[I don't find Chomsky's thoughts in this instance convincing. A more persuasive POV (below) is offered by a recent poster (whom I do not know) on the Marxism list, so I am taking the liberty of citing it in full. BTW, I appreciate the wry reference here to the Spongebob Squarepants character Plankton as illustrating that "plots for world domination can be conceived in many ways”; however, I don’t think Plankton will be lecturing before the Naval War College anytime soon ;-)]
To: marxism at lists.econ.utah.edu Subject: RE: [Marxism] James Petras: The Tyranny Of Israel Over America From: "M. Junaid Alam" <alam at lefthook.org> Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2006 00:24:46 -0500
[Louis Proyect wrote:] "Israel does not exercise a 'tyranny' over US foreign policy. US foreign policy is simply an extension of English foreign policy that goes back to the Balfour declaration."
This is really a bit odd. First, because this totally contradicts Louis' earlier argument that perhaps support for Israel is totally irrational because systems on the brink behave irrationally. But more to the point, while the argument here tries to make US support for Israel sound as natural as the sun setting in the evening, it ends up doing quite the opposite. Yes - the policy is definitely an extension of British foreign policy - but then the question is: what motivated Britain's support for Jewish settlement in Palestine? The Brits didn't wake up one morning and say, "hey you know what would be a kick-ass idea? A Jewish state in the middle of the Muslim world!" Rather, it was Zionists in the mold of Herzl and Weizmann who actively lobbied the British government to create a state.
Look at Herzl's 1896 Der Judenstaat, and the activities of his movement from 1880-1920. The most pressing need of the movement was to find a sponsor. Zionists tried to appeal to the anti-Semitism of some European rulers to get support (hey, we Jews will be out of your way if...); and they also tried to appeal to the imperialist interests of the West as well ('we will act as an European rampart against Asian barbarism'). Early on Zionists tried to literally bribe the Ottomans to give them part of the land (the response was, 'Sons of clinking gold, keep your billions.') Most of this is documented in Benny Morris' "Righteous Victims" among other places, including Jabotinsky's famous Zionist thesis, "The Iron Wall."
Naturally, in his usual bizarre style Petras takes things way overboard; there is no 'tyranny' involved because supporting Israel is one way to try to further US interests. But the Chomsky-type, rather robotic proposition that posits US level of support for Israel as inevitable as gravity doesn't stand any test of reason whatsoever - Israel is *one way* yes, but certainly not the only and even more certainly not the most effective of furthering US interests. Zionism needed a sponsor, it always has and always will. It is manifestly in the interests of the Zionist movement to ensure full support for Israel and domination of the Arabs continues without the bat of an eye. What rule etched in what granite rock dictates that this coincidentally just happens to be precisely the same course the US ruling elite was going to embark upon anyway? None whatsoever! As anyone can learn from watching Plankton in Spongebob Squarepants, plots for world domination can be conceived in many ways. The obvious American path, if we started carte blanche, would be to actually get 300 of the 306 million people in an oil-rich region on your side as much as possible; to get the side that actually has the oil to tolerate you - you know, the dozens of countries versus...just the one without any oil. Otherwise, you end up with some nasty stuff: mass riots ostensibly over cartoons, a totally unstable simmering Arab world with creaky despots sitting on a pot of boiling Islamists, a fanatical Iranian regime which nonetheless understands that another country owning 200 nuclear warheads legitimizes its own possession of such arms - and so on.
This is really ABC stuff. There is no "objective, material" reason for the US to support Israel. There are superstructural reasons, residue from what was once buttressed by objective material conditions (Cold War), a residue that has hardened, been reinforced, and locked into place so as to become policy. That residue is (a) demonization of Arabs and Islam, resulting in a sense of 'Judeo-Christian' solidarity against the Other, (b) deep exploitation of the history of Jewish suffering - and Western guilt in it - to use as a battering ram against criticism of Israel. To deny that these two have been major elements of public indoctrination - to deny that the 'organized American Jewish community,' plus its newfound far-right friends, has not only bought into Zionism but actively promotes it - is to deny the social reality we inhabit. Nothing less can explain how it is possible that, in the face of the clearest historical evidence unearthed since 1980, it is actually borderline criminal to criticize a state founded on ethnic cleansing and predicated on mass terror and racism.
This is not the stuff of "client state" relationships or "inevitable" policies! How much of a 'lobby' and how many 'think tanks' does Musharraf or Karzai have, how many did any of the US-sponsored despots in the CW period have, that were based in Washington and punished politicians for 'misbehaving'? Consider even the lobbying arms of corporations - how much outrage in backlash is there when the public in some poll or temporary outburst of action says they are too powerful or acting against majority interests or corrupting democracy? That is exactly the standard fare image most people have of a corporate lobbyist and they are unharassed for it in private or in public discourse. Why so different for an Israeli lobbyist and Israel?
In brief: If US intense support for Israel is so bloody inevitable, someone needs to tell the army of pro-Israel lobbyists, slanderers, professional smearers and liars in academia, on network TV, in the newspapers - because clearly they did not get the memo and simply need to retire! This situation reminds me of my old high school history teacher's little parable: all the scientists with their elegant theories decided only light bodies with large wings could fly, but luckily the bumble bee, hearing and knowing nothing of this theory, merrily buzzed away. Well, 'The Lobby' continues to buzz away, while some of us pretend it doesn't matter, or doesn't exist.
The other thought process I see going on in this list is pretty simple: "If the lobby has power to influence US policy, and if the place influenced is a Jewish state, then the lobby is mostly Jewish, and so that it means that Jews have power, and that's what the KKK says too, so therefore, it is racist." Or, "well the authors of this report are poly-sci realists, so their political position is that without Israeli influence, US imperialism would be a good thing, so therefore it is bourgeois." In other words you guys set up litmus tests - you don't take the argument on its own merits, but rather you look at it in terms of the endless ways it can be employed by others with different motives, and on that basis, declare it illegitimate. And there's nothing Marxist about that.
<http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/msg80550.html>
Carl