deliberately by the Israeli lobby to consolidate support for Israel in the United States and elsewhere, but it also emerges quite naturally and spontaneously from Jewish and Jewish American consciousness.

  However, whatever the natural, legitimate, and understandable roots of unconditional loyalty to Israel, the effects it must be said often resemble wider patterns of nationalism in the world. One of the saddest experiences of visits to countries experiencing national disputes and heightened moods of nationalism is to meet with highly intelligent, civilized, and moderate individuals whose capacity for reason and moderation vanishes as soon as the conversation touches on conflicts involving their own nation or ethnicity. Otherwise universally accepted standards of behavior, argument, and evidence are suspended, facts are conjured from thin air, critics are demonized, wild accusations are leveled, and rational argument becomes impossible.

  I observed this as a journalist in the southern Caucasus in the run-up to the wars there in the early 1990s, and more than a decade earlier when visiting the then Yugoslavia as a student. It was therefore with dismay that I found exactly the same pattern repeating itself at dinner parties in Washington, DC, and New York as soon as the conversation touched on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Also immensely sad and troubling is to see ethical principles and intellectual standards crumble at the touch of national allegiance among scholars and thinkers whose work you deeply admire.72