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Rashid Khalidi, "The Palestine Question and the U.S. Public Sphere" <http://feedblitz.com/r.asp?l=50820142&f=17475&u=22792232&c=3901891> The 1967 war had a galvanizing effect on American Jewish attachment to Israel. It connected a whole generation that was coming of age at that time with Israel in a way that was different from what had come before. . . . The growing emphasis on the Holocaust and the increased identification with Israel have grown into what have now been institutionalized as central pillars of American Jewish identity in ways that were not true previously. . . . These were changes that were the result of the fact that our government, the U.S. government, was increasingly coming to see Israel, for the first time, as an ally. It was seeing it for the first time as a proxy in the Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union and its Arab clients in the region. This was not always the case. We think it was but it wasn't. The United States and the Soviet Union were on the same side in 1947-1948; they both supported the establishment of Israel. They were on the same side in 1956; they both opposed the tripartite aggression against Egypt. There was no Cold War alignment on one side or the other on the Arab-Israeli conflict. Israel had not been considered to be a strategic asset to the United States, by most American policy-makers, from 1947 right up through the mid-1960s. But by 1967, the United States had become completely aligned with Israel against the Arab states, most of which were supported by the USSR, in a configuration that continued until the end of the Cold War. Israel has been considered a strategic asset ever since -- but, I'm trying to stress, never was before that -- even though there may be some questioning of Israel's strategic value in some policy-making circles in this town today. . . . The impact of the Vietnam War was also a big factor in causing policy-makers to see the Middle East in Cold War terms much starker than had been the case before. And the June war itself played a role in this closer alignment with Israel. This resounding Israeli victory showed American policy-makers who were deeply shaken at this time by Vietnam -- Johnson was about to resign a year later because of Vietnam, this was before the Tet Offensive, but things were already going badly -- it showed him and the people around him that Israel could serve American interests in opposing the Soviet Union. The defeat of the Soviet-supplied Arab armies provided a welcome triumph for the free world at a time when news from the Southeast Asian battlefields was bad. Full article – http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/khalidi081010.html ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
