On Sat, Aug 17, 2024 at 08:23 PM, Mark Baugher wrote: > > Rashid Khalidi discussed the problems of building the Palestinian > liberation movement in a recent interview with Tariq Ali, > https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii147/articles/the-neck-and-the-sword > .
The entire lengthy interview is worth reading. As you would expect, it’s a sophisticated survey by both of Palestinian history from the Balfour Declaration through the 1936-39 Arab Revolt, the UN partition plan and creation of Israel, the Nakba and Oslo Accords to the present, and of the role of British and US imperialism, the Israel lobby, and the corrupt Arab elites in perpetuating The Hundred Years War Against Palestine - the title of Khalidi’s best-seller which been widely circulating in the English-speaking Palestine solidarity movement. Some of the exchanges which I found to be of particular interest ( Ali’s questions in italics ): What if there had been no Judeocide in Europe and the German fascists had been ordinary fascists without the obsession to wipe out the Jews? What a might-have-been. But look at the situation in 1939. There was already a Zionist project, with strong British imperial support, for reasons that had nothing to do with Jews or Zionism. It had to do with strategic interests. ...The British ruling class didn’t care for the Jews per se. They may have cared for their reading of the Bible, but what they cared about most was the strategic importance of Palestine and the Middle East as a gateway to India, long before 1917. ...Had Hitler been assassinated, there would still have been a Zionist project, with British imperial backing. But weren’t there also anti-Zionist currents within the Jewish communities? Certainly, there were Jewish communists, Jewish assimilationists. The vast majority of the persecuted Jewish population of Eastern Europe chose emigration to the white-settler colonies: South Africa, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and, above all, the United States; some also went to Argentina and other Latin American countries. These were the majority and that’s where the bulk of the Jewish population of the world went, besides those who stayed in Europe. Anti-Zionism was a Jewish project, up until Hitler. Before then, Zionists were a minority and their programme was deeply contested in Jewish communities. But the Holocaust produced a kind of understandable uniformity in support of Zionism. But how do you explain the Soviet Union’s support for the Zionists, supplying them with Czech weapons in order to carry on fighting? Stalin turned on a dime, as you know. From being a staunch anti-nationalist and anti-Zionist power, the Soviet Union suddenly became an advocate of a Jewish state. This came as a huge shock to the Communist parties of the Arab world. There were several motivations, I think. It was certainly an effort to outbid the United States, and there was a sense that this might be a socialist country that would align with the Soviet Union. Stalin also wanted to undermine the British in the Middle East...he now saw this as a moment in which the Soviet Union could undermine Britain’s Arab puppet regimes in the region. If you look at the vote in the UN General Assembly, without the Soviet Union and their Belarusian and Ukrainian attachments, as well as the countries they influenced, the Americans would have had difficulty pushing through the Partition resolution. They might have done it, but it could have led to a different outcome. And the Czech arms deal was crucial to Israel’s victories against the Arab armies on the battlefield. Let’s turn to Hamas. Is it accurate to say, as many of its opponents in the PLO insist, that it was created by Israel? No. Let me be very clear. Hamas emerged in 1987–88, in the situation we’ve just talked about. It grew out of the Islamist movement in Gaza, as a separate Palestinian extension of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. This occurred just at the moment when Fatah and the PLO moved away from the goal of liberating the entirety of Palestine, as a secular-democratic state, to accepting the American-Israeli conditions laid out in UNSC 242, laying down arms, agreeing to a divided Palestinian statelet side-by-side with Israel. The PLO formally accepted this in 1987–88, which is precisely when Hamas emerged as a breakaway from the Islamist movement. Now, were they encouraged by the Israelis? Yes, of course they were encouraged. Israel saw the PLO as its chief nationalist opponent, the primary danger. Any dissident movement which undermined the wall-to-wall support of the Palestinians for the PLO was welcome to Israeli intelligence. ... But over time, Hamas turned into a resistance movement, and then the Israelis were not so happy with it. But they went back to supporting it in the last few years, under Netanyahu, because they thought they could use Hamas to pacify the Gaza Strip, with cash coming from the Gulf countries, Qatar in particular. After Oslo, NLR described Fatah’s trajectory as a lurch from fantasy maximalism to ignominious minimalism, with no attempt to define and fight for an equitable solution in between. There are still some in the PLO who are resisting. Hanan Ashrawi has been stronger than the others, and I’m sure there must be others waiting for some alternative. There are many people, including people involved in the PLO/Fatah, and even some involved with the Palestinian Authority, though not many, who still have an independent position and who oppose the PA’s collaborationist nature. You can see very clearly from a series of public opinion polls how broadly despised Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas) is, how hated the PA is. This in spite of the fact that it provides the salaries for a huge proportion of the population of the occupied territories. The interesting thing is that Hamas’s popularity has not always been as great as some people think, whether in Gaza, where they were growing increasingly unpopular before October 7, or even in the West Bank, where they are more popular simply because people have not been governed by them. But many of those under their rule in the Gaza Strip took a dim view of Hamas...People assume that, because a lot of young people were swept away by enthusiasm after October 7, that is still the view of most people today, eight months later. I don’t think that’s necessarily the case. Hamas is seen as deserving credit for inflicting a military defeat on Israel, the likes of which it has never suffered. ..So many people give Hamas credit for this, even though they may have reservations about them on other counts. I did think there might be more protests in the Arab world—and the only thing that could change the mood there would be mass uprisings. But apart from Yemen, not too much. There have been pro-Gaza demonstrations, but so far not on the scale of the anger displayed in Britain and the US. I think there are at least two things to say here. The first thing is that there is, and has always been, a deep sympathy with Palestine among the Arab peoples, throughout the Arab world, from the Gulf to the Atlantic. This hasn’t changed. It’s gone up and down a little bit, but it hasn’t gone away. But these people are facing other critical issues. If you live in a state that’s been destroyed—like Libya, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Sudan, Lebanon—by civil war or intervention by the imperial powers and their clients, you have other concerns. Iraq still doesn’t have 24-hour electricity, 21 years after the American occupation—one of the greatest oil producers in the world. Palestine is important, but electricity and not being killed by the regime—or by this or that army faction—is also important. This is the situation in half a dozen Arab countries: different stages of civil war-cum-proxy war, with all the great powers involved. The second thing is that, almost without exception, from the Gulf to the Atlantic, you don’t have regimes that allow public opinion to express itself. There are jackboot dictatorships, a pouvoir in Algeria, the most absolutist monarchies since Louis XIV, which allow virtually no dissent beyond a tiny space, and if you go beyond it, you will be tasered and tortured, you will be arrested and your family will suffer... They don’t represent their people’s views in any shape or form. They’re tied to Israel by so many visible and invisible ties. The anti-missile defences of the Emirates were provided by the Israeli subsidiary of Raytheon, which means that Israel’s anti-missile surveillance against Iran is in Jabal Ali, in Abu Dhabi, not Jabal al-Sheikh (Mount Hermon), in the occupied Golan Heights. The uae depends entirely on Israel for its security against missile attack. There are variations of that arrangement in Jordan, Egypt and other Arab countries. In Morocco, the royal bodyguards have been trained by Mossad for the past fifty or sixty years, since the time of King Hassan II. The Israeli defence connection is generations-old in the case of Jordan, Morocco and Egypt, and is well established in several of the Gulf countries and a couple of others, too. There was some hope expressed early on that Hezbollah, with the backing, quietly or publicly, of the Iranian regime, might open up a second front and relieve the pressure on Hamas. But this didn’t happen. I think Hamas was wrong to expect it. They probably expected far more sustained responses from other Palestinians in the occupied territories and hoped that Hezbollah, as well as other Iran-allied militias and perhaps Iran itself, would be much more vigorous in reacting to Israel’s counter-response to October 7. It’s a perfect example of how little they understand of the world. For all their acumen in other respects, the leaders who organized this assault have what I would call tunnel vision. I think they really believed that there would be an uprising throughout the Arab world. I don’t have a lot of evidence for that assertion, but they were certainly disappointed by the reaction... But while it may still explode into a full-scale war, so far it’s been tit for tat, very measured and controlled. This is a function of what anybody with eyes to see could have told the boys in the tunnels, which is that Iran did not invest in building up Hezbollah’s capabilities for the sake of Hamas. It did so in order to create a deterrent to protect Iran against Israel; that’s the only reason. The idea that Hezbollah and the Iranians would shoot every arrow in their quivers to support Hamas, in a war it started without warning its allies—it beggars belief that anybody could think that that would be the case. Iran is a nation state that has national interests, which are restricted to regime preservation, self-defence and raison d’état. You can talk about Islam, ideology and the ‘axis of resistance’ until you’re blue in the face. I will tell you: raison d’état , regime protection—that’s what they care about, and that’s why they backed the build-up of Hezbollah’s capacity. And they’re not going to shoot that bolt. There was no possibility under any circumstances of their doing that to support Hamas. If, heaven forbid, a full-scale war erupts, it will be because of a miscalculation, or an accident, or an irrational move by Netanyahu, not a decision by Hezbollah. Hezbollah is a Lebanese party. It has an Iranian patron, but it is acutely attuned to the fact that the Lebanese public will turn against it if its operations against Israel provoke a massive retaliation against Lebanon—which would not be directed just against Hezbollah but also, as in the 2006 war, against Lebanon’s infrastructure. The Israelis have always punished the host country in order to force it to force the resistance to stop doing whatever it was doing. They bombed Jordan, they bombed Syria, in order to force those regimes to stop the Palestinians. They weren’t trying to stop the Palestinians themselves, but to stop whichever Arab country it was from hosting and supporting the Palestinians. They would do that to Lebanon, to force it to stop Hezbollah. And Hezbollah knows that, and the Lebanese know it, too. I don’t understand how the leaders of Hamas didn’t understand that. It shows a detachment from reality and a flawed strategic sense which is really quite disturbing. Since October 7 they have dramatically upended the stagnant status quo in Palestine, and have shown themselves highly adept at waging guerrilla warfare—at an unspeakable price, let it be said. But ultimately, war is an extension of politics by other means, and they have not projected a clear, strategic, unified Palestinian political vision to the world. I don’t think people are saying these kinds of things, hard as they are to say. But they should be. They should be. Mearsheimer and Walt were vilified for their book on the Israel lobby, called antisemites and so forth. But the case they put for how American foreign policy is run on that level seems pretty strong today. The amusing thing is that, in spite of all the vilification and the slanders, The Israel Lobby and us Foreign Policy fast became a bestseller, and it is still selling very well. .. I think it was a sound analysis. I don’t think it was comprehensive enough because it only talked about the lobby groups on Capitol Hill, as well as the Christian Zionists and the neocons, and the lobby’s vigilantes in the media and academia, whereas there’s a whole ecosystem that has extended to important elements of the American military, tech and biomedical sectors, which are closely integrated with their Israeli equivalents. Enormously important parts of the us economy are linked to these sectors in Israel and these are powerful forces in American society. They own Congress, in the sense that their contributions keep elected politicians in office—Silicon Valley, biotech, finance, the military sector in particular. The imbrication of the us security-military-industrial complex with that of Israel is seamless, as is the imbrication of Israel’s defence and intelligence networks with those in India, the Emirates and a few other places. I don’t think this is fully accounted for in The Israel Lobby , partly because some of this has emerged subsequent to publication of their book. A number of Israeli scholars and archaeologists, including Israel Finkelstein, have shown that the heroic stories of the Old Testament account—the exodus, the royal lineage of the Book of Kings—were largely an ‘invented tradition’, borrowings that were constructed as a court ideology in a later period. The Hebrew editions of Shlomo Sand’s books, The Invention of the Jewish People and The Invention of the Land of Israel, have been bestsellers in Israel. But this has had negligible impact on the hold of the national ideology over the majority of the population. On nationalism, Gellner, Hobsbawm and Benedict Anderson were right: it doesn’t matter what the historical realities were, it’s what people believe that counts. Finkelstein and other excellent Israeli archaeologists have blown to pieces much of the Biblical foundation of Zionism, to very little political effect. I think we have to look at the power of those Biblical myths, irrespective of their baselessness from a historical and archaeological perspective—their resonance over generations, over centuries, and not only among Jews. It’s equally important that they have resonated among Christians. British Protestants are ultimately responsible for the Balfour Declaration, rooted in their belief in these same myths. But Israeli barbarism, as we’re seeing it, is beginning to dent some of these myths, is it not? There may be a reckoning. This Christian Zionism is primarily a Protestant phenomenon; it’s much less prevalent among Catholic populations. That reading of the Bible—the ‘gathering of Israel’ as a precursor to the Second Coming and the Last Judgement, the Revelation of Saint John the Divine—is essentially a Protestant reading. And in many of the more liberal Protestant denominations in the us , there is a growing understanding of the danger of that reading and how false it is in terms of Christian values. You see a parallel shift among Jews, who say that this has nothing to do with the Jewish tradition we want to uphold. We don’t want to destroy people as the Israelites destroyed Amalek. We don’t believe in the version of Judaism that animates many of the settlers and the right wing of the Israeli political spectrum—which stretches from the far right to the centre left, by the way. They believe this stuff, about destroying the Amalekites as enemies of Israel. ...Yet that’s not what a large proportion of the Jewish community in the US believe. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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