July/August 2006

http://alawda.newjerseysolidarity.org

Does the Tail Wag the Dog?

Why the US is hell-bent on supporting “Israel”, Part 1

Here's a bit of Palestinian history. It begins in Clermont, a city in France. The year is 1095, and nobles and clerics are gathered to hear the words of Pope Urban II. He tells them a lurid tale. Christians in Muslim-ruled Palestine are being forcibly circumcised and their blood spilled on the tomb of Christ. He urges the Christians of Europe, "rich and poor," to take up arms and free the "Holy Land" from a "base race that worships demons," as he calls Muslims.

Like Bush's tales of Iraqi WMDs and Qaeda connections, the Pope's story was a complete invention. Christians and other religious minorities in the Muslim Middle East enjoyed much more freedom than did non-Christians in feudal Europe.

It didn't matter. The assembled lords and clerics ordered, “God wills it,” and the Crusades began. Four years later Christian knights seized Al Quds (Jerusalem) and massacred its Muslim and Jewish inhabitants. The pious knights also grabbed all the gold and silver they could find. For the next two centuries, generation after generation of European knights "took up the cross" to kill and be killed on battlefields from Akka to Edessa.

It could have been called a quagmire. Irrational. Religious zeal gone mad. But for the European feudal order and its political party, the Catholic Church, the Crusades were needed. The feudal lords of western Europe were running out of land. Because of the law of primogeniture--inheritance by the firstborn male--the country was filled with landless junior knights and nobles, and they became armies of plunderers. Constant wars and raiding hurt the incomes of kings, lords and bishops.

At Clermont the Pope made direct appeal to these disinherited parasites: "Let those who for a long time have been robbers now become knights. Let those who have been fighting against their brothers and relatives now fight in a proper way against the barbarians. Let those who have been serving as mercenaries for small pay now obtain the eternal reward."

The medieval Church, by the way, didn't only launch Crusades against Muslims. Saxons, French "heretics", Lithuanians, Latvians and Eastern Orthodox Slavs were also butchered in the name of Christ. The leaders of the Fourth Crusade (1204) decided it was too much trouble to go all the way to Palestine and looted Greek Orthodox Constantinople instead.

THE NEW CRUSADES

Today, many people feel that US policy in the Middle East is irrational. Decades of support for Israeli racism has antagonized Arab and Muslim lands, which hold the largest known oil reserves. And it is said to have made the US a target for "Islamic terrorism."

In the 1973 war, Nixon's backing of Israel brought the US and USSR to the nuclear brink. It led to the OPEC oil embargo and price hikes that (bad) economists say caused a global recession.

Now, Bush's occupation of Iraq is wearing down the U.S. military and running up the deficit. But instead of pulling out, the Bush regime--in concert with Israel--is planning war against Iran. A war that would likely coincide with an Israeli attack on Syria and the Palestine Authority. A war that could mean confrontation with Russia and China. A war that could turn nuclear.

What could possibly explain such madness? Bush's alleged stupidity? Die-hard Christian fundamentalist Armageddon ideology, which includes a strong belief in Israel? Or the decades-long influence in Washington of the American Israeli Public Action Committee, the notorious Israel Lobby.

The latter view has gained increased attention because of a widely circulated paper called "The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy."

It is written by professors John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago Political Science Department and Stephen Walt of the JFK School of Government at Harvard. Their conclusions are supported by progressive writers like James Petras. But they are wrong.

The paper accurately details the vast financial and political support that the US has lavished on Israel. "Washington has provided Israel with a level of support dwarfing that given to any other state. It has been the largest annual recipient of direct economic and military assistance since 1976, and is the largest recipient in total since World War Two, to the tune of well over $140 billion (in 2004 dollars). Israel receives about $3 billion in direct assistance each year, roughly one-fifth of the foreign aid budget, and worth about $500 a year for every Israeli. ...

"Other recipients get their money in quarterly installments, but Israel receives its entire appropriation at the beginning of each fiscal year and can thus earn interest on it. Most recipients of aid given for military purposes are required to spend all of it in the US, but Israel is allowed to use roughly 25 per cent of its allocation to subsidise its own defence industry. It is the only recipient that does not have to account for how the aid is spent, which makes it virtually impossible to prevent the money from being used for purposes the US opposes, such as building settlements on the West Bank. Moreover, the US has provided Israel with nearly $3 billion to develop weapons systems, and given it access to such top-drawer weaponry as Blackhawk helicopters and F-16 jets. Finally, the US gives Israel access to intelligence it denies to its Nato allies and has turned a blind eye to Israel’s acquisition of nuclear weapons."

It asks, "Why has the US been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of another state?" It concludes that the the Israel Lobby "has managed to divert US foreign policy far from what American national interest would otherwise dictate."

What the professors fail to understand--or at least pretend not to--is that the US is not "one nation, indivisible." It is a class society. As President Calvin Coolidge proclaimed, "The business of America is business." When politicians, Republican or Democratic, speak of "our national interest," they mean what makes Wall Street richer. And U.S. actions in the Middle East--from arming the Israeli war machine to invading Iraq--have made Wall Street, especially Big Oil, very rich indeed.

Yes, the Israel Lobby does exist. So do racist cops. But it is not the bigots on the beat who make the decisions that cause mass unemployment in Black communities and the mass imprisonment of Black youth. That is done by people of wealth and power. The police are among their enforcers.

The board members of AIPAC may be wealthier than the average cop. But they are small fry compared to the Rockefellers, Morgans, Duponts and other corporate dynasties who own the real wealth of this country. AIPAC and other Zionist organizations are powerful. But their power rests on their utility to Corporate America and the Military-Industrial Complex.

THIS GUN FOR HIRE

From its inception in 19th-century Europe, Zionism was a mercenary movement. While brave Jewish workers fought and died for socialist ideals, the founders of Zionism shopped their services to competing colonial powers. The offer: You sponsor our settlements, and we will defend your colonial interests.

In 1902, Theodore Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, wrote in his diary, "The figures in my chess game now are Cecil Rhodes (with whom I am to meet after his return from Scotland); Roosevelt, the new President (through Gotthiel); the King of England (through the Bishop of Ripon); the Czar (through General Von Hess), etc."

To Rhodes, the British plunderer who created Rhodesia, Herzl wrote, "You are being invited to help make history. That cannot frighten you nor will you laugh at it. ... It doesn't involve Africa but a piece of Asia Minor, not Englishmen but Jews. But had this been on your path, you would have done it by now. ... How then do I happen to turn to you? Because it is something colonial."

Herzl also wrote to Lord Rothschild: "You may claim high credit from your government if you strengthen English influence east of the Mediterranean by a great colonization of our people at a middle point of Egyptian and Indo-Persian interests."

Herzl may have thought he was manipulating captains and kings. But the Zionist project in Palestine only became reality when the British crown found it useful to, in the words of U.S. agent William Yale, "introduce another power in opposition to Islam, a power that would be a protection to the Suez Canal, a people under eternal obligation to the British." Eliazer Liebenstein of the Zionist Labor Party wrote in 1934, "England needs the Jews in order to prevent the Arabs from becoming too strong and in order to have protection against an Arab movement which aims at emancipation of a united Arab Middle Orient from English domination."

Vladimir Jabotinsky, founder of the terrorist Irgun Zvai Leumi and forefather of the Likud Party, also put it clearly: "Should Palestine remain Arab, Palestine would follow the orbit of Arab destinies--federation of Arab countries and elimination of all traces of European influence. But a Palestine predominantly Jewish, Palestine as a Jewish state ... will in the interests of its own preservation always seek to lean upon some powerful Empire, non-Arab and non-Mohammedan ... This is an almost providential basis for a permanent alliance between England and a Jewish (but only a Jewish ) Palestine."

Socialists of the time understood the game. At its 1918 conference, the British Socialist Party called the Balfour Declaration a "veiled attempt at the annexation of Palestine and also a means to enlist the assistance of Jews the world over for the imperialist ends of Great Britain and its Allies." The resolution warned that "the conversion of Palestine into a Jewish State would mean the Jews would be used as a tool by the capitalists all over the world."

British troops and British-armed and -trained Zionist settlers worked together in the '20s and '30s to drive Palestinian peasants off their land and suppress the Arab independence struggle. The Haganah, Israel's future army, was armed and trained by the British to protect the British-owned pipeline that brought Iraqi oil to the Mediterranean. If insurgents attacked the pipeline, the Haganah would strike the nearest village.

It took 40,000 British troops and terror bombing by the Royal Air force to crush the 1936-38 revolt in Palestine. But facing war with Germany, Britain felt compelled to try and limit Zionist settlement. This concession to the Arab struggle led some Zionist groups to attack British targets--a limited struggle that could be compared to contradictions between Britain and white settlers in Rhodesia or the Unionist gangs in northern Ireland. But by this time powerful forces in the U.S. were supporting the Zionist project. As early as 1918, Yale had predicted, "A Jewish state in Palestine will inevitably fall under the control of American Jews, who will work out along Jewish lines American ideas and American civilization; a Jewish commonwealth in Palestine will develop into an outpost in the Orient."

Said David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister: "The center of gravity of our political efforts had shifted from Britain to America, who was making sure of being the world's leading power."

In 1945, Walter Lippman, who coined the phrase "American Century," wrote, "We must be present in the Middle East--present somewhere, for example, at the port of Haifa, exercising influence not only from the distance of Washington, but influence radiating from some local point of actual American power."

The timing was no coincidence. The U.S., victorious in World War II, was moving to replace Britain, France, Belgium and Holland as the economic overlord of Africa and Asia. The 1945 Quincy Agreement between President Roosevelt and Saudi King Abdel Aziz had guaranteed the Rockefeller-owned Arabian-American Oil Company (ARAMCO) a stranglehold on Arabian oil.

But no more than in Latin America could Corporate America depend on the good will of the people it was robbing or the stability of hated regimes. U.S. plunder of Latin America was backed up by the U.S. Marine Corps. In the oil-rich Middle East, Corporate America needed an enforcer on the spot. One that could serve U.S. interests with what covert-operations types call "plausible deniability."

President Truman strong-armed the UN General Assembly into partitioning Palestine for the same reason he created the CIA, launched a genocidal war in Korea and helped Winston Churchill massacre Greek Resistance fighters. It was all part of building a global empire for U.S. monopolies.

The Israeli state owes its existence and power to U.S. dollars and political support. And virtually everything it has done, every war it has waged, has directly benefitted Big Oil, Wall Street, the Pentagon and the U.S. Military-Industrial Complex.

Yes, Israel has its own wishes--so does an attack dog on a leash. But it cannot realize those wishes without its master's approval. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz summed up the relationship in 1953: "Israel is to be kind of a watchdog. Israel's job is to punish one or a number of neighboring countries whose lack of politeness to the West becomes too much." The article continued, "One must not fear Israel will use a violent policy against the Arab countries if this would be clearly against the interests of America and Britain."

Of course, to understand how Israel serves U.S. corporate interests it is necessary to understand what those interests are. And that is something both media and politicians do their best to obscure.

BLOOD AND OIL

There is a slogan in the antiwar movement: "No blood for oil." It's a catchy chant, but it's misleading. U.S. corporations covet Middle East oil primarily as a commodity--a source of profit. Long before the U.S. imported a drop of oil from the Middle East, seven U.S. and British firms monopolized the world oil market through their ownership of Arab and Iranian fields. Iraqi crude, which cost 7 cents a barrel to produce in 1960, was sold by the oil majors for the same price as oil from the U.S., which averaged $1.73 a barrel to produce. Such practices brought U.S. oil companies $13 billion in profits from their Middle East holdings between 1948 and 1960. That was half the return on all overseas investment by U.S. companies in those years.

But this lucrative arrangement was jeopardized by the anticolonial tide sweeping Asia, Africa and Latin America, including the Arab world. The 1952 Egyptian Revolution, led by Gamal Abdel Nasser, toppled a British-imposed king, nationalized the Suez Canal and used its income to set up an institute to help Arab countries develop their own oil resources. (Nasser, whose government brought health care and education to the masses of Egyptians for the first time, was called "Hitler on the Nile" by U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, a former oil company lawyer whose brother headed the CIA. Dulles failed to mention that he himself had supported the real Hitler, the one on the Rhine, before World War II.)

In 1958 a popular revolution in Iraq threw out the British-created Hashemite monarchy and challenged Western ownership of that country's oil. Abdel Karim Kassem, the president of the new Iraqi republic, pioneered the creation of the Organization of Oil-Producing Countries (OPEC) to demand a bigger share of oil revenue for the producing countries. Said Kassem: "We are not fighting the oil companies to get an additional 7 million dinars. We are fighting for the industrialization of our republic and an end to our dependence on the sale of crude oil."

In 1961 Algeria won freedom from France after seven years of war and the murder of over 1 million Algerians by the French army. In 1962 a popular revolution overthrew the feudal regime in North Yemen on the Arabian peninsula, posing a direct threat to the Saudi royal family and ARAMCO's $400-million-a-year oil fields. The same year a guerrilla war for independence began in British-ruled southern Yemen. In 1966 the left wing of the Baath Party came to power in Syria and nationalized ARAMCO's Trans-Arabian Pipeline that carried Saudi oil to the Mediterranean. Under these circumstances, even pro-U.S. regimes were forced to demand more from the oil companies.

The U.S. did what it could to counter these developments. In 1953 a CIA-organized coup in Iran overthrew the popular government of Mohammed Mossadegh, which had nationalized that country's British-owned oil fields. A grateful Shah cut U.S. companies in on Iran's reserves, and CIA operator Kermit Roosevelt was made a vice president of Gulf Oil. U.S. Marines landed in Lebanon in 1958 to protect a French-installed Christian minority regime, and the CIA helped engineer the overthrow and assassination of Abdel Karim Kassem in 1963. The U.S. also joined with Saudi Arabia to try and overthrow the new republic in Yemen. However world geopolitics--the growing U.S. military involvement in Southeast Asia and global confrontation with the USSR and China--did not allow the U.S. to directly commit large military forces to the Middle East. It was then that Israel baled out U.S. oil interests and proved its worth in gold to the U.S. corporate empire.

This article will be continued in the next issue of Al-Awda newspaper!