American geopolitics after WWII & Its
relationship to the Middle East
By Tom Wheat
The belief in America and what Americans believe in, -- is our
democratic tradition. However, as America has expanded in Cultural and
economic influence it has also had to rely on its conventional military,
including traditional allies, and allies of necessity. This line has
begun to blur as well. The last time the military was part of a social
movement was in WWII when we were battling the Nazi's and Fascist
absolutism. America became the world leader due to its ability to
mass-produce and through victory by being the dominant player received
the torch of empire from English colonialism. Participatory Democracy
was viewed as having triumphed over autarky. American ideals were
thought to be universal.
At the end of WWII we inherited
the mantle of European colonialism. The country was transformed from a
relatively free democratic republic into a country that came to field an
agenda of liberal economic expansion at the expense of actual freedom
and democracy in the countries so affected by our imperialist expansion.
Now as a world super power we had to create a national security state
and a central intelligence agency to reinforce our dominance in world
affairs. This forced us to compromise many of our innate republican
ideals of freedom. We then
proceeded to support any fascist regime ready to be economic suzerain so
long as it wasn’t socialist.
As World War II ended along with
traditional European colonialism there was a genuine belief among these
countries that self-determination and sovereignty would be restored, and
that key social reform would be implemented. Many Asian intellectual
elites looked to American models while the warlords of Asia, the wealthy
autocratic elite admired American weapons to contain their populace and
enact power plays against their rivals.
At the height of our expansion
after WWII we entered an era of unparalleled economic prosperity.
However, the democracy that created the power of unlimited mass
production became the military industrial complex that guided US foreign
policy after the war.
In reality the Cold War was a
means in which the military industrial complex created during WWII
sought to maintain its function as a supplier of military hardware. Only
by perpetually existing in a state of emergency could we continue to
justify increased defense spending, while in the process we were making
more enemies in the third world with our reactionary philosophy of
propping up the dictator to safeguard democracy. In this process we came
to train assassins and later would be terrorists, such as Osama Bin
Laden, and Saddam Hussein, among countless others.
Cold War military interventions
were often based more on ideology and trade expansion than out of real
military necessity. With the Cold War, Interventions in Korea and
Vietnam were based on the Domino theory, an ideology that there was a
real threat to democracy and capitalism posed by the emergence of soviet
client states in Asia. In
this process the US military supported regimes that did not adhere to
true notions of either capitalism or democracy.
For
example, the early pro US regimes of S. Korea and especially Vietnam The
Tandem of presidents' Diem, and Nguyen illustrated how corruption could
not only undermine a military campaign (through government bureaucratic
inefficiency and corruption) but also the value of supporting a regime
that ran anathema to every American's ideal hurt citizen and troop
morale and also mobilized the majority of the local population into
total opposition towards what they perceived as an occupying alien
imperial force.
Many individual soldiers on the other hand
truly believed that intervention in these Asian countries was justified,
politically and ideologically. Most GI's truly felt that their presence
and the war that they were fighting would eventually bring peace and
freedom to a country under the threat of the soviet expansionary menace.
That with victory the American way of life would come to the third
world. The benefits of capitalism at home would come to the peoples of
the third world.
The war on the other hand had an
economic incentive to be fought. South East Asia had originally been
part of Imperial Japan's, Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. A
trade bloc whereby the Japanese would dominate East Asia as its dominate
sphere of influence and like the European colonial's Japan wanted to
establish client states with advantageous trade terms facilitating the
flow of tin and rubber along with other cash commodities.
We lost the Vietnam War because
we lost the collective will of our people and of the host country we
were supposedly defending against the alleged evil of communism. So
while our government preached the ideology of the Soviet evil empire the
reality was that US mid-western grain farmers engaged in active trade
with Russia. This is only just one illustration of the economic power
plays that have lead men into the battlefield. War is good business for
some people.
According to George Kennan, the
architect of American Foreign policy, the Cold War could be described as
being based on a bipolar system of mutual antagonism. With the rise of
the Cold war it became necessary to maintain massive defense spending
for the ideology of freedom, of which the direct application came to be
support for fascist regimes counter to the ideals of freedom. In the
1960's we were still masters of the universe. However, we attempted to
fight three wars at a time when we had only the economic power to wage
two wars. The wars fought were the Cold War, Vietnam War, and the War on
Poverty. The end result of that was by 1968 we had managed to acquire a
huge deficit and European currency traders made a run on the American
dollar. The Nixon response was to de-link the dollar from gold and float
the currency. At this point Americans began to lose their economic
freedom. Soon we would have stagflation, inflation, oil embargos and a
host of maladies that would become a burden to the American empire and
also would lead to the erosion of American freedom.
After the 60's hangover subsided, American awareness for politics
also began to drift into the abyss of corporate relativism. The Burden
of empire was exacting its toll like Rome we also began to
intellectually wither.
The Middle east Conflict
The present state of the Middle East crisis is
a situation borne of political and economic adversarial antagonisms. On
the one hand US economic security is dependant upon Arab oil and on the
other hand our own military industrial complex is wedded to Israel both
ideologically and in terms of collective political and economic
security.
On the one hand we supply Israel with Arms and
ask that they be our regional peacemakers and the fjord in the path of
Pan Arabism. In the course Israel has become dependant entirely on the
US for its own survival. While Israel is an effective short-term wall
that divides the Arab world from total military consolidation its own
institutional structure also profits from threats to its own security.
It is a paradox of reason that nonetheless still exists when a
third of the Israeli economy is geared directly towards military
defense. Since heavily
militarized economies by nature are inflationary our foreign aid package
to Israel guarantees that that country will not have to bear the burden
of that inflation. Every year we supply Israel with a 15 billion dollar
foreign aid/DOD funding package. The reason for this adversarial
relationship is the fact that we use Israel as a regional power to
leverage the Arabs to supply oil at a rate consistent with our economic
expansion.
Secondly our demand for oil
forces us into economic stagnancy whereby we will go to any lengths to
sacrifice technological innovation for trade practices that will
guarantee that oil will be the sole form of fuel through every cycle of
boom and bust in the economy until the economy collapses when the supply
of oil runs out. So goes the wealth of nations.
The mercantilist practices of
OPEC also insure that the vast economic bounty of vibrant trade with the
West goes solely into the hands of sheiks and little left is doled out
to the populace, the masses of whom exist in utter poverty. It is in a
state of poverty that the Arab youth of the Middle East turn towards the
solace of politicized religion, an ephemeral god that can imbue their
own hopeless economic plight with a profound sense of purpose and
destiny. So as they are starving it is better for them blow themselves
up for the reward of heaven then to face a dismal existence of poverty
and despotism on earth. Countries where the prevailing system of rule is
Autocracy can only breed poverty, in the countries where such policies
constitute the philosophy of the regime. This policy of rule by a few
elites predicated on strategic necessity, and collective arms pacts is
in anachronism that leads to terrorism.
Since we refuse to diversify and
implement any other sustainable means, such as bio fuels, hydrogen fuel
cell, and plasma fusion, or even hemp fuel, we will continue to aid and
abet the cycle of Arab terrorism and Israeli aggression thereby assuring
that the ripple effects will be felt in our economy and our collective
security as well.
To some extent this containment
policy system is a holdover from the Cold War when we waged an economic
battle with the Soviet Union in regards to which hegemon would control
the Middle East and how Arab oil producing client states could be
established. However, the binomial of supply and maintenance the demand
for arms to safeguard that supply forces us to contend with autocracy in
the place of freedom. It is
unfortunate that the Palestinians are caught up in the geopolitics of
oil and the arms trade. A situation we largely help to manufacture due
to our dependence on Arab oil and Israel's overwhelming dependence on a
militarized economy for both economic and political survival.
Arab countries find it
convenient to politically manipulate the Palestinian plight to further
their own aims in regards to their own desire to leverage the US since
their economies are solely geared towards oil exportation. Seldom have
they held to the Palestinian cause for long when it became evident that
we would give into their demands to buy more oil.
So long as our economy is
dependant on oil and arms to safeguard that oil we will have Middle
Eastern terrorism to contend with both at home and abroad.
In the Middle East the scenario
was the same as well. The Palestinian -Israeli situation could be summed
up as an ageless blood honor clan feud locked into a system of global
transnational political and economic policies surrounding arms sales and
oil production.
There are those in the Israeli
and Arab camps that clearly profit from the violence in the Middle East.
Every true attempt at peace has either been derailed by assassination
(Rabin) or empty assurances of further extensions of autonomy (Oslo
accords) to the Palestinians. Before and during British occupation the
majority of the inhabitants of Palestine/Israel were Palestinian. To
some degree they had their country taken from them in 1948 before they
ever saw independence.
The state of Israel once an
image of Zion reborn was transformed into a nuclear power. The Saudis
were allowed to continue their medieval dictatorship despite being
number one supporters of terrorism all because they have the world’s
largest oil reserves. The Israeli’s became our regional means of
leverage against the Arabs. The Arabs supply us with oil which makes a
few Sheiks rich enough to leverage American Israeli leverage through
arms sales and support to terrorist organizations. The Israelis respond
with demands for more foreign and military aid.
The end result is that more military hardware is either supplied
directly or indirectly all throughout the Middle East by the United
States. Such a system demands that you add fuel to the fire and yet
bemoan the blaze when the intention was to put out the fire.
Israel's politicians have used
the instability and violence in the Middle East to work out advantageous
military contracts with our own military industrial complex. Further
escalation of the conflict means that the 30% of the Israeli economy
that is tied directly to the military budget can receive military
hardware from the US at bargain basement prices in the name of
collective security. Since most militarized economies suffer from
inflation, Israel has an advantageous arrangement with the US whereby
our military foreign aid package offsets that inflation.
So it is not surprising that a good portion of
the ruling class in the Middle East sleeps in the same bed as the US oil
lobby. The military industrial complex also profits from the mid east
malaise. Continuous
conflict insures that US can continually justify an annual 15 billion
dollar military aid package to Israel. 30% of the Israeli economy is
directly tied toward national defense. Israel has access to the latest
weapons systems from the US. They also have nuclear weapons. Dependence
on Arab oil forces us to support undemocratic regimes in the farcical
name of democracy and free trade. Arab leaders see our dependence on oil
as leverage by means to expand their own regional economic autonomy visa
via the threat of embargo. The
system of fair trade has been reduced to the power politics of majority
oligopolies and minority cartels.
All the political rhetoric about
democracy and human rights is only used as justification for military
intervention in countries not in the US economic sphere of friends. For
those inside the circle the rules need not apply. Hence, The principle
became propaganda used to increase foreign aid budgets on capital hill.
In fact the practice constitutes outright hypocrisy. For example, we
supported Saddam Hussein in the 80’s in his war with Iran despite the
fact that he used chemical weapons against Iran and also against his
Kurdish minority. Through the vehicle of free trade American Chemical
chemicals were the first to develop his chemical weapons arsenal.
Iraq’s neighbor, Turkey is our ally, and yet it has used poison gas
against the same Kurdish minority in its own borders. Nothing is said
about Turkey only about Iraq. Yet it is these same Kurds we laud as
heroes for opposing Saddam's brutal regime.
The concept of Human rights then became only an ideological
discourse applied only to those countries that were not in the US
political economic orbit as a psychological justification for military
intervention. If you are in the circle then the moral standards need not
apply. In truth US Democracy and capitalism became dependant upon
autocratic despots to safeguard its geopolitical ambitions. The price
for empire was the sacrifice of our democratic principals.
After Vietnam we had the despot
Shah of Iran to prop up. Also when we were beginning to decry the
autocrat Kadafi, US oil interests with some US government support had
long been pursuing economic ties to Libya despite Libya being named as a
state sponsor of terrorism. With the fall of the Shah of Iran and the
rise of the Ayatollah, US policymakers saw it necessary to arm Saddam.
In a classic divide and conquer strategy, it was hoped that the
split of the former Persian state would yield a malleable set of
regional interests politically weakened by tribal and religious
conflict, and eventually have the region transformed into an oil
producing client state for America.
Thus, the unintended consequence
of this was that in 1981 we set out to supply Saddam with arms poison
gas, for use against Kurds and the Iranians, courtesy of American
Chemical companies. That
war went on until 1988. In 1989 the soviet Afghan war began, and so we
began to supply afghan tribal factions along with Osama Bin Laden's own
faction of mujahadin. Victorious indeed we were against the soviets,
except that old allies became new enemies and new enemies fast became
old friends.
Democracy in practice has only
existed briefly before it was undone by oligarchy just ask the ancient
Athenians. The US committed
itself to supporting autocratic regimes based on vague geopolitical
principals, of collective security. The rhetoric of American foreign
policy today touts the expansion of democratic principles and yet its
practice of doling out foreign aid is based more on the horizontal
integration of the world's economic wealth into the hands of the power
elite classes as opposed to actual infra-structural investment in a
third world country. Third World countries are designed more on the
lines of a mercantile system in which all domestic production in those
countries is geared for export. The
poverty of these nations fans the flames of nationalism and since
dissent is not tolerated in these countries it will always be the US who
is viewed as the sole aggressor and infidel. The more we retaliate and
continue to prop up despotic regimes just for the sake of extracting oil
out of a country without real regard as to the genuine welfare of the
people whose natural resources we exploit, the more we insure that the
cycle of autocracy, poverty and terrorism will come to be increasingly
more visible in our own country
Historically, one can look to
past empires for evidence of the same trends we are witnessing today.
The rise of imperial Rome saw to the dissolution of the roman republic
and the expansion of empire. The second Punic wars transformed a
relatively prosperous society into a society of slaves and aristocrats.
In the last 100 years prior to the reign of Augustus, Rome was at civil
war and by the election of Augustus the roman senate the last bastion of
republicanism was divested of its power and existed in name only. Rome
continued to expand yet the price for that expansion was freedom and
imperialism was what ultimately did in the empire. The same could be
said about British Victorian colonialism.
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Middle east summary of Peace
agreements.
Gandhi quote
"Palestine belongs to the
Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to
the French...What is going on in Palestine today cannot be justified by
any moral code of conduct...If they [the Jews] must look to the
Palestine of geography as their national home, it is wrong to enter it
under the shadow of the British gun. A religious act cannot be performed
with the aid of the bayonet or the bomb. They can settle in Palestine
only by the goodwill of the Arabs... As it is, they are co-sharers with
the British in despoiling a people who have done no wrong to them. I am
not defending the Arab excesses. I wish they had chosen the way of
non-violence in resisting what they rightly regard as an unacceptable
encroachment upon their country. But according to the accepted canons of
right and wrong, nothing can be said against the Arab resistance in the
face of overwhelming odds." Mahatma Gandhi, quoted in
"A Land of Two Peoples" ed. Mendes-Flohr.
UN Security Council resolution
242
http://domino.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/45996cc3259e1c9c052567270057ac6f/59210ce6d04aef61852560c3005da209?OpenDocument
UN Security Council resolution
338
http://domino.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/be25c7c81949e71a052567270057c82b/7fb7c26fcbe80a31852560c50065f878?OpenDocument
history of Palestine/Israel
until 1988
http://domino.un.org/unispal.nsf/85255a0a0010ae82852555340060479d/57c45a3dd0d46b09802564740045cc0a!OpenDocument
Avi
Shlaim professor of
International Relations at Oxford and the author of The Iron Wall:
Israel and the Arab World (2000)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/comment/0,10551,684161,00.html
Pitfalls to peace
Prime Minister of Israel Yitzak
Rabin was a peacemaker like Anwar Sadat and an Israeli assassinated him
soon after the 1994 Oslo accords. He was assassinated at a advocating
peace between Israel and Palestinians. Soon after there was an election
and the Likud party came
into power under Netanyahu. Likud party ran on a platform of peace
through security. Likud party began to colonize/develop housing on
Palestinian lands. The response was terrorist attack on Israel by
Hezbollah. Israel responds with an invasion of Lebanon This led to
further escalation of terrorist activity.
In 1998 the Wye River Agreement
was to return to the Palestinians 13% of their land still occupied by
Israeli troops. Both sides waffled on this one. Arafat did not agree
with the arms reduction clause and Israel therefore reneged on the deal.
Failure to implement the Wye
River agreement cost Netanyahu the election. In comes the
"liberal" labor party candidate, Ehud Barak.
Wye-2 in 1999 promised the
Palestinians nominal control over the West bank just like its original
predecessor UN resolution 242. Never mind that the 1967 UN resolution
242 had already stated that the Israeli’s were supposed to withdrawal
"from territories conquered" from the 6-day war.
Although 30% of the west bank was to be ceded to the PLO, the PLO
would have had only control of only 5.4% of that 30% and the other 94.6%
would have been patrolled and figuratively controlled by the Israeli
defense forces. The corridor from the West Bank to the Gaza strip would
be entirely controlled by the Israelis.
Source:
The Washington Post, 5 August 1999 and
The Washington Post, 13 August 1999
Barak Soon lost the election to
Sharon
In 2000 the dispute between the
Israelis and Palestinians was about the fate of the 100,000 Palestinian
refugees who wanted to return to Israel. Israel refused to allow them to
return. Israeli settlements on internationally decreed
Palestinian lands were not removed. The situation led to riots
after the political appearance of the hawkish Ariel Sharon at the Temple
Mount a site considered holy by both Muslims and Jews, in September.
Next up was the Mitchell Plan.
the Mitchell plan called for Israeli withdrawal from settlements on
occupied Palestinian lands. It also told the Palestinians that cessation
from terror was a priority for peace.
The fact is Israel never agreed to the Mitchell Plan. Check
out the AP story, "Israel: Govt. Never OK'd Mitchell Plan"
By LAURIE COPANS Jan 31st 2002
The present day
problem is but a
repeat of the past. The
Bush administration wants to keep the current conflict out of the
jurisdiction of the United Nations despite prior Security Council
obligatory resolutions. Rather US policy makers seek to triangulate the
conflict and negotiate a separate uneven peace with
Palestinian that favors Israel. Problem is we are part of the
problem . Essentially, the
US obviously have a conflict of interest when it comes to negotiating
peace in the middle east if on the one hand it supplies
Israel with 15 billion dollars in military hardware and on the
other it expects the Palestinians to more or less accept the fact that
international law is meaningless and only Bilateral US Israeli terms of
negotiation determines the outcome of Palestinian sovereignty. So while
the stage for peace is portrayed as being on level ground,
civilizational rules only, the real expression of the rules of that
civilization are hypocritical and empty when it comes to the Palestinian
people. They are told that they have a state, and yet the territory of
that state is continually encroached upon occupied or resettled by
Israelis.
The Israeli's are using the US's
current global war on terror as a way to permanently end dialogue as to
who determines the Palestinian question other than Israel. Fact is that
there is a real civil war going on in Israel/Palestine and instead of us
being objective about the situation we have acted as partisans of the
Israeli's.
So while terrorist attacks
do come from Palestinians, no one mentions how Israel’s US
supplied apache helicopter gun ships
ring up double if not triple the number innocent civilian
casualties versus the nominal though
not inconsequential numbers of Israelis killed by Palestinian
terrorists. Secondly, any peace agreement between Israeli and
Palestinian is negotiated not on the basis of equal states rather on the
basis of falsely applied suzerainty. The Palestinian state is invested
with sovereignty in name only and in reality it is more like a
reservation than a state.
Since Israel has a centralized
state it has international legitimacy and hence its actions are not
deemed terrorist. However, when Israel was fighting British occupation
in the 1930’s and 40’s their actions were exactly the same as the
Palestinian acts of terrorism today.
In 2000, the Palestinians
rejected the Barak/Clinton Camp David peace proposal because Israel
refused to cede territory required by Un Security council resolution
242, and offered only nominal concessions. The spirit of Un Security
338, more or less reaffirmed a desire for the necessity of
implementation of 242. The only document issued out of the talks was the
Trilateral Agreement in which both sides mutually agreed that UN
Security Council resolutions 242 and 338, the latter in spirit of
the establishment of de juore separate and equal states.
A cycle of Hot air, more or less.
The proposal was also never
formerly written down and therefore never constituted an actual
agreement to a ceasefire and hence the idea that binding contractual
terms offered by the proposal is ostensibly fallacious.
The document refused to also accord attention to the ongoing
refugee problem Overall the
2000 agreement was just a high publicity photo opportunity.
Also recent Israeli colonization
of Palestinian lands by American Jew émigrés has further compounded
the problem. Israel has not agreed to a withdrawal. Hence the
Palestinian state and its supporters do not see themselves as violating
any peace agreement because there was never any real peace agreement.
Furthermore the Israeli
interpretation of UN 338 required that the Palestinian state would have
been sectioned off into 4 security zones, the corridors in between would
have been policed by Israel and the Palestinian state would have been
forced to rely on existing Israeli economic and transportation
infrastructure. This
scenario was something akin to the partition of Germany after WWII.
Oddly enough one can draw many
parallels between the offer of farcical independence by Israel to
Palestine with the apartheid regime in South Africa's own Bantustan
system.
---------------------------------------------------------------
An eye for an eye makes the
whole world blind yet until Israel relinquishes the majority of the
occupied territories, pursuant to international law,
Palestinian terrorism will continue. It’s hardly a fair fight
when we give Israel, 15 billion dollars in military Aid every year and
the Palestinians 50 million in food aid.
Recent proposals have suggested
that either a UN international peacekeeping force be dispatched to the
region or 20,000 US soldiers be sent to the region to police the
borders. Problem is that the whole Middle East framework for peace in
that area has come down to semantics, i.e., Israel must withdraw
"from all territories conquered to "from territories
conquered"(amended UN res. 242). Hence Israel has created a legal
stalemate hover how long it can prolong the occupation of Palestinian
territory on the basis of internal security politics and its need for
security buffer zones.
The state of Israel is waging an
ideological war that cannot be won, rather
the current policies have resulted
in proliferation of the conflict at a global scale. Until Israel
addresses legitimate concerns in regards to actual Palestinian
statehood, terrorism will continue to be inflicted by both sides.
sources:
These United Nations Security
Council resolutions both stipulate that Israel must withdraw "from
territories conquered" from the six days war. This leaves no
question as to the true and actual boundaries of the Palestinian State.
http://www.mfa.gov.il/mfa/go.asp?MFAH0hnl0
A terrorist one-day is the
father of a country the next day. War is a dirty business that makes a
few men rich. Nationalism
and poverty go hand in hand. The
nationalist response to imperialism and or occupation is terrorism. The
imperialist uses terror when he bombs whole villages to the ground to
punish one guilty terrorist. Terrorism is the weapon of the weak as it
is the weapon of the strong.
The legacy of terrorism in the
Middle East is predicated on the notion that Arabs see our support for
Israel as part of overall US acceptance of Israeli policies of
agitation and retaliation in the Middle East. Like Columbia, the
militarized state of Israel is waging an ideological war that cannot be
won, rather the current
policies have resulted in
proliferation of the conflict at a global scale. Until Israel addresses
legitimate concerns in regards to actual Palestinian statehood,
terrorism will continue to be inflicted by both sides.
The real question comes down to the fact that
while the Palestinians, specifically the PLO, Hamas, etc., have
committed acts of terrorism, specifically targeting non-combatants,
their actions are a direct result of illegal Israeli occupation. The
current political dogma of Israeli occupation relies on a extreme form
of Zionism that has always advocated either expulsion or segregation of
the Palestinians.
"... it is the duty of the [Israeli]
leadership to explain to the public a number of truths. One truth is
that there is no Zionism, no settlement, and no Jewish state without
evacuating Arabs, and without expropriating lands and their fencing
off." -- Yesha'ayahu Ben-Porat, (Yedi'ot Aharonot 07/14/1972)
responding to public controversy regarding the Israeli evictions of
Palestinians in Rafah, Gaza, in 1972. (Cited in Nur Masalha's "A
Land Without A People" 1997, p.98)
It seems Sharon suffers from the
same bias today. Hence terrorism will continue in the Middle East until
an acceptable re-addressment of pre 1967 boundaries of Israel-Palestine
is established as well as an internationalization of the city of
Jerusalem. Secondly, Israeli troops can hardly be expected to keep peace
when their natural interaction with Arabs is one based on advesarialism.
Un peacekeepers should be deployed to the region, and assist the
Palestinians in rebuilding their infrastructure and at the same time
establishing international zones and Un security checkpoints going to
and from the West Bank and Gaza strip. With those steps in place, along
with the removal of Israeli troops would be the final make or break
moment for the Palestinians. An objective international presence should
take away the ideological advocacy of terrorism as a direct response to
foreign occupation from the mindset of Palestinians.
Terrorism will continue to be
the chief weapon of these countries until a multilateral UN peacekeeping
force can insure that clear boundaries between the two states can be
established, upheld and true infrastructural modernization can be
brought to Palestine. The most potent weapon against terrorism is the
civil society. So long as regional politics and games of economic supply
continually dictate the Middle East agenda the problem will remain
intractable.
Political Zionism
The
Nazi holocaust and the subsequent liberation of the surviving Jews from
the concentration camps was the zeitgeist that propelled the world to
finally give the Jews a homeland. For many and not just Jews, it was the
realization of the dream of Zionism. Essentially, god could be seen
making good on his promise to redeem his vow to his chosen
people. Religion aside, from mundane truth, The specter of the horrors
of the Nazi holocaust did not eternally absolve the government of Israel
of any future wrongdoing, especially in regards to illegal occupation,
targeting of civilians and ghettoization of their Palestinian
brothers. Extremists on both sides fan the flames of discontent and
cunningly disguise their true intentions under the guise of religious
struggle and Jihad.
There
are many Jews who see Israel's current policy toward Palestinians as a
stain on the religious institutional mandate that founded their state.
60 years ago the politics were different. We really did have a black and
white US vs. them scenario with Germany. In this day and age it is
different because economics and politics have sidestepped morality, self
determination sacrificed for regional and geopolitical security.
Until
one can be distanced from ethnocentric Calvinist world view that of
which the modern day equivalent now also equates Jew with whiteness and
Palestinian with blackness, civilized and uncivilized, the latter a pox
on creation, unsuitable to the dominate theological discourse that
it is solely Judeo-Christian culture that constitutes modernity
than terrorism will continue to be waged by both sides. The
Arabs will view the US as eternally biased culturally toward Arabs
and hence we will be viewed as the enemy infidel. Failure to
establish multilateral negotiations on equal terms for both parties will
increase the cycle of violence out of which the contents will soon
manifest more terrorist attacks on American soil.
Behind
the façade of religion the true economic and political reasons for
Israeli hegemony are
Israel's
growing population needs housing and Israeli developers want to build on
Palestinian land. ex. Golan Heights
Further
escalation of conflict guarantees the constant need to reinforce state
security aims and maintains the US-Israeli, arms sales status quo.
Quote from Edward Said
on the formation of Israel
"In 1948, at the moment
that Israel declared itself a state, it legally owned a little more than
6 percent of the land of Palestine...After 1940, when the mandatory
authority restricted Jewish land ownership to specific zones inside
Palestine, there continued to be illegal buying (and selling) within the
65 percent of the total area restricted to Arabs.
Thus when the partition plan was
announced in 1947 it included land held illegally by Jews, which was
incorporated as a fait accompli inside the borders of the Jewish state.
And after Israel announced its statehood, an impressive series of laws
legally assimilated huge tracts of Arab land (whose proprietors had
become refugees, and were pronounced 'absentee landlords' in order to
expropriate their lands and prevent their return under any
circumstances)." Edward Said, "The Question of
Palestine."
"Palestinian attempts to
set up a real state were blocked by Egypt and Jordan. When the fighting
ended in 1949, Israel held territories beyond the boundaries set by the
UN plan - a total of 78% of the area west of the Jordan River. The rest
of the area assigned to the Arab state was occupied by Egypt and Jordan.
Egypt held the Gaza Strip and Jordan held the West Bank. About
700,000 Arabs fled or were driven out of Israel and became refugees in
neighboring Arab countries. The Arab countries refused to sign a
permanent peace treaty with Israel. Consequently, the borders of Israel
established by the armistice commission never received de jure (legal)
international recognition. "
other source quotes
http://www.pacificnews.org/content/pns/2001/dec/1214unholy.html
http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/10/26/home/oz-slopes.html
http://www.jewsnotzionists.org/
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/world/DailyNews/mideast010802_hamas.html
Research
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