The Soap Box

Just like opinions concerning the greater conflict in which the State of Israel has been embroiled for decades, the various positions people stake out with regard specifically to Israel’s role within the region are often based on misunderstanding and ignorance. Reaction to the latest hostilities that have erupted in the Middle East is once again exposing the ignorance of that region’s history which many on the left are relying upon. The final truth about the current conflict and the entire Palestinian-Israeli conflict itself is that the situation is extremely complicated and lends itself to very few absolutely right answers, just like every other geo-political conflict that has ever occurred anywhere around the globe. Regardless, spectators of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict seem to feel entitled to their own authoritative opinion on the moral righteousness of Israel’s existence and its actions. Unfortunately, more often than not, and particularly it appears for those on the left, these viewpoints are based on myths about the Middle East which are spread as propaganda by one side or the other in order to gain a rhetorical — and ultimately a military — advantage in the conflict.

One such myth states that the American Jewish community has hijacked United States foreign policy by pressuring the federal government into unwaivering support of Israel. For some on the left, this perspective conflates into a crass anti-Semitism which posits that the majority of American Jews (or at least the majority of organized American Jews) uniformly promote the Israeli agenda in the halls of American government, as if American Jews are a monolith and there is a singular “Israeli agenda.” As proof of the theory, adherents often note the presence of (a few) Jewish people in high positions of power in the federal government who do not aggressively criticize Israeli policy or who advocate other seemingly anti-Arab policies (because if it’s anti-Arab, it must be pro-Israel) or Middle East policies with which they disagree, such as the Iraq War.

Every community — religious, ethnic, or otherwise — has its share of hawks and conservatives. Ultimately, it was Colin Powell’s speech to the U.N. which sealed the deal for the neocons’ war plan in Iraq. Some of those neocons, such as Paul Wolfowitz, are Jewish, although there is never any discussion of how strongly these officials identify as Jewish or feel a bond with the State of Israel based on religious or ethnic identity; it’s enough merely to point out their heritage. Despite there being at least a valid basis now to believe that Powell knew precisely what he was doing when he gave what amounted to essentially a falsified report to the Security Counsel in order to garner world support for the invasion, and that he was likely the only person in the world who could have possibly stopped the President from going to war, there has never been any suggestion that the United Stated entered into the Iraq War because the well-organized and extremely influential Black community in the United States pushed for it. Such an allegation has been lodged, however, against the American Jewish community.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, is the sole reason why some on the left believe it is acceptable to brush the entire American Jewish community as “pro-Israel” and as being at least partially responsible for the War in Iraq. The NAACP didn’t engage in a years-long campaign to push for a policy of overthrowing Saddam Hussein the way that AIPAC did, so the Black community is not implicated the way the Jewish community is. But AIPAC does not speak for the American Jewish community any more than the Christian Coalition speaks for the Protestant community. The American Jewish community is as diverse as all of our other religious and ethnic communities, many of whom are opposed to much of AIPAC’s policy positions.

Even AIPAC’s role in promoting the Iraq War can be grossly overstated. AIPAC is an extremely affective lobbying organization, and they are able to have a significant impact on politicians in Washington. But President Bush did not make the decision to go to war based on AIPAC’s lobbying any more than President Clinton nominated Stephen Breyer to the Supreme Court based on lobbying for a pro-choice candidate by EMILY’s List; sure, lobbying may have helped, but President Bush was going to go to war for his own reasons whether AIPAC was pushing for it or not. The Jewish community is not even a particularly influential voting block (they make up only about 2% of the population) and have historically voted solidly Democratic. Even if Republicans were able to score a coup and capture the entire Jewish vote as a reward for their cooperation with AIPAC, the political benefits would be negligible. AIPAC’s influence in Washington is commonly overstated by those on the left; they mainly are a true believer’s best friend, useful to accomplish objectives which one already wishes to realize.

The close relationship between the United States and Israel has always been the result of America’s own geo-political self-interests. The relationship didn’t begin in earnest until the late 1950’s or early 1960’s, after the decades-long struggle between native Arabs and Jewish settlers culminating in the controversial birth of the State of Israel in 1948, all of which the United States essentially watched from the sidelines. Contrary to the popular perception on the left that this relationship has been dominated by the overwhelming political influence of American Jews, the relationship was born out of the Cold War struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union. At the time, the American Jews who are thought to have hijacked American foreign policy in the Middle East were still excluded from institutions of higher learning based on their ethnicity and restrictive covenants kept them out of homes in white neighborhoods, just as Black Americans were, hardly a position from which a community overpowers the U.S. Department of State.

In the 1950s, the Soviet Union shrewdly saw an opportunity to expand the influence of Communism in the newly established post-colonial Arab states of the Middle East. The Soviets had significant influence over states such as Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. Close relations with Israel was the United States’ best option for countering the spread of Communism throughout the region. In this sense, the relationship between the United States and Israel is comparable to our longstanding and costly relationship with South Korea; and yet no one has suggested that this relationship resulted from overpowering political influence in the South Korean American community, or that the relationship hasn’t been to the United States’ benefit.

Israel has fought many of the Middle East wars in which it has been a participant using American-made fighters and munitions that the United States has supplied them with, some on the left complain. American tax dollars have gone to funding Israel’s aggression against neighboring states and oppression of the Palestinian people. What is never acknowledged is that all of those Arab states with which Israel has warred repeatedly — sometimes in wars flagrantly instigated by those other states — were being armed by the Soviet Union, fighting wars in Soviet fighters and using Soviet munitions. Some of those nations continue to be armed by Russia today. Over the years, American tax dollars have gone towards countering Soviet (and now Russian) military influence, essentially fighting the Cold War in the Middle East by proxy. These Arab regimes have also had a long history of oppressing their native Jewish populations, many of whom have also been displaced from their homes in the years since Israel came into existence. It is estimated that more Arab Jews in these countries were displaced when those countries clamped down on their Jewish populations following the 1948 war than there were displaced Palestinians in Israel.

None of which justifies Israeli’s position vis-a-vis the Palestinians, or even the situation in the greater Middle East. What is clear is that the myth that Israel (or American Jews) have hijacked our foreign policy cannot be sustained. For instance, proponents of this position frequently cite the fact that Israel is the greatest recipient of American foreign aid, receiving $48.7 billion between 1960 and 2004, as evidence that our government is a slave to the Israeli cause. However, seldom do these same people acknowledge that the nation coming in a close second — at $42.9 billion during the same period — is Egypt, one of the nations which the United States has allegedly blindly opposed at Israel’s command until the 1970s and which continues to spread virulent anti-Semitism throughout the region today, including the very myth that the United States is under Israel’s command.

In fiscal year 2005, Israel received $2.58 billion in U.S. foreign aid while Egypt, with whom Israel has long been at peace, received $1.84 billion. But making peace with Israel is not a quid pro quo for jumping to the head of the aid line; Jordan, who has also made a lasting peace with Israel, is only seventh on the list of recipients in 2005, behind Pakistan, Colombia, and the Sudan, the nation which has been slaughtering innocent civilians in Darfur. Cessation of hostilities by Egypt and Jordan has increased stability in the region where so much of the world’s supply of oil resides, which is a direct strategic benefit to the United States. American aid has been directed to the Middle East to support stability, just as it flowed into Europe after World War II, and into Southeast Asia — particularly South Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam — in the 1950s and 1960s at the height of the Cold War.

The United States has always conducted its foreign policy in the Middle East in its own interest — not on the basis of Israel or American Jews dominating the relationship — first as a major front in the Cold War, and now as its only dependable entrée (with the slow collapse of the Saudi regime and the mess in Iraq) into a region of great strategic importance based primarily upon access to oil, and in which it is otherwise almost entirely irrelevant (some European nations have very close relations with Arab countries as their former colonies, an avenue to influence which the United States has never had the benefit of).

But the most common and by far the most damaging myth attractive to those on the left with regard to the situation in the Middle East is that all of the violence is a result of Israel’s illegal occupation of Arab lands, and that if they would merely withdraw from the Occupied Territories back within the 1967 borders, the violence would cease. Virtually nothing asserted in this point of view, however, even remotely resembles the reality on the ground.

The Middle East is among the regions with the longest recorded history of humanity, and that history is a veritable laundry list of conflicts and hostilities which make understanding virtually any contemporary relationship there nearly impossible. For Jews, their connection to the modern State of Israel goes literally back to biblical times when the land was given to them by God, and before they were conquered and dispersed by a variety of invading forces. Katha Politt once argued in the pages of The Nation that, besides the obvious problems of verification, no claim to land based on divine gift should be considered legitimate as it invites conflicting claims which can never be resolved. And yet, heavenly conveyances aside, no one disputes the historical fact that the holy city of Jerusalem would not exist today if the Jews had not built it in the days before Jesus or Muhammad, and that it would always have been control by the Jews if the city had not been taken from them by force. Some Jews have maintained a continual presence in modern-day Israel and the surrounding areas since biblical times, and there can be no dispute that the Jewish people (an extraordinarily coherent diasporic community) have legitimate historical ties to the region.

Regardless, to many Arabs, every inch of the modern State of Israel belongs in Arab hands. Virtually all militant groups in the area, and even many of the Arab states, have made it their explicit goal to destroy the entire State of Israel and drive the Jews out of the region, usually choosing the Mediterranean Sea as the prefered exit point (and not on boats). For instance, Hezbollah, a Lebonese Shiite Muslim militant group, precipitated the current crisis even after Israel had withdrawn completely from every inch of occupied Lebanon years ago. Likewise, Israel’s voluntary withdrawal from Gaza preceded Hamas’s recent incursion into Israel proper and the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier. If what these anti-Israel forces want is withdrawal from the areas which Israel currently occupies beyond the 1967 borders, they certainly have a strange way of encouraging it.

Certainly the Israeli occupation is problematic for reasons which extend beyond the physical control of portions of land. Palestinians experience degredations at the hands of Israeli forces, including incarceration or worse, which militants and Arab states might legitimately oppose even if Israel does withdraw its forces from discrete areas. But the paradigm which forms the basis of the myth of Israeli violence as the root cause of the conflict is one of Israeli hatred and Arab unity. The surrounding Arab states and militant groups (sometimes including even al Qaeda) purport simply to have the Palestinians’ best interests in mind when they attack Israel and want only to see them returned to their rightful place in the community of nations.

The idea that al Qaeda has anyone’s best interests in mind is laughable; and it is only slightly more believeable that Islamic militant groups in the area or other Arab nations (many of whom are Shiite) are looking out for the Palestinians (who are Sunni). The regional wars which surrounding nations played at least a part in instigating have done absolutely nothing to improve the lot of Palestinians. On the contrary, as moderate Arab nations have evolved towards a political resolution of the wider conflict, some — particularly Jordan and Egypt — have developed antagonisms with the Palestinians. Palestinian refugees who had fled to Jordan after the 1948 war openly opposed the Jordanian monarchy and precipitated a civil war there in which Syria also involved itself (on the side of the Palestinians, against Jordan). The PLO then took refuge in southern Lebanon after being driven out of Jordan and, by perpetrating attacks on northern Israel, instigated the Israeli occupation of a buffer zone in southern Lebanon, leading to the creation of Hezbollah as an armed resistance to the Israeli occupation which the PLO had provoked; Hezbollah’s raison d’etre was to fight back the Israeli occupation of Lebanon, not to fight for the return of any other Israeli-occupied lands which the Palestinians laid claim to. And although Egypt occupied the Gaza Strip between 1948 and 1967 (nearly twenty years), it maintained a closed border with Gaza and never offered the Palestinians citizenship or autonomy. When Israel recaptured Gaza in the 1967 war, Egypt made no effort to regain the territory. Neither Jordan nor Egypt ever attempted to establish a Palestinian state in either the West Bank or Gaza even though they were both part of a Palestinian state contemplated in the U.N. partition plan of 1947. Until recently, when the Palestinians had become relatively stable in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza, the surrounding Arab populations had not been their friends so much as the common enemy of the Jewish State of Israel.

Neither have the Palestinian militant groups done much to improve the station of the Palestinian people. For decades, Yassir Arafat used the PLO to enrich himself immensely and amass unrivaled personal power both before and after signing peace accords with Israel. Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other militant organizations continued to engage in counter-productive assaults on Israel even when the prospect of peace was nearing fruition, and no militant group challenged Arafat’s (and then the Palestinian Authority’s) rampant corruption which plundered the wealth of the Palestinian people. All focus was on “ending the Israeli occupation.”

In a recent interview with John McLaughlin on national television, the Syrian ambassador to the United States professed his belief that if Israel returned “our occupied lands”, this would end all violence in the Middle East. This neatly sums up the core of the myth which undergirds so much of the left’s hostility towards Israel. However, neither retreating from southern Lebanon nor from Gaza recently earned Israel any good will with militant groups. It was seen instead as either a victory for armed resistance (in Lebanon), or a refusal on Israel’s part to fulfill its obligations to negotiate with a counterpart bent on its destruction (in Gaza). It is not clear what occupied lands the return of which the ambassador believes would magically end all of these hostilities; perhaps he was referring to the entire State of Israel, contending that once all the Jews were driven into the sea, the attacks on them would stop.

But even this is much too simplistic. Jordan and Egypt still have scant love for the Palestinians, and vice versa. Hezbollah is supported by Syria, but many in Lebanon resent Syria’s meddling in Lebonese affairs, which are for all intents and purposes still controlled either by Syria or Hezbollah. And the various Palestinian militias, principally Hamas and Fatah, have never gotten along with one another; their relations have recently strained so far as to have resulted in gunfights on the streets of Gaza as they jockey for power over the Palestinian-controlled territories. And that is to say nothing of Iran’s clear designs now on becoming the primary powerbroker within the region, the sectarian splits within Iraq, or the tensions between the Kurds of northern Iraq and Turkey, never mind al Qaeda’s goal of overturning the “secular” governments of moderate Arab countries and create one pan-Arab Muslim theocracy. Even if Israel had never come into existence, violence in the Middle East would still be going strong.

That is because there is little in the Middle East which is organic, which makes sense on its own. Virtually all of the national borders in the region were devised by colonizing powers in the first half of the Twentieth Century. Even the call for Israel to return to the 1967 borders, a final disposition which is almost universally accepted as a solution to all of the Middle East’s problems (except by the proponents of Israeli settlement building and by Arab militants and states which still cling to the dream of eradicating the Jews), has no basis in logic or history. The post-1967 borders are no less valid than the 1947 partition plan, or the 1948 borders following Israel’s war for independence. Most of what people on the left or the right consider to be commonly held truths about the conflict are actually nothing more than a point of view.

Which is precisely why the conflict has been so intractable for so long. The myths which both sides spread and attempt to perpetuate eventually take hold and appear as truths. But those myths which the left in this country has embraced are particularly damaging, not just to Israel but to all of the West. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is a convenient excuse for any violent acts or threats which Islamist extremists decide they would like to commit: Iran obtaining nuclear weapons, Syria invading and controling Lebanon, Osama bin Laden attacking Manhattan to punish the U.S. for its support of Israel. There is no question that Israel has acted inappropriately, and that U.S. policy in the region has been flawed at times. But the notion that all of the problems of extremist Islam have their roots in Israel’s occupation of Arab lands is nothing but a shell game to divert attention from the share of blame for the current situation which belongs to tyrranical regimes and terrorist organizations, and from their repressive policies which keep so many of the world’s Arab civilians living under crushing and unaccountable regimes. And the myth that Israel and American Jews are holding the United States hostage to their interests in the region is merely an attempt to blame the mess on someone else who won’t threaten or attack us for doing so, rather than admitting that it is our own self-interests which drive us to be involved in the first place. It also allows us to avoid the fact that the absence of peace in the region is as much the result of virtulent anti-Semitism and militant theocracy as it is the result of an unjust occupation. Under these conditions, it is hard to imagine either side understanding the other sufficiently for peace ever to flourish in that troubled region, and bridging the gap between Islam and the West might as well be a pipe dream.