Presentation at a forum on “Islam, American Foreign Policy, Democracy and Globalization”
From the 19th century onwards Islam in the world became increasingly intertwined with nationalism. In the case of 19th century Arab nationalism this was in part against a Muslim empire – the Ottoman Empire. By the 19th century the Ottoman Empire was decaying, and its control over Arab lands was resented.
In the 20th century the fusion of Islam and nationalism brought into the world a whole new country – PAKISTAN, which was carved out of British India. But also in the 19th and 20th centuries Judaism had gone nationalistic – giving birth to Zionism hungry for land. Judaism is a religion, but Zionism is an ideology with a marked territorial appetite.
Israel was created as a Jewish state a year after Pakistan was created as an Islamic state. But while the creation of Pakistan did not produce stateless people, the creation of Israel did. The creation of Pakistan resulted in exchange of populations between two parts of former British India. On the other hand, the creation of Israel produced refugees and displaced people who have been scattered in many countries ever since.
When European powers occupied Africa and parts of Asia, the image of America was that of an anti-colonial force in world affairs. The United States put a lot of pressure on its European allies to speed up the process of giving independence to the colonies.
Even as late as 1956 – when Britain, France and Israel invaded Egypt in response to Egypt’s nationalization of the Suez Canal – the Eisenhower Administration turned against its allies.
The United States forced Israel to withdraw from the Sinai, and forced Britain and France to give up Port Said in Egypt. The British Prime Minister had a nervous breakdown – Anthony Eden gave way to Harold McMillan.
Egypt’s Nasser emerged as world figure – partly because the United States would not support the Anglo-Franco-Israeli invasion of Egypt. Nasser had been militarily defeated, but emerged politically triumphant. The Eisenhower administration – wittingly or unwittingly – had helped the Egyptian president.
John F. Kennedy as President dismissed the concerns of the white settlers elsewhere in Africa when they objected to the phrase “AFRICA FOR THE AFRICANS”. Kennedy insisted “Who else would Africa be for if not for Africans?” The United States was on the side of the aspirations of African nationalists.
But two things were happening which future historians would later have to dis-entangle. The United States was expanding towards greater globalization – while the Jews of the world decided to withdraw from globalization. As Europe declined in world affairs, the United States rose in global pre-eminence. And as Europe emerged from the brutal excesses of Nazi nationalism, the Jews retreated into a form of nationalism of their own.
Until the creation of the state of Israel Jews were, per capita, the most globalized of all people. There were Jews leading intellectual movements in Germany, advising Sultans in the Arab world, experimenting as scientists in Russia, writing poetry in Iran, and changing the ideological map of the world. It is in that sense that the Jews invented globalization.
Among the ethnic Jews who changed the modern mind were the philosopher Spinoza, the psychiatrist Sigmund Freud, the social revolutionary Karl Marx, the physicist Albert Einstein. It is once again in that sense that the Jews invented globalization.
The creation of the state of Israel was, in the long run, the de-globalization of world Jewry. Zionism was anti-globalism. The Jews of the Diaspora were retreating from a global arena to fortress Israel. Just as the United States was expanding into a global power, the Jews were shrinking as a global presence. The paradox was at its most acute within the United States. The Jews of America were, as citizens, part of a global power – but as Jews they were part of a shrinking global presence.
The American hegemone was now extending a global Pax Americana – establishing a policing presence worldwide. Yet the Jews were smaller and smaller fractions of major European cities. In the Arab world – where they had once been Ministers and leading advisors of rulers – they were thrown out or worse. In much of the Third World they were suspect as potentially subversive Zionists. In Ethiopia they had all but disappeared. In South Africa they were packing to leave in stages.
In Russia and the Ukraine they have left in droves for Israel. The impact of Zionism and the creation of Israel has resulted in the parochialization of world Jewry. Zionism had been antithetical to globalization.
Towards the Racialization of Zionism
But did the parochialization of World Jewry coincide with the racialization of Zionism?
Many friends of Israel are anxious that the repressive forces in the Jewish state are getting stronger -- and a distinctly Israeli form of racism may be evolving. This is a minority. But within that racially anti-Arab minority there may be a smaller and more ominous sub-group.
There is a school of thought in Israel which is already becoming fascist. This issue is debated more frankly in Israel itself than in the United States. Lovers of democracy in Israel are alarmed by the fascist trend. There is even an Israeli word for this kind of Semitic fascism. Professor Yeshayahu Leibovitz of the Hebrew University has called it: Judeo-Nazism. As editor of the Encyclopedia Hebraica, Leibovitz has grappled with many trends in the Jewish experience. But he has now raised the issue of whether the concept of Judeo-Nazism is any longer a contradiction in terms.
Israelis are warning each other that the unthinkable is not necessarily impossible. Specific sociological conditions in inter-war Germany fostered right wing extremism among the Germans. The history of German extremism started with a people who believed they had been humiliated and humbled.
The Treaty of Versailles which ended World War I created among the Germans a martyrdom complex which later favoured the rise of extreme nationalism. The martyrdom complex -- strong among the Israelis today and powerful among the Germans in the inter-war years -- can degenerate into paranoia. We now know that lovers of democracy in the German population underestimated the danger. The whole world paid a heavy price for German paranoia.
Jews -- like the Germans -- have been impressive contributors to world civilization. But both people are human, and therefore psychologically vulnerable. The danger of extremism is real.
The stages toward extremism through which the German psyche passed were as follows:
1. Martyrdom Complex
2. Paranoia
3. Extreme Nationalism
4. Racial Exclusivity
5. Militarization
6. Territorial Expansionism
It is very unlikely that Israelis will pass through similar stages. There are in any case major constraints to Zionist extremism. The question nevertheless remains whether the danger of fascism in Israel is real enough to alarm Israeli patriots themselves.
Israel was genuinely born out of the ashes and anguish of the Holocaust. It was a more genuine martyrdom than was the Nazi sense of humiliation in the inter-war years.
But when does the martyrdom complex evolve into paranoia? In two stages in the case of the Jews:
a) Monopolizing the Holocaust as an experience of the Past
b) Pre-empting imaginary Holocausts of the future
A 1980’s American immigrant into Israel from a religious family in New York prayed for a new persecution of Jews in the Diaspora so that they are forced to go to the fortress Israel:
“The hatred the Gentiles feel towards the Jews is eternal. There never was peace between us and them except when they totally beat us or when we shall totally beat them. Maybe if they will give someone like Sharon the chance to kill...until the Arabs will understand that we did them a favour letting them remain alive .... We are powerful now and power should talk now. The Gentiles only understand the language of power.”
Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir declared in April 1988:
“We say to them, from this hilltop and from the perspective of thousands of years of history, that in our eyes they are like grasshoppers.”
Menachin Begin’s earlier denunciation of Palestinians as “two-legged animals” has formed part of the same drift towards racist perceptions and perspectives in powerful circles in Israel.
Is Zionist nationalism stifling Israeli liberalism? Opinion polls of Israeli attitudes to the Palestinian uprising in the occupied territories is one measure. The death of over 500 Palestinians since the Intifada began has not alarmed enough Israelis. Indeed, the majority of Israelis seem to want even stiffer measures against the Palestinians.
When is soft Israeli arrogance towards the Arabs paternalistic? As an Israeli originally from Aden put it:
“We know that the Arab is an obedient good creature as long as he is not incited and no one puts ideas into his head.... He just has to be told exactly what his right place is.... They must understand who the master is. That’s all.”
When united to fanaticism and nationalism, arrogance can take the form of militant racism. Take the case of the young rabbi who denounced the “filth” of mixed marriages and the “hybrid children” such marriages produce -- “a thorn in the flesh of the Jewish society in Israel.”
This rabbi recommended school segregation and exclusion of Arabs from the universities. Echoes of apartheid are unmistakable.
As for the trend towards militarization, Israel has indeed become the most efficient war machine since Nazi Germany. In war after war the Jewish state has demonstrated staggering proficiency both in the air and on land. The six-day war in June 1967 was its most dazzling military success. Did this military success increase territorial appetite? A state created in the teeth of the opposition of indigenous people became a state surrounded by hostile neighbours. It was only a matter of time before the moral cost had to be paid. Director-General of Israel Broadcasting Authority (radio and television) in the 1970s was a “long time admirer of South Africa and a frequent visitor there.” In 1974 he wrote an “emotional article” expressing his preference for South Africa over Black Africa, complete “with citations of research proving genetic inferiority of blacks” -- a view which “seems to reflect the feeling of many in the Israeli elite.”
The journal of Mapam (left wing of Labour Alignment) published an explanation of the superiority of Israeli pilots. Blacks and Arabs were inferior in “complex, cognitive intelligence.” That was why “American Blacks succeed only in short distance running”
Israeli neo-Nazism reversed the scale of genetic values favoured by German Nazis. Both forms of extremism exaggerated the impact of the Jewish factor. The Nazis thought the Jewish impact was negative. The Israeli extremists erred the other way.
Why has the United States outdistanced Europe in modern culture? The proportion of Jews in the American population has enhanced American creativity, according to this Israeli school of thought.
By implication German inventiveness before the Holocaust was due to the Jewish creative infusion into the German population. An Israeli labour party journal refers to “genetic experiments” at Tel Aviv University -- which have shown that “genetic differences among Jewish communities [Poland and Yemen are cited] are smaller than those between Gentiles and Jews.”
“In earlier years the Rabbinate had cited biblical authority to justify expulsion of the Arabs (“The foreign element”) from the land, or simply their destruction, and religious law was invoked to justify killing of civilians in war or raid.”
American Rabbi Isaac Bernstein argued that religious law gives power and legitimacy to Israel to “dispossess the Arabs of the conquered territories.” Another Rabbi, Rabbi Lubovitcher of New York, deplored that Israel did not conquer Damascus during the 1973 October War.
A doctrine emerged called “secure and defensible borders.” After almost every war Israel attempted to get more territory. Whose secure and defensible borders? Because of Israel’s military supremacy, only Israel had such secure borders. The Arabs were easily penetrable by Israeli air and rocket power.
The transition from chosen people to chosen race gathered momentum. Rabbi Elazar Valdman of Gush Emunim wrote in the journal Nekudah of the West Bank settlers:
We will certainly establish order in the Middle East and in the world. And if we do not take this responsibility upon ourselves, we are sinners, not just towards ourselves but towards the entire world. For who can establish order in the world? All of those Western leaders of weak character?
The question which inevitably has now arisen is whether Israel’s taste for imperial expansion can long be sustained without hurting Israeli democracy. Can the sadism against Palestinians be long enjoyed without creating Israeli masochism? Is Zionism becoming a cancer not just on the body politic of Arab stability but also on the body politic of Jewish sense of justice?
Towards the Militarization of Pax Americana
But something had also changed in the attitude of the United States. Instead of its previous role as anti-colonial power, the United States became increasingly perceived as the new imperial hegemone. Just as cowboys were sometimes trigger happy, the United States became bomber-happy with ever expanding militarization.
Every American president since Franklin D. Roosevelt has engaged in some act of war or another. Roosevelt was inevitably embroiled in World War II; Harry Truman helped to initiate the Korean War; Dwight Eisenhower ended the Korean War but started planning for the Bay of Pigs operation on Cuba; John F. Kennedy unleashed the Bay of Pigs operation and helped to initiate the Vietnam War; Lyndon Johnson escalated the Vietnam war; Richard Nixon bombed Cambodia; Gerald Ford sent the Marines in a disagreement with Cambodia over a U.S. cargo-ship, the Mayaguez; Jimmy Carter attempted to thwart the Iranian revolution and paid heavily for it; Ronald Reagan perpetrated acts of war in Lebanon, the Caribbean, Libya and in shooting down a civilian airline in the Persian Gulf; George Bush Senior invaded Panama and is most famous for Desert Storm in the Persian Gulf; Bill Clinton led military action against Yugoslavia over Kosovo and bombed Sudan and Afghanistan; George W. Bush has already inherited a decade of bombing Iraq and subsidizing half a century of Israeli militarism against Palestinians. Now this younger Bush is about to embark on what he calls a “crusade against terrorism.”
Every American president since Franklin Roosevelt has regarded an act of war as the equivalent of a rite of passage. The Commander-in-Chief has to “act presidential”. And yet the United States hardly ever calls these engagements “acts of war”. Even the war in Vietnam which cost nearly sixty thousand American lives and millions of Vietnamese lives, was never officially declared by the United States. America needs to find more humane rites of passage for its leaders. Pax Americana needs to pacify American values first and foremost.
Terrorism is getting globalized, but the definition of an “act of war” is not. Such a definition is still highly selective, depending upon the power of the perpetrator or the status of the victim. For the immediate future it may also depend upon making sure that Usamaphobia does not degenerate into Islamophobia.
The blood of the innocent cries out not just for a coalition against terrorism but for a coalition in search of genuine peace.
But something also changed in the anticolonial attitude of the United States in the second half of the twentieth century. Israel was as much a colonial and occupying power over Palestinians as European powers had been over Asians or Africans.
But that old anti-colonial image of the United States evaporated when the colonizers were Israelis rather than Europeans. The relationship between the United States and Israel is one of the strangest in world history. Why should Israeli colonialism be any more legitimate than British colonialism in the eyes of Americans? And why should the Israeli tail be able to wag the American dog in any case?
There will be no “world without terrorism” for as long as the Palestinian-Israeli dispute is unresolved. It is by far the biggest trigger of anger against the United States among all issues.
Muslims are victims of violent injustice elsewhere in the world without the globalization of anger against the United States. Muslims in Kashmir, India, are victims of Indian security forces trying to prevent them from having self-determination.
Muslims in Chechnya are victims of Russian security forces trying to prevent them from having self-determination. Muslims in Macedonia are trying to cope with discrimination from Christian Madedonians. Muslims in Kosovo are denied a separate state by the international community and face the risk of reintegration with Yugoslavia hanging over them.
Muslims in Afghanistan faced the Soviet Union before and defeated it. The Afghans have now experienced military action by the United States.
If Muslims have been victimized elsewhere by other powers, why is the victimization of Muslims in the Middle East such a powder keg? This is not a clash of civilizations but a clash of two centers. The United States is the center of the Western world in military and economic power. The Middle East is the center of the Muslim world for a variety of reasons.
Although the majority of Arabs are Muslims, the majority of Muslims are not Arab. The largest Muslim countries are Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan and (numerically) India, each of which has well over 100 million.
No Arab country is large enough to be even No. 5 in population in the Muslim world. Iran and Turkey have larger Muslim populations than Egypt.
BUT WHY is the Middle East the center of the Muslim World?
(a) The location of Mecca and Medina
(b) Five prayers facing Mecca for all practicing Muslims
(c) Pilgrimage to Mecca produces two million Muslim pilgrims a year
(d) The Arab world is the land of the language of the Q’uran
(e) Mecca is the birthplace of Muhammad the Prophet -- Medina is his burial place
(f) JERUSALEM is the third holiest city of Islam.
(g) Great centers of Islamic learning include Al-Azhar University in Egypt and Fez in Morocco.
(h) Concentration of Muslim wealth in the Middle East is reflected in:
(i) The Organization of the Islamic Conference
(ii) Islamic Bank for Development
(iii) The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (this is two-thirds Muslim)
Into this Arab heartland of the Muslim world Western powers decided to create a Jewish state – with President Harry S. Truman playing a critical role in making it happen.
It did not stop with the creation of the Jewish state.
(a) Israel expanded after the 1948 war
(b) Eisenhower prevented expansion in 1956
(c) Further Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory after 1967 war
(d) Annexation of Jerusalem by Israel in 1967
(e) Creating Jewish settlements on Arab land continually
(f) Blowing up and destroying Arab homes as a hidden strategy of ethnic cleansing.
WHY IS THE U.S. being blamed for Israeli policies? Where was Osama bin Laden’s anti-Americanism coming from?
(a) Massive economic aid from the United States to Israel in billions
(b) Provision of sophisticated American weapons to Israel
(c) The United States was shielding Israel from U.N. censure
(d) The United States was making U.N. Security Council impotent in punishing Israel.
(e) The United States was weakening anti-Israeli Arab forces by buying off the government of Egypt with a billion U.S. dollars every year. Egypt is the largest Arab country and used to be the biggest single threat to Israel militarily. The U.S. largess has bought off Egypt effectively.
(f) The U.S. was preventing IRAQ from rising as an alternative to Egypt in challenging Israel. Taking advantage of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait to weaken Iraq permanently – whereas Pearl Harbor was not used to weaken Japan permanently, nor was Hitler’s aggression used to weaken Germany permanently.
THE UNITED STATES is both the main source of military support for the enemy of the Arab World, Israel, and the USA is also the main destroyer of Arab capacity to rise militarily. This latter policy includes weakening Egypt and enfeebling Iraq.
The American base in SAUDI ARABIA since 1991 is perceived as turning sacred Islamic soil into an extension of the PENTAGON. The USA is the center of the Western World; the Arab countries are the center of the Muslim World.
A situation of gross military frustration has been created, especially in Palestine and Iraq. This is not a clash of civilizations, it is a clash of two centers – Titanic Intercentrism in conflict.
We must solve the Palestine problem if terrorism is to end. To the moralist, terrorism against the United States is born out of evil. To the political analyst terrorism is born out of anger and hate.
Solving the Israeli-Palestinian brutal stalemate is indispensable for the creation of a world without terrorism. It is also indispensable for making the United States a more benevolent super power, and Israel a less racist power.
Finally, the Jews to whom 1.2 billion Muslims owe a lot doctrinally and to whom a similar number of Christians are equally indebted, will one day re-discover their global role. The Jews –who invented globalization – may one day help to make globalization more humane. AMEN.
Bibliography
Al Hamishmar, January 4, 1978.
Chomsky, Noam. The Fateful Triangle : The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians (Boston: South End Press, 1983)
“Search for Partners: Should the US Deal with the PLO?” Time Magazine April 11, 1988. See what is a “Grasshopper”, letter to NYT, April 20, 1988.
Consult report by Eliahu Salpeter, Ha’aretz, No. 4, 1982.
Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, “Israel and South Africa” New Outlook, March/April 1983; Hotam, April 18, 1975 and October 1, 1982.
Charles Hoffman, “A Monkey Trial, Local Style”, Jerusalem Post, March 22, 1983.
Entire Article (Islam Radicalized) can be found at: http://www.mediareviewnet.com/ISLAM%20RADICALISED%20BETWEEN%20ZIONISM%20&%20PAX%20AMERICANA.htm