The Watchdog Bites
Israel is fighting to protect
America 's empire in the Middle East
by Phil Gasper
International Socialist Review,
September/October 2006
Israel's brutal attacks on Palestinians
in the Gaza Strip and on Lebanon have resulted in hundreds of
civilian deaths, hundreds of thousands of refugees, and billions
of dollars of damage to vital infrastructure. In both cases the
Olmert government used attacks on Israeli military targets and
the seizure of Israeli soldiers as a pretext to launch its well-planned
offensives, with the aim of destroying Hamas-the elected government
of the Palestinian Authority-and Hezbollah, the radical Lebanese
Shiite organization. And in both cases, Israel was fulfilling
its longstanding role as Washington's watchdog in the region-pursuing
its own plans for regional dominance while simultaneously attacking
threats to U.S. control of the wider Middle East, with scant regard
for the cost in Arab lives. Israel's role as a U.S. watchdog was
spelled out in the influential Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz in 1951,
only three years after the Jewish state was created:
Israel is to become the watchdog. There
is no fear that Israel will undertake any aggressive policy towards
the Arab states when this would explicitly contradict the wishes
of the U.S. and Britain. But, if for any reasons the Western powers
should sometimes prefer to close their eyes, Israel could be relied
upon to punish one or several neighboring states whose discourtesy
to the West went beyond the bounds of the permissible.
Recent events fit this pattern. The Bush
administration has openly backed the Israeli attacks. It cheered
on the assault on Gaza and the months of siege and assassinations
that preceded it. After Israel expanded its war into Lebanon,
Washington refused to call for a ceasefire and instead speeded
up delivery of jet fuel and precision-guided bombs to the Israelis.
The Washington Post reported, "For the United States, the
broader goal is to strangle the axis of Hezbollah, Hamas, Syria
and Iran, which the Bush administration believes is pooling resources
to change the strategic playing field in the Middle East, U.S.
officials say." According to a former senior administration
official, Bush wanted to take the "opportunity to really
grind down Hezbollah ... even if there are other serious consequences
that will have to be managed." The U.S. occupation of Iraq
has turned into a disaster for the Bush administration. Not only
is it unable to defeat the largely Sunni resistance, it has been
forced to accept a majority Shiite government, with close ties
to the Iranian regime. Iran's position has thus been strengthened
by the removal of its long-time adversary Saddam Hussein, and
Washington would like nothing more than to bring about "regime
change" in Tehran as it did in Baghdad. That is why the Bush
administration has tried to create an international crisis over
Iran's nuclear program and the Pentagon has drawn up plans for
a military attack on the country's nuclear facilities. But leading
U.S. military figures are worried that such an attack would backfire
and strengthen the Ahmadinejad government.
That is why Washington is so enthusiastic
about Israel's attack on Gaza and, especially, Lebanon. Iran,
along with Syria, is Hezbollah's main backer. The Iranian government
also rushed money to Hamas after the U.S. and the European Union
cut their funding to the Palestinian Authority earlier in the
year. The Bush administration, together with leading figures in
the Democratic Party, hope that Israel's onslaught will thus indirectly
weaken Iran and strengthen U.S. imperialism in the region, whatever
the cost in innocent lives. It's necessary to weaken Hezbollah
and Hamas and deprive Iran of allies who could hit back against
the U.S. or Israel in the event of a U.S-Israeli attack on Iran
or so the argument goes.
Israel's role as a protector of imperialist
interests has its roots in the ideology of the Zionist movement
that created it. From its beginnings in the late nineteenth century,
Zionism promoted its goal of a Jewish state as a way of securing
the interests of the world's major powers. Theodore Herzl, the
movement's founder, wrote that such a state in the Middle East
would be "a portion of the rampart of Europe against Asia,
an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism." In other
words, the proposed state would be part of the system of colonial
domination. Herzl compared himself to Cecil Rhodes, the most prominent
representative of British imperialism in southern Africa.
Before the First World War, Herzl and
other Zionists approached the German kaiser and the Russian tsar,
among others, offering to protect their interests in the Middle
East. But when it became clear towards the end of the war that
Britain would control Palestine, the area the Zionists wanted
to colonize, their focus shifted. The Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann
promised, "A Jewish Palestine would be a safeguard to England,
in particular in respect to the Suez Canal." The argument
was attractive to the British ruling class. The war had underlined
the importance of the Middle East, which guarded the sea routes
to the Far East and contained the highly profitable and strategically
vital Persian oilfields. In November 1917, the British foreign
minister Lord Balfour (a notorious anti-Semite) issued a declaration
pledging his government's support for "the establishment
in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people."
After the war, Britain was granted a colonial
"mandate" to rule Palestine by the League of Nations.
Sir Ronald Storrs, the British governor of Jerusalem in the early
1920s, wrote that a Jewish homeland in Palestine would be "for
England a 'little loyal Jewish Ulster' in a sea of potentially
hostile Arabism"-a reference to Britain's creation of a separate
Protestant majority Northern Ireland in order to maintain its
dominance over the rest of Ireland. From the 1920s onwards, the
British used the Jewish settlers permitted to immigrate to Palestine
to help suppress mass Arab demonstrations against landlessness
and unemployment, and for Palestinian independence, including
a massive general strike in 1936.
The Second World War brought the barbarity
of the Nazi Holocaust in Europe. Zionism, which had previously
only been accepted by a minority, became the majority view among
Jews. The war also greatly weakened Britain, which was forced
to withdraw from Palestine. With the support of the major postwar
powers in the United Nations, including the U.S. and the USSR,
both of which were trying to expand their influence in the region,
the Zionists declared their own state. But Israel was born on
the basis of its own enormous crime against humanity-brutal massacres
and the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinian Arabs in 1948, which
resulted in the destruction of hundreds of Arab villages.
Israel also learned the lesson in 1948
of portraying its own aggression as acts of self-defense against
hostile neighbors. But it was only after Israel had launched its
attack on the Palestinians that other Arab countries mobilized
a token force, largely in an effort to mollify their own populations
rather than as a serious military threat. The Arab states did
nothing to reverse the expulsion of Palestinians and by the time
the 1948 War ended, the Zionists were in control of 78 percent
of historic Palestine.
In his diary, Moshe Sharett, Israeli prime
minister in the 1950s, admitted that the Israeli political and
military leadership never believed in any Arab danger to Israel.
Rather, Israel sought to maneuver the Arab states into military
confrontations that the Zionist leadership was certain of winning
so Israel could destabilize Arab regimes and occupy more territory.
Israel's aim has been to "dismember the Arab world, defeat
the Arab national movement and create puppet regimes under regional
Israeli power" and "to modify the balance of power in
the region radically, transforming Israel into the major power
in the Middle East."
W hen Israel was created, there was some
concern in the U.S. that it might be drawn into the Soviet orbit,
but it soon gravitated towards the wealthier Western powers. In
the 1950s and early 1960s, Israel was closest to France, fighting
its own bloody colonial wars in Vietnam and Algeria at the time.
But with the rise of Arab nationalism in opposition to Western
domination of the region, the U.S. began to regard Israel as a
crucial ally. A 1958 National Security Council document argued
that Washington should "support Israel as the only strong
pro-West power left in the Near East."
The 1967 Six Day War, in which Israel
easily defeated its Arab neighbors and conquered more Arab territory,
including the West Bank and Gaza Strip, was the turning point
for the United States. By the early 1970s, U.S. economic and military
aid to Israel had skyrocketed, amounting since then on a conservative
estimate to almost $100 billion. About one-third of the entire
U.S. foreign aid budget goes to an economically advanced country
of only six million people. As a result, Israel has the highest
per capita military expenditure in the world and possesses the
most advanced military technology. It is also the only nuclear
power in the Middle East.
The value of this investment was explained
by right-wing Democratic senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson
in 1973, who pointed out that Israel had "served to inhibit
and contain those irresponsible and radical elements in certain
Arab states, who, were they free to do so, would pose a grave
threat indeed to our principle sources of petroleum in the Persian
Gulf." Former U.S. Secretary of State Alexander Haig reportedly
called Israel "the largest American aircraft carrier in the
world." More recently, the Israeli analyst Yoram Ettinger
has argued, "Without Israel, the U.S. would have been forced
to deploy tens of thousands of American troops in the eastern
Mediterranean Basin, at a cost of billions of dollars a year."
Instead, the U.S. has backed Israel's repression of the Palestinians
and its frequent attacks on its neighbors, including the 1982
invasion and occupation of Lebanon, which killed 20,000.
But Israel has not only defended the interests
of U.S. imperialism in the Middle East. As Lance Selfa notes,
over the past half century "every pro-U.S. repressive dictatorship
in the world has received some kind of overt or covert Israeli
aid," including apartheid South Africa, every murderous military
regime in Latin America, and the Suharto dictatorship in Indonesia
during its genocidal occupation of East Timor. Washington "funnels
weapons and aid through Israel when it wants to evade congressional
bans on aid to repressive regimes." This history refutes
the idea, popular among some on the Left, that the U.S. supports
Israel because of the pro-Israel lobby in Washington. In fact,
U.S. political and economic elites back
Israel because they see this as a way of promoting their own interests.
s Whether or not the current round of U.S-Israeli aggression will
succeed in achieving Washington's and Tel Aviv's goals, however,
is another question. Within a few days of the attack on Lebanon
it was becoming clear that Hezbollah was a more formidable foe
than the Olmert government had expected and that the war was increasing
Hezbollah's support. The danger is that failure in Lebanon may
lead Bush and Olmert to expand the conflict even further, with
all the horrific consequences that would entail. The only way
to bring real peace and stability is to oppose Washington's support
for Israeli violence, and to support justice for the long suffering
people of Palestine and Lebanon.
Phil Casper teaches at Notre Dame de Namur
University in California. He is editor of The Communist Manifesto:
A Roadmap to History's Most Important Political Document (Haymarket
Books, 2005), a contributor to The Struggle for Palestine (Haymarket
Books, 2002), and The Encyclopedia of the Israeli-Palestinian
Conflict (Lynne Reinner, forthcoming).
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