"What are You Doing? What Have You Become?" Israel as an Extension of American Empire
By JEFF HALPER Jeff Halper is an anthropologist and the Director of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD). He can be reached at icahd at zahav.net.il.)
There are many tragic and self-destructive features of the Occupation for Israel itself. Although the country was founded on the "original sin" of exclusivity and the expulsion of the refugees, it nevertheless had (has?) the potential to develop into a normal, even progressive society. Many of the socialist principles that accompanied the Zionist program led in those directions. Israel always talked of democracy, even extending citizenship to its Arab population in 1948, even though the underlying concept of a "Jewish democracy," coupled with a deep-based fear of demographics only exacerbated by the Occupation, has emptied that of much of its content. It constituted itself as a welfare state, only to see that largely dismantled as the Israel-Palestine conflict gave dominance to the right whose agenda, together with expansion, was anti-socialist and pro-privatization. Israel became a member of the Socialist International and engaged in constructive development work in Africa, Asia and Latin America, but its need for military strength, coupled with a self-serving "alliance" with the US, has led to become a major arms dealer on a global scale, a subverter of progressive civil society elements throughout the developing world.
One of the tragic developments related to this rightward shift of Israeli politics and social policies -- even defining Israel's view of itself in the world -- is its emergence as a center for the global right-wing, a constellation of nefarious ideologies, groups and forces that seek nothing less than American-Christian hegemony over the entire world. In a unique and, again, tragic confluence of historical processes, the rise of an aggressive neo-con ideology and militaristic foreign policy, centered in the US but not limited to it, coincides with the emergence of the Israeli rights and an expansionist Israel. "Coincides" might understate the case: in fact, the rise of a religious right in the West owes much of its impetus to Zionism and Israel, while Israel is able to pursue its Occupation only because of its willingness to serve Western (mainly US) imperial interests including acting as a galvanizing center for global neo-con forces. What follows is a brief survey of those forces and their interplay with Israel.
Israel as a Center of Neo-Con Ideology and Mobilization.
Many of the founders of neo-conservatism in the 1970s and most of its prominent advocates today are Jewish. This is not an irrelevant fact, nor is it "anti-Semitic" to say so. Neo-conservatism emerged not of traditional anti-New Deal Republican conservatism, which was largely WASP and Middle Western in its roots, but out the Roosevelt's New Deal itself, which resonated with Eastern European Jewish immigrants, many of whom were working class and attracted to socialism and communism. From there they and their children gravitated to the New Left and then to liberalism (Irving Kristol has described a neo-con as "a liberal mugged by reality.") The Jewish magazine Commentary, a publication of Jewish liberals who were indeed mugged by the Sixties, became the fountain and mouthpiece of neo-conservatism as it emerged and entered into power politics during the Reagan Administration (when Jeane Kirkpatrick became the leading non-Jewish luminary).
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