[lbo-talk] Chomsky: Israel Lobby ?

Marvin Gandall marvgandall at videotron.ca
Thu Mar 30 16:31:27 PST 2006


Doug wrote:


> Don't forget the argument of Nitzan & Bichler in The Global Political
> Economy of Israel: oil companies *like* tensions in the Middle East,
> because they raise prices and therefore profits.
======================================== That sounds a bit too conspiratorial for my tastes. Perhaps it is true up to a point, but it's hard to imagine oil executives don't understand that tensions - which are, by nature, unpredictable - can become uncontrollable and threaten the pro-Western Arab regimes who allow the multinationals to exploit the region's rich oil resources on favourable terms. To be sure, they've had enough unhappy experience. I doubt, for example, that the oil companies applauded the accession to power of radical secular nationalists like Nasser or religious ones like Khomeini, and the anti-Western programs and instability each brought in their wake. And uncontrollable price spikes produced by these crises can also produce recessions which quickly bring profits down and provoke demands for alternative energy. In any case, beyond the oil companies, the capitalists as a class and their governments emphatically do not like these developments, and their strong support of Israel for the past half century has been for the express purpose of blocking them. Their reliance on Israel as a counter to radical nationalism has produced tension in its own way - which is what our present discussion is about - but of the kind produced by strikes or lockouts, which employers often accept as an unavoidable alternative to more serious headaches. If the issue is one of overthrowing anti-Western regimes, they can also accept the attendant conflict here as well, but they have had to mostly contend with the opposite trend since they overthrew Mossadegh, and it can hardly be something they've welcomed.



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