FOR- Fellowship Magazine -UNDERSTANDING THE U.S.-ISRAEL RELATIONSHIP

UNDERSTANDING THE U.S.-ISRAEL RELATIONSHIP

by Stephen Zunes

Great challenges come out of a firm commitment to nonviolence. One of them is promoting the fundamental goal of reconciliation while at the same time acknowledging that the asymmetrical nature of power relationships in many conflicts requires advocacy for the oppressed. Perhaps this is most difficult when both sides of a conflict are from historically oppressed groups.

Such is the case when it comes to Israel and Palestine. Here, even expressing legitimate concerns regarding the plight of the Palestinians is frequently labeled "anti-Semitic."On the other hand, there really are some who defend the rights of Palestinians not out of a universal concern about human rights and international law, but as an excuse to attack the world's only Jewish state.

This has made it difficult for conscientious Americans to even address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Many of us recognize the brutality and injustice of the Israeli occupation, yet do not want to inadvertently encourage real anti-Semitism.

Many of us recognize the brutality and injustice of the Israeli occupation, yet do not want to inadvertently encourage real anti-Semitism.

The problem is that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has often been presented as an either/or conflict. The reality, however, is that Israeli security and Palestinian rights are not mutually exclusive but mutually dependent. Palestinians will not be granted their rights until Israel is secure and Israel will not be secure until Palestinians are granted their rights.

The root of the current phase of the conflict is the Israeli occupation and its refusal to grant the Palestinians a viable state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, including a shared Jerusalem. Although the Palestinian Authority and most of Israel's neighbors have agreed to provide Israel with verifiable security guarantees and full diplomatic relations in return for a withdrawal from territories seized in the 1967 war, Israel - with the backing of the United States - has refused. Even though this proposed Palestinian state would be made up of only twenty-two percent of original Palestine, the Israelis and Americans have insisted that the Palestinians must be willing to settle for less.

The Bush Administration has refused to support a resumption of the peace process until all Palestinian violence - both terrorism and armed resistance against Israeli occupation forces in the designated autonomous Palestinian areas - completely stops. No comparable demand has been made to stop the Israeli violence and repression, even though, in contrast to the majority of Palestinian violence against Israeli civilians, most Israeli violence is directly undertaken by the government. Nor has there been any pressure on the Israeli government to compromise on its determination to maintain its control over the majority of the occupied territories and to continue building its illegal settlements, actions that most observers believe are necessary in order to halt the Palestinian violence.

Palestinians will not be granted their rights until Israel is secure and Israel will not be secure until Palestinians are granted their rights.

Meanwhile, the United States continues to make the occupation and repression possible through more than $3 billion in unconditional military and economic aid to the government of right-wing Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon. This aid is extended in violation of the Arms Control Export Act and other provisions of US law that prohibit US military aid to countries which use these weapons for non-defensive purposes. Nor is it only domestic law that is suspended in Israel's case. The United States has repeatedly used its veto power to block the United Nations from forcing Israel to abide by the UN Charter, the Fourth Geneva Convention, and other international legal obligations.

Despite its internal corruption, authoritarianism, and propensity to violence, the Palestinian authority's negotiation position of on virtually all the outstanding issues of the peace process - the extent of the Israeli withdrawal, the status of Jerusalem, and the fate of the Israeli settlements - is far more moderate, consistent with international law and UN Security Council resolutions, and in line with the vast majority of the world's governments than is the Israeli position. Nevertheless the Bush Administration insists that it is the Palestinians who need to replace their leadership in order for negotiations to move forward and that Prime Minister Sharon is "a man of peace."

This inevitably raises the question as to why the United States takes such a strident position in support of the Israeli occupation and in opposition to the thousands of Israelis and Palestinians who really are working for peace.

A great deal of attention has focused upon the influence of domestic groups aligned with the Israeli government or the ideological affinity many Americans have with Israel. Yet the primary reason is the role Israel plays for the United States.

In a region where radical nationalism could threaten US control of oil and other strategic interests, Israel successfully has prevented victories by such movements, not just in Palestine, but in Lebanon and Jordan as well. It has kept Syria, with a radical nationalist regime once allied with the Soviet Union, in check. The air force is predominant throughout the region.

Israel has missiles capable of reaching the former Soviet Union and has cooperated with the US military-industrial complex with research and development for new jet fighters and anti-missile defense systems, a relationship that is growing every year. Another function Israel performs is that its frequent wars have allowed for battlefield testing of American arms. Israel's own arms industry has provided weapons and munitions for governments and opposition movements supported by the United States.

Moreover, Israel has been a conduit for US arms to regimes and movements too unpopular in the United States for open granting of direct US military assistance. These have included South Africa under the apartheid regime, Iran's Islamic republic, Guatemala's rightist military juntas, and the Nicaraguan Contras. Israeli military advisors have assisted the Contras, the Salvadoran junta, and other movements and governments backed by the US. The Israeli intelligence agency Mossad has cooperated with the CIA and other US agencies in intelligence gathering and covert operations.

US policy has resulted in dividing Israelis and Arabs - both Semitic peoples who share the same God and the same love for the land as well as a history of subjugation and oppression - from one another.

As one Israeli analyst described it during the Iran-Contra scandal, where Israel played a crucial intermediary rule, "It's like Israel has become just another federal agency, one that's convenient to use when you want something done quietly."

An examination of the history of US support for Israel reveals that the stronger, more aggressive, and more willing to cooperate with US interests that Israel has become, the higher the level of aid and strategic cooperation. A militant Israel is seen to advance American interests. Indeed, an Israel in a constant state of war - technologically sophisticated and militarily advanced, yet lacking an independent economy and dependent on the United States - is far more willing to perform tasks that might be unacceptable to other allies than would be an Israel at peace with its neighbors. As former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger once put it, in reference to Israel's reluctance to make peace, "Israel's obstinacy... serves the purposes of both our countries best."

Throughout Europe in past centuries, the ruling class of a given country would, in return for granting limited religious and cultural autonomy, set up certain individuals in the Jewish community to become the visible agents of the oppressive social order, such as tax collectors and moneylenders. When the population would threaten to rise up against the ruling elites, the rulers could then blame the Jews, sending the wrath of an exploited people against convenient scapegoats, resulting in the pogroms and other notorious waves of repression that have taken place throughout the Jewish Diaspora over the centuries. Unfortunately, one of the more unsettling aspects of US policy today is how closely it corresponds with this historic anti-Semitism.

The idea behind Zionism was to break this cycle of the centuries through the creation of a Jewish nation-state where Jews would no longer be dependent on the ruling class of a given country. But in a tragic irony, as a result of Israel's inability or unwillingness to make peace with its Arab neighbors, Israel's role over the decades has been to perpetuate this cycle on a global scale. Israel has been used by Western powers - initially Great Britain and France and more recently the United States - to maintain their interests in the Middle East. In a horrible echo of the past, autocratic Arab governments, Islamic extremists, and others are blaming Israel, Zionism, or the Jews for their problems, leaving largely untouched the broader exploitative global economic system and their own elites who benefit from and help perpetuate such a system.

The ramifications of US policy are quite apparent when it comes to the suffering of Palestinians. But it also has a negative impact on Israel. The late respected Israeli intellectual Yishayahu Leibowitz observed, "The existence of the Jewish people of sixty to eighty generations. . . was a heroic situation. We never got from the goyish world a cent. We supported ourselves. We maintained our own institutions. Now we have taken three million Jews, gathered them here and turned them over to be parasites - parasites of America. And in some sense we are even the mercenaries of America to fight the wars of what the ruling persons in America consider to be American interests."

This view is not uncommon. In the Israeli press, one can find comments like those in Yediot Ahronot that describe their country as "the Godfather's messenger," since Israel undertakes the "dirty work" of the Godfather, who "always tries to appear to be the owner of some large respectable business." Israeli satirist B. Michael describes US aid to Israel as a situation where "My master gives me food to eat and I bite those whom he tells me to bite. It's called strategic cooperation." Progressive Zionists have argued that the growing Israeli dependency on the United States violates the principle of non-alignment, once a cornerstone of the Labor Zionist movement, and has undermined the last vestiges of Labor Zionism's commitment to socialism and solidarity with the Third World. They fear that Israel's close ties with what they perceive as an imperialist power like the United States alienates Israel's potential allies in the Third World and leaves Israel vulnerable to the whims of US foreign policy. Like the Jews of medieval Europe, modern Israel, they fear, could be suddenly abandoned by the West after being set up to become the visible agent of an oppressive world order.

Increasingly, critics of US support of Israel such as conservative political leader Patrick Buchanan, former Congressman Paul Findley, and retired State Department officials like Richard Curtiss are claiming that the US-Israeli relationship is a case of "the tail wagging the dog." This analysis argues that tiny Israel, through its agents in the American Jewish community, is manipulating US foreign policy. However, in reality, the situation is just the opposite. In a classic case of exactly this type of anti-Semitic scapegoating, members of Congress and their aides will claim - always off the record - that they or their boss must take pro-militarist and anti-human rights positions toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict because of the need for Jewish campaign contributions. Similarly, as a means of diverting Arab criticism from US policymakers, American diplomats routinely tell representatives of Arab governments that wealthy Jews essentially dictate US Middle East policy. The senior President Bush made it clear that such scapegoating is acceptable when, during the debate on the proposed $10 billion loan guarantees to Israel in 1992, he claimed that he was just "one lonely little guy" standing up to "a thousand lobbyists" swarming on Capitol Hill.

The results of US policy could be tragic, not just for the Palestinians and other Arabs who are the immediate victims of the diplomatic support and the largesse of American aid to Israel, but ultimately for Israel as well. The fates of American client states have often not been positive. Though differing from them in many respects, Israel could end up like El Salvador and South Vietnam, whose leadership made common cause with US global designs in ways that ultimately led to their countries' self-destruction. Israeli leaders and their counterparts in many American Zionist organizations have been repeating the historic error of trading in short-term benefits at the risk of long-term security.

The United States is working toward a Middle East where Israel can be a key component in projecting American military and economic interests. The US project requires suppressing challenges to its local hegemony. Consequently it has long been in the interests of the US government to maintain a militarily powerful, belligerent Israel. Real regional peace could undermine this crucial relationship. The United States therefore has pursued a policy that could bring greater stability to the region while falling carefully short of real peace. The so-called peace process, then, is not about peace, but about imposing a Pax Americana.

Unfortunately, this policy has seemed only to provoke a reaction that threatens any kind of stable order, much less justice. So it is incumbent upon Americans who support peace and justice to do more than reiterate the long list of atrocities by the Israeli government or the claim that US policy is "too pro-Israel." US policy has resulted in dividing Israelis and Arabs - both Semitic peoples who share the same God and the same love for the land as well as a history of subjugation and oppression - from one another. We must make it clear that this is contrary to the interests of both peoples. US policy must no longer stand in the way of a just and lasting peace.

Stephen Zunes is an associate professor of Politics and chair of the Peace & Justice Studies Program at the University of San Francisco. He serves on FOR's Middle East Committee and is the Middle East editor for the Foreign Policy in Focus Project <www.fpif.org>. This article draws on excerpts from his new book Tinderbox: U.S. Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism (Common Courage Press, $18.95, available from FOR).