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The truth behind
America’s love affair with Israel
By Rahhalah Haqq
America loves Israel.
This love is unconditional, perhaps even eternal, and
is expressed in countless ways. Presidents come and
go, politicians live and die, and people spend their
lives, but the love outlasts them all. Those who try
to explain America’s unflinching support for Israel
will ache and strain to see it change, somehow, or even
claim it is lessening. Some of these people even love
America "the land of the cool and easy" and
have no qualms about Uncle Sam, except they just can’t
seem to figure out why America supports Israel, through
thick and thin.
Since the recent
American elections, the question of why America loves
Israel has once again been raised in many quarters.
Arabs and Muslims in America pinned their hopes on George
W. Bush and, in an unprecedented move toward electoral
unity, block-voted for Bush. Some groups even cited
possibilities for a new foreign policy as a key reason
for their choice, including a just resolution of the
Palestine problem. Similarly, Bush’s election was applauded
in many parts of the Muslim world, especially in the
Gulf, where the Bush legacy is strongest.
Eight years of
Clintonian politics seems to have been a factor in the
support for Bush. Besides his infamous corruption, Clinton
was notorious for stacking his cabinet and key positions
with Zionist Jews. In fact, there were more Jews in
Clinton’s government than in any other time in American
history. This was exacerbated by Gore’s selection of
a Zionist vice president, Joe Lieberman. Often seen
in skullcaps pandering to Jews in public gatherings,
both Clinton and Gore seemed to have turned US foreign
policy over to the Zionists. While this is an expression
of America’s love for Israel, it is not an explanation.
Now that new American
secretary of state Colin Powell is publicly cosying
up to the Butcher of Beirut, Ariel Sharon, the new Zionist
prime minister, and with Bush vowing to move the US
embassy from Tel Aviv to occupied Jerusalem, new questions
have been raised. While the Republicans have at times
stood up to the Zionists, as for example when George
Bush senior challenged then Israeli prime minister Yitzhak
Shamir on US loan guarantees in the late 1980s, and
while it is true that the Democrats have acted like
a branch of the Israeli government, the real reasons
for America’s unflinching love and support for Israel
are to be found primarily outside the narrow corridors
of American party politics.
The American dissident
anti-establishment movement perhaps can offer some clues.
American leftists and radicals such as Edward Herman
and Noam Chomsky try to explain the love of Israel in
material terms, sometimes citing cold war concerns.
Critics of this ilk may develop their analysis by including
things like the influence of the infamous Zionist lobby
in Washington, peppered with references to racism against
Arabs or Christian guilt toward Jews for the alleged
holocaust.
Although concerns
about the Zionist lobby were first noted by leftist
Jews in the US in the 1970s, and picked up by the ‘pro-Arab’
US state department cadres, it is now the Arab media
that have taken after the lobby with a vengeance. Countless
programs on satellite TV, like the American-backed al-Jazeerah
channel in Qatar, rant and rave about the dreaded ‘looby
sihyooni.’ Arab ‘intellectuals’ can be seen screaming
at eachother about the seeming omnipotence of the lobby,
bewailing the failure of Muslims and Arabs to have their
own ‘pro-Arab’ lobby in Washington. But some analysis
of the Israel-America relationship is more nuanced,
and warns against ascribing too much power to the Zionist
lobby. Instead, so this line of thinking goes, we should
be looking toward American corporate globalization for
the recent anti-Muslim tirades in the Western media,
and Israel is staunchly backed because it is supportive
of the Western reign of globalization in the region.
Some even say that Israel is slated to become the next
Singapore or Switzerland.
There is no doubt
that the US and Israel agree on issues such as the globalization
of US corporations, but there are also deeper reasons
for the love affair. While conflict in the region is
constantly enriching Western defense contractors selling
their wares to Arabs, this is irrelevant since the Arabs
have not used their weapons against Israel in any meaningful
way since the 1970s. In the Gulf, recently, there was
a mega-weapons fair and the rich Arabs could be seen
gleefully buying their latest toys, while one Gulf ruler
boldly declared that the Arabs should support the Palestinians,
but not with arms. Instead, rich Arabs built more hospitals
to mop up after the Zionist atrocities, leaving the
Palestinians defenseless and the defense contractors
richer. While this might explain the love of money in
America, and perhaps the love of war and violence, it
does little to explain the love of Israel.
The answer is much
simpler than all of this. America is Israel. America
is an older and larger Israel, perhaps even a parent,
and like any parent it loves its child. Look at American
history. Puritans saw themselves as God’s ‘chosen people,’
who justified slaughtering Indians as part of a biblical
decree. American missionaries saw America as ‘Zion on
the hill,’ pledged by ‘Providence’ to impose its form
of Christianity on the world, east and west. American
racism is rooted in the Jewish idea of racial supremacy,
while the raging will to convert all others is rooted
in a narrow vision of Christianity unique to America.
This version of Christianity has always looked toward
Jerusalem as its true homeland and spiritual center.
If Israel fails, it means admitting the failure of the
deepest passions of America and the West.
Two central ideologies
have deep roots in the West, and America brought them
to their fullest expression. The first, known as ‘manifest
destiny,’ is a Jewish idea that a chosen people must
rule all others, and the other, known as ‘millenarianism,’
pins its hopes on liberating Jerusalem of ‘pagans’ in
order to bring about the true millennium, which is not
about the year 2000, but about the reign of Christ on
earth for a thousand years. The secular version of this
ideology sees America as replacing Christ; in either
case, America must rule and Israel is its saving grace.
The only thing
that might pry the two apart is an ongoing intifada,
coupled by boycotts and civil disobedience in the world
targeted at the US, similar to what erupted in the weeks
after the intifada, forcing the US to close its embassies.
Meanwhile, the US economy and its political system will
probably take further downturns in the next few years.
If Israel cannot stamp out the intifada soon, (which
is beginning to turn world opinion against it once again),
and as economic and political times get harder in the
US, America can be forced to rethink its support. This
will not happen by voting for one candidate or another
in an election, or by writing letters to congressman;
it will happen in the streets of the cities of the world,
because of the intifada in Palestine, and it will happen
in the greed-ridden hearts of American arrogant powers
who have finally overstepped their imperial privilege
of plundering the planet. As America hits tougher times,
with the world reconfiguring itself around different
poles of power, and with ongoing intifadas and boycotts,
Israel may come to be seen as a liability. Indeed, this
has already begun to happen, but is not seriously enough
to have any effect yet. However, if it continues, it
will, and that is why the Zionists are so frantically
pulling every string they can to make some room in order
to crush the intifada as soon as possible, and to find
a way to placate the PLO and achieve a final sellout.
If this happens,
modern Israel will be gone within about ten years. But
by itself, this is still not enough, since the ideologies
of manifest destiny and millenarianism are more stubborn
than the emerging economic or political realities. Even
if the American political system and economy are in
a shambles, the shared belief in millenarianism will
not abate any time in the near future. It is part and
parcel of the American identity, fused with missionary
fervor and bolstered by a feeling of world superiority.
This will be the enduring legacy of the sordid America-Israel
affair, even after their material manifestations as
states and systems have long since crumbled or been
dismantled.
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