The December 14 killing of 15 Jews by two ISIS-inspired gunmen at Sydney’s Bondi Beach has given rise to calls for a ban on the use of the phrase “globalize the intifada,” on the grounds that it is a call for the killing of Jews around the world.
The New York Times reported that “Two of Britain’s largest police forces announced that they would arrest protesters for using the phrase ‘globalize the intifada,’ saying in a joint statement that a ‘more assertive’ approach was needed after the terrorist attack in Australia and a previous assault on a synagogue in England.”
In Canada, the editorial board of the country’s largest newspaper, The Globe and Mail, argued—with not a shred of evidence—that the Bondi Beach killers were driven to their murderous spree by a desire to globalize the intifada. The board harrumphed, “And if anyone was still unclear as to what the chants heard in countless rallies in Canada and elsewhere to ‘globalize the intifada’ mean, the answer is to be found in the carnage at Bondi Beach. The two gunmen heard and heeded the call to intifada.”
British authorities, court journalists, Zionists, and defenders of Israel misrepresent “globalize the intifada” as a call to kill Jews everywhere, falsely citing the slogan as the inspiration for the Bondi Beach killings.
There are two problems with their argument.
Globalize the intifada is a call to bring global pressure to bear on Israel to end its occupation of Palestinian territories, not a call to kill Jews.
The Bondi Beach killings were not inspired by either the true meaning of the slogan or the false meaning that has been attributed to it by Israel’s supporters.
Globalize the intifada is a call to bring global pressure to bear on Israel to end its occupation of Palestinian territories
Intifada is an Arabic word meaning “to shake off.” It was used by Palestinians to describe two of their efforts to bring an end to, or shake off, the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian Territories of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. One of those efforts lasted from 1987-1993; another from 2000-2005.
At the heart of the word “intifada”, as Palestinians have used this term, is a political goal: an end to the occupation. However, Zionists and their supports misinterpret the word to mean violence against Jews. To be sure, violence is one way that Palestinians might try, and have tried, to achieve this goal. But calling for intifada—shaking off Israeli oppression—is a call for a campaign to achieve a political aim, not a specification of how the aim is to be achieved.
Still, political violence was part of the intifadas, but it was aimed, not at Jews qua Jews, but at Israelis. So even if the call for intifada was specifically a call for political violence—and it isn’t—it wouldn’t be a call for violence against Jews as such, but against Jewish supremacist settlers in the Palestinians’ homeland.
To say, then, that “globalize the intifada” is a call to kill Jews everywhere is false. First, there is no inherent reference to violence in the word intifada. Second, even if there was, the violence would be directed not at Jews everywhere, but at Israelis specifically, and not for reasons of blind hatred of Jews but in pursuit of a legitimate Palestinian political objective.
I say the Palestinian political objective is legitimate for two reasons.
The Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories is illegal under international law. This statement isn’t even remotely controversial.
A people’s redressing its dispossession and oppression is, on moral grounds, axiomatically legitimate.
The Palestinians’ pursuit of the goal embodied in the word intifada is, thus, a legitimate political project. To globalize the intifada is to internationalize the pursuit of this legitimate political objective; it is a call for people around the world to enter the fight, in whatever way they can, to help an oppressed people achieve their legitimate political aim.
In sum, the slogan:
Is not based in the psychopathology of Judeophobia, but in a legitimate political objective.
Is not a call for violence (nor at the same time a call for non-violence; it is a call for the achievement of a political objective, not a specification of how the objective is to be achieved).
Makes no allusion to Jews as such but only to Israelis who support and enforce the denial of the Palestinians’ legitimate aims.
The slogan is not, therefore, necessarily a call for violence against Israelis, and it is most especially not a call for violence against Jews outside Israel.
The Bondi Beach killings were not inspired by either the false or true meanings of the slogan
The killers, according to Australian officials, appear to have been motivated by Islamic State ideology. Islamic State thinking is pretty simple: kill the infidel—Yazidis, Christians, Shia Muslims, Alawi Muslims, Jews, and even non-fundamentalist Sunni Muslims. ISIS militants are not choosy. If you don’t believe what they believe, you’re fair game.
In June “a suicide bomber who was a member of the Islamic State opened fire before blowing himself up during the Sunday service at the Greek Orthodox church of Prophet Elias in Damascus, killing at least 30 and wounding more than 60 Greek Orthodox Christians.”
For every Jew killed at Bondi Beach two Christians were killed at Damascus, by killers inspired by the same Islamic State ideology. Significantly, the killing of 30 Christians was a non-story, barely noticed anywhere, but the massacre of half as many Jews has widely reported and is now known by much of the world.
No one has cited the Damascus slaughter of Christians as evidence of a spike in anti-Christian hatred, or called for Christians to have their own ethno-state where they can feel safe, or demanded measures to combat a growing scourge of anti-Christian animus.
It would appear that the Bondi Beach killers did not target Jews to show solidarity with Palestinians. It is more likely that they slaughtered Jews for the reason ISIS militants slaughter anyone, including Christians and Shia Muslims: because, in ISIS’s view, they’re infidels.
But even if the killers’ actions were intended as a show of solidarity with Palestinians, their decision to slaughter Jews on an Australian beach has no meaningful connection to any legitimate interpretation of “globalize the intifada.” The slogan is not a call to kill Jews as Jews, much less Jews living almost nine thousand miles away from Palestine, but to support Palestinians in their quest to overcome the opposition of Israelis to the achievement of a legitimate Palestinian political aim.
The politics of misinterpretation
Not surprisingly, the misinterpretation of the slogan comports with the political aims of Zionists, Israeli officials, and Israel’s supporters. They want to discredit the global movement which seeks to pressure Israel to end its occupation of the Palestinian territories by identifying its motivations as rooted in the psychopathology of Judeophobia. Zionists want to do this in order to draw attention away from the political questions at the heart of the Palestinian project: settler colonialism, apartheid, genocide, and international law. Zionists cannot win in this arena, and so they attempt to shift the debate to another question.
Israeli officials are always quick to present any violence against Jews, whether directed against Jews qua Jews or otherwise, as evidence of an ineradicable worldwide Judeophobia. Zionism is predicated on the idea that non-Jews can’t help but hate Jews; that anti-Jewish violence is always simmering below the surface, ready to boil over; and that for these reasons, the existence of a Jewish state as a bulwark against the Judeophobic psychopathology of non-Jews is a moral and existential necessity. The slaughter of Jews by Islamic State killers at Bondi Beach has been dishonestly exploited by pro-Israel forces to strengthen this discourse. Violence against Jews is eternal, Zionists argue, and, what’s more, they say, it is inspired by the slogans of those who march in solidarity with the Palestinians. The argument seeks to achieve two objectives at one stroke: 1) To fear-monger in order to induce diaspora Jews to immigrate to Israel; 2) To depoliticize the Palestinians’ political project and situate it in anti-Semitism in order to discredit it.
“Globalize the intifada” is, unquestionably, anti-Zionist and expresses a view that is strenuously opposed to the continued Israeli denial of the Palestinians’ legitimate political aims. But it is not anti-Semitic. It is a political slogan based in opposition to the denial of the Palestinians’ legitimate political project. It is for this reason that the purveyors of Israeli hasbara invoke anti-Semitism as a smokescreen to conceal the political questions at the heart of the pro-Palestinian solidarity movement and its slogans. Having no argument to support settler colonialism, apartheid, genocide, and the continued Israeli violation of international law (condoned in deeds by the United States and its G7 allies), they conjure the red-herring of anti-Semitism. Western governments, such as the United Kingdom, and court journalists, such as the editorial board of The Globe and Mail, participate in this deception because they are as supportive of Israel and its denial of the Palestinians’ legitimate political aims as are the Israeli oppressors themselves. Support for Israel within the Western establishment is based on the reality that the Zionist state has, from its birth, been child, extension, and outpost, of the West in the East; the West’s, and especially the United States’, instrument for controlling the region’s petroleum resources and strategic position.
We can expect no honesty from Western governments and mainstream news media, anymore than we can from the Israeli government itself, on questions related to the Palestinians’ legitimate political project. The Western establishment and Israel maintain a symbiotic relationship, with Israel doing, as German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said not too long ago, the West’s dirty work, in exchange for the United States and its G7 subalterns, providing Israel with the political, economic, military, and diplomatic support it needs to keep the Palestinians down.
Bernie Sanders is the only US senator to acknowledge the Israeli genocide against the Palestinians, and even he does so post festum, and grudgingly. Only after a mountain of evidence had been amassed by multiple organizations and experts—from the ICJ to human rights groups and genocide scholars (including Israeli ones) and finally from the United Nations Human Rights Council (to say nothing of what was evident for anyone to see in the overt expressions of genocidal intent and conduct of the Israeli leadership and its revenge-ravening military)—did Senator Sanders, the soi-disant democratic socialist from Vermont, get around to acknowledging that indeed a genocide is in progress. This, after months of being pressed by his supporters to concede the obvious. Having acquiesced to both political pressure and reality, he conciliated the genocidaire by blaming Hamas for the ongoing holocaust of the Palestinians, al-Nakba al-Mustimira. On top of that, he continued to endorse arms shipments to Israel in the form of “defensive arms”, thus drawing a misleading distinction between offensive and defensive weaponry.
But forget Sanders for the moment. What about the 99 other senators who haven’t even grudgingly acknowledged the genocide?
Most senators are millionaires or multimillionaires, who are intimately interconnected familialy, socially, politically, and professionally with the top investors and leading CEOs of the most profitable US companies, on whom they rely for campaign contributions and lucrative post-political-career opportunities. Accordingly, they are devoted to upholding the systems of capitalist exploitation and US imperialist competition—the foundation of their wealth and privilege, and more broadly, the wealth and privilege of their class.
West Asia is important to the senators’ class, and largely for one reason: petroleum. While the United States, the world’s largest oil and natural gas producer, draws the bulk of its oil and natural gas from the Americas, the price of energy depends on the unhindered flow of petroleum resources worldwide. Hence, West Asia—and Washington’s outpost in the region, Israel—is vital to the smooth functioning of capital accumulation at home, and therefore to the senators’ core personal and class interests.
Additionally, China depends on access to West Asian oil to fuel its military and keep its economy running. Controlling the region gives Washington considerable strategic leverage over its leading rival. What’s more, Japan and Western Europe—key US subordinates and potential strategic competitors—are also dependent on West Asian petroleum. Controlling the Arab world’s oil and natural gas helps Washington keep these states in line.
Hence, US capitalism has an interest in dominating West Asia and suppressing West Asian expressions of national assertiveness and local sovereignty. Arab and Iranian nationalists, were they allowed to thrive, would seek to turn the region’s petroleum resources to the benefit of local populations at the expense of US capitalist class imperatives. They’ve done it before, and would, if they could, do it again.
Now, some would argue that Washington’s foreign policy is controlled by “the Israel lobby,” a group of Christian and Jewish Zionists who advance Israeli goals at the expense of US interests. To be sure, the Israel lobby has enormous influence in Washington, but key parts of this argument—articulated by political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt—are often left unexamined.
When we say “US interests”, whose interests do we mean? Those of the bulk of the US population, or those of the approximately one percent of the population that owns and controls the economy and dominates the state (including the Senate)? (Mearsheimer and Walt see only one undifferentiated US interest, unmediated by class.)
Are the interests of the bulk of the US population at odds with the Zionist interests of Israel?
Do the interests of the US plutocracy mesh with the Zionist aims of the Jewish settler colonial state?
I would argue that US economic, military, and diplomatic support of Israel is at variance with the interests of the vast majority of US citizens (and therefore would agree with Mearsheimer and Walt, so far as they define “US interests” as the class interests of most US citizens—those of the employee class—as distinct from those of the US economic elite.) At the same time, I would argue that the interests of the US capitalist class mesh well with Zionist interests.
Significantly, the “Israel lobby” is largely made up of major US investors and the top CEOs of the United States’ leading companies. The group of Israel-zealots that Mearsheimer and Walt argue have highjacked US foreign policy, happen to be the elite of US capitalism, according to research by Laurence H. Shoup, whose has specialized in examining the contours of the US ruling class. If the Israel lobby has hijacked US foreign policy, then so too have the leaders of corporate America taken control of the levers of the US Departments of State, National Defense, and Treasury, along with the posts of National Intelligence Director and Ambassador to the UN. Shoup and others have shown that these key posts have long been dominated by the US capitalist elite. The Israel lobby exists, but it is a subset of the corporate lobby, a fact that points to a commonality of interest between the US capitalist class and its outpost in West Asia.
How are US capitalist and Israeli interests alike?
First, it should be noted that Israel is completely dependent on the United States. It could not survive without:
US military and economic subsidies, and US guarantees that the Israeli military will be equipped with a qualitative military edge over every other state in its region.
Unwavering diplomatic support, that allows Israel to act unconstrained by international law and over the objections of international public opinion and the expostulations of the states of the world, including US subordinates, without fear of penalty. (There are two roque states in the world: Israel and the United States. The former acts under the aegis of the latter and the latter under the aegis of its immense power.)
As a consequence of its dependence on the United States, the embattled Zionist state has no option but to pursue US goals as a condition of continuing to receive US support. The US goals it pursues include suppressing any force that might attempt to bring the region’s energy resources under local control for the purpose of uplifting the local population at the expense of aggrandizing the interests of US investors and oil companies and denying Washington control of West Asia, thereby negating US strategic leverage over China, Japan, and Western Europe. Moshe Dayan, an Israeli chief of defense staff, minister of defense, and minister of foreign affairs, is reputed to have said that Israel’s mission is “to be a rock, an extension of the West, against which the waves of…Arab nationalism will be broken.” Echoing Dayan, Israel’s current prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, wrote in 1998 that Israel acts as “the West’s policeman in the Middle East.” Referring to states in West Asia that are keen to assert their independence as “militant regimes”, Netanyahu declared that Israel’s role is to “safeguard the broader interests of peace” since no other state in the region can be relied on by Washington to check either the militant states’ “ambitions or obsessive plans for armament.” Safeguarding the broader interests of peace means safeguarding the status quo of US power in West Asia.
This is the fundamental quid-pro-quo of the US-Israeli relationship: Israel helps Washington stop the emergence of another Mohammad Mosaddegh, Gamal-Abdel Nasser, Colonel Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, or Hafez or Bashar al-Assad—nationalist leaders who sought to put the interests of their own people above US capitalist class strategic interests and those of US oil companies and investors—and Washington provides Israel with the resources it needs to remain a viable state in West Asia.
It should be added, however, that Washington hardly needs to compel Israel to vigorously oppose West Asia’s nationalists. Whether expressed overtly, as a secular movement under an national liberationist label, or whether it lurks inside Islamist states or movements, like the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Ansar Allah, West Asian national liberation is irreconcilable with Zionism. The two movements are mutually antagonistic. Israel and the US capitalist elite, thus, share a common enemy. Both parties seek to despoil the peoples of West Asia of their land, labor, and resources, and West Asian nationalist forces seek to overcome the despoliation. To secure both Zionist and US capitalist class goals, West Asian nationalist movements must be crushed or at the very least contained. This makes US plutocrats and Israeli Zionists natural allies.
[S]ettler colonies are … typically highly militarized and violent societies, which tend to be reliant upon external support in order to maintain their material privileges in a hostile regional environment. … For this reason, settler colonies are much more dependable partners of Western imperial interests than ‘normal’ client states. In the Middle East, for instance, Arab governments supported by the US (such as today’s Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco) face repeated challenges from political movements within their own borders and are always forced to accommodate and respond to pressures coming from below. This is different from Israel, where the majority of the population views their interests and privileges as dependent upon continued outside support.
In upholding the interests of their class, US senators, then, naturally defend Israel, because it is a US instrument for the fulfillment of a common US capitalist class – Zionist project of dominating West Asia. Israel’s character as a settler colony — from which flows its: multifarious familial, social, cultural, and economic ties to the United States; it’s violent, militaristic character; its complete dependence on US aid and support to survive; and its shared opposition with the US capitalist elite to West Asian national liberation — makes it the ideal candidate to represent US imperialist interests in West Asia.
Given who senators are, and their position at the apex—and as the beneficiaries—of the US capitalist system, it is unthinkable that they would exhibit even the slightest degree of solidarity with the enemies of their class and the targets of their exploitation. We can express outrage that only one senator has even acknowledged the Zionist genocide against the Palestinians, but to do so would fail to recognize the capitalist reality of the United States and its governing class. Expecting senators to concede that a genocide is underway, to say nothing of condemning it and acting to stop it, is tantamount to expecting wolves to become vegetarians.
As for Bernie Sanders, his reluctantly conceding that his beloved Israel is carrying out a genocide against the Palestinians confirms what is already obvious: he is no socialist. Socialists do not defend settler colonialism, apologize for apartheid, or tolerate Zionism. Nor do they uphold the status quo of Israeli oppression of the Palestinians by arguing that Israel has a right to defend itself. (Israeli Zionists have no more right to defend themselves than slave-owners have the right to defend themselves against the uprising of their slaves.) And socialists certainly don’t vote for the continued delivery of arms to genocidaires, in the form of “defensive” weaponry, a sophism that obfuscates the reality that “defensive” weapons have a utility equal to offensive weapons in maintaining Israel’s regime of Jewish supremacy. Would a socialist advocate the provisioning of “defensive” weapons to slave-owners to defend themselves from the uprisings of their slaves? As a socialist Bernie is a fraud. As a senator, committed—with the rest of the Senate—to defending the interests of the US capitalist class and its overseas outposts, he’s more believable.
In a Jacobin interview, Gilbert Achcar, a man Lenin may have characterized as a ‘social parson and opportunist’, and thus fitting as a Jacobin contributor, makes some good points about the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians, but offers a facile assessment of Hamas’s Oct 7 action.
A meaningful evaluation of Operation Al Aqsa Flood would answer the following questions:
Against what goals should the attack be evaluated?
What were Hamas’s goals for the Oct 7 action?
Was the attack rational, given the goals set for it and the information available to Hamas at the time?
To what degree have Hamas’s goals been met?
Is it too early to say?
Achcar addresses none of these questions. Instead, he decries the Oct 7 action as a catastrophe that handed Israel a pretext to carry out a genocide. He argues instead for non-violent resistance.
Why? Because, he says, Israel is many times more powerful than the Palestinian resistance. Armed Palestinian action will inevitably be crushed, leaving non-violent resistance as the only safe option.
Fair point.
But Achcar also believes that any gains the Palestinians make will arise from whatever pressure they can place on Israel and its allies to accommodate their demands. In his view, non-violent action is more likely to create pressure without providing a pretext for violent retaliation, and therefore, is the safer path to follow.
What Achcar misses, however, is the critical point that the catastrophe he condemns as Hamas’s child—the mass atrocities Israel is carrying out against the Palestinians—has turned world public opinion against Israel and created enormous pressure on the Zionist state to accommodate the Palestinians’ demands.
Israel’s reaction to the Oct 7 operation has left Israel greatly weakened. Its standing in world opinion is in the toilet. More and more, people have woken up and taken a hard look at what Israel really is, and they’ve come to see it, in growing numbers, as a racist, apartheid, settler colonial abomination. The abomination’s allies are no longer as keen to offer their unqualified support. Serious efforts are afoot to create a Palestinian state—efforts that had slipped from the agenda prior to Oct 7.
In the face of the undeniable reality that Palestine has perhaps never been more on the agenda, Achcar stamps his foot and cries, ‘No, no, that’s not true. The idea that Oct 7 has put Palestine back on the agenda is absurd.’
But what’s absurd, as anyone of an unbiased mind and clear perception sees, is that the only absurdity here is Achcar’s idea that Oct 7 hasn’t put Palestine back on the agenda.
Thinking about Achcar’s patent aversion to the Palestinians’ use of violence calls to mind three socialist epigrams about class struggle which apply as strongly to national liberation.
The only just war is war against slavery. – Marx
An oppressed class [nation] which does not strive to learn to use arms, to acquire arms, only deserves to be treated like slaves. – Lenin
Socialism [national liberation] is not a … policy for the timid. – Oskar Lange
By Achcar’s logic, we can dismiss as ill-considered the Warsaw uprising, the French resistance, and indeed, the 1939-1948 Zionist settler war for independence from Britain, all violent movements against forces much more powerful than themselves.
Jacobin’s Cloudy Thinking on Hamas’s Resistance and Palestinian Solidarity
“If no consideration in a political crisis has been addressed to the people of this country except to remember to hate violence and love order and exercise patience, the liberties of this country would never have been obtained.” British Prime Minister William E Gladstone [1]
November 1, 2024
By Stephen Gowans
Jacobin contributing editor BashirAbu-Manneh has written a criticism of the pro-Palestinian protest movement (“Palestine Needs Mass Support, Not Sectarian Marginalization,” Jacobin, October 30, 2024), arguing that its effectiveness is clouded by poor strategic thinking. It is not, however, the protest movement’s thinking which is clouded, but Abu-Manneh’s own thinking, which is contradictory and self-refuting. In effect, Abu-Manneh urges readers to hate Hamas’s violence, love international law, and exercise patience, while defining the Palestinian cause as the achievement of Palestinian Bantustans alongside a Zionist colonial settler state. To make his case, he deploys a series of arguments which collapse under the weight of their own contradictions. I have set out his arguments below, and show how they are based on poor—and, ultimately, anti-Palestinian—reasoning.
The Jacobin contributor begins his article by attributing what he calls the cloudy strategic thinking of the pro-Palestinian protest movement to its members’ anger and frustration at Israel’s indifference to “the wrath of global public opinion” and their being “ignored and sidelined by warmongering elites.” In his view, emotion has impaired judgment. A “very small minority of vocal activists,” he writes, “have turned legitimate anger and frustration … into a mindless embrace of violence” which is playing “into the hands of those who want to see a popular antiwar mass movement discredited.”
“Most worryingly,” he adds, “some voices in the Palestinian solidarity movement have glorified Hamas’s October 7 attacks,” quickly noting that: “There is no question that Palestinians have a right to resist foreign occupation. That is an achievement of the decolonization era enshrined in international law. But it does not follow that everything the Palestinian resistance movement does advances the Palestinian cause.”
Let’s unpack this paragraph.
Abu-Manneh attributes the Palestinians’ right to resist foreign occupation to international law. But where does international law come from? Does it exist independently of humanity, or is it written by humans? And which humans write it? International law is formulated, ignored, or enforced, by the most powerful states, at their discretion. The international system is characterized, not by “the rule of law”, in which no state stands above it, but “rule by law”, in which law is selectively applied by those who have sway over it, namely, states with permanent Security Council vetoes, at least four, and possibly all of which, can be characterized as formerly if not current colonial states. One, the United States, originated, as Israel has, in settler colonialism. [2, 3] If the states that dominate the international system, and therefore the formulation and (selective) application of international law, were to decide that the Palestinians have no right to resist occupation, would their resistance be illegitimate? By Abu-Manneh’s reasoning, it would be. This gives us the first clue about how the Jacobin contributing editor thinks about the Palestine question. He regards it not as a question of settler colonialism (the theft of the Palestinians’ country, land, homes, and property and what to do about it), but one of international law, a law over which powerful states, many of them with histories of colonial or settler colonial domination over other peoples, have always exercised an outsize influence. Palestinians may have the right of resistance in international law, but it amounts to little. Does international law, or the great powers who write and selectively enforce it, protect Palestinians as they exercise this right? On the contrary, these same powers raise Israel’s right of self-defense to an inviolable principle of the first order, while execrating, gagging, or punishing anyone bold enough to invoke the Palestinians’ right of resistance. At the same time, they sanction the killing of Palestinians who exercise their right as the necessary and desired outcome of Israel exercising its hallowed right of self-defense.
International law, in the form of the US, British, and Israeli-authored 1967 UN Security Council Resolution 242, recognizes as legitimate a settler colonial Israeli state, implanted by force and by means of ethnic cleansing, on the four-fifths of a country known as Palestine which Zionist settlers conquered in 1948. This law does not grant the Palestinians the right to resist the foreign occupation of this part of their country. So, yes, international law concedes a right to resist, but it is meaningless in fact, and to make matters worse, the right is conceded for only one-fifth of historic Palestine.
We can think of Israel as a settler colonial project which has consolidated its theft of Palestinian land, homes, and property in four-fifths of Palestine. We can think of it too as seeking to extend its larceny to the one-fifth of historic Palestine that has yet to be completely plundered. We can also think of international law as a means of legitimizing the theft. Alternatively, we can, as Abu-Manneh does, fetishize international law, seeing it not as the instrument of colonial and settler colonial states, used to legitimize the existence of Israel [4] but naively, as a neutral expression of universal justice.
After accepting the Palestinians’ right to resistance based on international law (and exercisable only in the one-fifth of the Palestinians’ country which Jewish settlers were unable to capture in 1948), Abu-Manneh writes: It “does not follow that everything the Palestinian resistance movement does advances the Palestinian cause.” This is true as far as it goes, but the statement is of little value unless we know what “the Palestinian cause” is. In Abu-Manneh’s view, the Palestinian cause has nothing whatever to do with decolonizing Palestine, dismantling apartheid, and overcoming Zionist racism. Instead, the cause, in his view, is bringing to fruition the two-state solution as laid out in the 1967 UN Security Council Resolution 242–that is, the achievement of a Palestinian state in one-fifth of the Palestinians’ country, alongside a Zionist colonial settler state, on the larger four-fifths.
Now that we’re clear on what Abu-Manneh thinks the Palestinian cause is, we can ask why he accepts Palestinian resistance (in the abstract) but rejects Hamas’s Operation Al Aqsa Flood (as a specific instance of Palestinian resistance.) According to the Jacobin contributor, any “reasonable cost-benefit analysis for the people of Gaza has to conclude that the price” of the 7 October attack (i.e., Israel’s retaliation) “is simply not worth it.” Owing to “a balance of power that is overwhelmingly to Israel’s advantage” the Hamas rebellion was, in his view, “a massive miscalculation.”
It is indeed true that there exists between Israel and the Palestinians a massive imbalance of power. But what does the fact that there is a massive imbalance of power mean? It means that Israel has been able to maintain an ongoing, unremitting, regime of aggression against the Palestinians, which continues the project, begun over one hundred years ago, of replacing one country, Palestine, with another, Israel, and displacing the indigenous Palestinians with transplanted Jews. This is an ongoing project. It didn’t stop in 1967, when the UN Security Council ordered Israel—without, as time has shown, the slightest intention of compelling Israel’s compliance—to withdraw from the new territories it had taken. It is not the case, as Abu-Manneh supposes, that the great imbalance of power is fixed and that the Zionist project is sated, with no further conquests on its agenda. On the contrary, before 7 October, each passing day was one in which ever more Palestinians were crushed under the wheels of the Zionist juggernaut. Settlements continued to be built in the West Bank. The Gaza blockade continued to make life miserable for Palestinians. Israel continued to threaten to Judaize the Haram al-Sharrif. Abu-Manneh assumes that there existed prior to 7 October a fixed status quo, which, however grim it was, was still better than what has befallen the Palestinians since. To the contrary, the condition of Palestinians was—despite the misplaced faith the Jacobin contributor has in international law—one of incessant weakening and deterioration. Palestinians faced, not a choice of standing still if they did nothing, or going backward if they provoked Israel’s fury, but if they did nothing, of going backward slowly, inexorably, until Palestinians and Palestine ceased to exist. It was a choice of dying on their knees or standing on their feet.
This is not to say that there are not miscalculations in struggle, and that Operation Al Aqsa Flood was not a miscalculation. It may have been. In fact, there is evidence to suggest that the attack didn’t unfold quite as the Hamas leadership intended. Far greater Israeli resistance was expected, and when Hamas fighters quickly achieved their limited objectives, the operation dissolved into chaos. [5] Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader who has since died in battle, remarked that “Things went out of control. People got caught up in this, and that should not have happened.” [6]
In decrying the 7 October Hamas operation as not worth the candle because the outcome has been a devastating Israeli retaliation, Abu-Manneh fails to blame the architects of the retaliatory ossuary: Israel and its principal backers, the United States and Germany, the former a veritable co-belligerent. One could argue that the carnage is due to both the provocation of Hamas (a distal cause) and Israel’s response to it (the proximal cause). Instead, Abu-Manneh chooses to lay 100 percent of the blame at Hamas’s door, removing the proximal cause (Israel and its backers and co-belligerent) from the equation altogether. This is blatant victim-blaming.
If that isn’t bad enough, the Jacobin contributing editor then denies Hamas any credit for the benefit of the 7 October rebellion. The benefit, as he puts it, is that “Palestine is now back in global political focus.” But why is it back? In Abu-Manneh’s view, “Because of Israel’s brutal genocide”, not because Hamas undertook an operation which included among its aims the rescue of the Palestinian cause from the oblivion into which it was rapidly sinking. [7] If Hamas is to be blamed for provoking Israel to accelerate the job of erasing the Palestinians—conduct hardly at odds with the history of Zionist settler colonialism (isn’t its point to eliminate the natives to make way for the settlers?)—then it must also be credited with placing Palestine back on the global agenda. Does Abu-Manneh believe that “the huge global protest movement … against colonization and occupation” and the radicalization of “a new generation of young activists,” would have occurred had Hamas or other resistance groups not carried out the Al-Aqsa Flood action or its equivalents? Palestine had fallen off the radar until Hamas acted. Now Palestine and the Palestinians are back with a vengeance. Abu-Manneh’s vaunted international law had done nothing, up to 7 October, to keep them on the agenda. Indeed, it was the failure of international law and the quietude of the Palestinian solidarity movement that galvanized Hamas to act.
Having dismissed Palestinian militant action as ill-advised in light of the enormous imbalance in power between Israel and the Palestinians, Abu-Manneh turns to international law as the Palestinians’ possible savior. In view of the fact that the UN and international law have played important roles in facilitating the Jewish settlers’ spoliation of Palestine and its indigenous people—especially UN General Assembly Resolution 181 of November 1947, which recommended the partition of the Palestinians’ country, and UN Security Council Resolution 242 of 1967, which legitimized the Zionist settler state’s capture of four-fifths of Palestine, and the ethnic cleansing of much of the Palestinian population from it—the idea that the Palestinians should look to international law for salvation is wholly unconvincing; one may as well have asked Hitler to solve the problem of anti-Semitism.
All the same, Abu-Manneh is particularly encouraged by “the July International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling (July 19, 2024) [which] has deemed Israel’s occupation illegal.” But it should be understood thar the ICJ opinion has not deemed as illegal the Zionist occupation of a country called Palestine; it has only declared illegal the occupation of the one-fifth of Palestine which the settlers failed to conquer and ethnically cleanse in 1948. What encourages the Jacobin contributor, is thus, an ICJ ruling which presses Israel to accept the two-state solution, what Palestinian scholar Rashid Khalidi denounces as “a one-state, multiple-Bantustan solution.” [8] And how is the two-state solution—which Israelis vehemently oppose [9], and whose history is one of a false promise designed to keep the Palestinians passive while what remains of their country is gradually taken away from them—to be brought to fruition? Through “focussed political work and organization” counsels Abu-Manneh—in other words, by mobilizing radicalized youth and the “huge global protest movement” to press countries to pressure Israel to grant the Palestinians the sop of a few Bantustans. Abu-Manneh’s favored two-state solution, “has always been meaningless, a cruel Orwellian hoax,” concludes Khalidi. It “would effectively maintain the status quo in Palestine under a different form, with an externally controlled Quisling ‘Palestinian Authority’ lacking real jurisdiction or authority replaced by a Quisling ‘Palestinian state’ similarly devoid of the sovereignty and independence that attach to a real state.” [10]
Abu-Manneh’s thinking is problematic, if not naïve and, worse, revolting, on three levels.
First, it ignores his own assessment of public opinion. Israel, he notes correctly, is “protected from the wrath of global public opinion.” Moreover, “protesters and activists” are “ignored and sidelined by warmongering elites.” If Israel is insulated from public opinion, and protestors and activists are ignored, how is “focussed political work and organization” going to compel Israel to grant Palestinians the multiple Bantustans Abu-Manneh thinks will resolve the Palestine question? The imbalance in power between Israel and the Palestinians is indeed huge, but the yawning chasm is not only a military one, but a public diplomacy one, as well. If you’re going to say, don’t take on Israel militarily, because its military power is overwhelming, don’t, at the same time, say take on Israel in the realm of public opinion, without recognizing that Israel’s public diplomacy power is also overwhelming. This is surely clouded strategic thinking.
Second, in advocating a one-state-multiple-Bantustan solution, Abu-Manneh proposes that radicalized youth and the huge global protest movement accept Jewish settler colonialism and Zionist apartheid in four-fifths of the Palestinians’ country, in return for Palestinian Bantustans on the remaining one-fifth. Were the radicalized youth who Abu-Manneh celebrates to accept his program they would immediately become de-radicalized, for there is nothing radical about Abu-Manneh’s counsel. Neither is there anything progressive about it. Would a movement against apartheid in South Africa which advocated multiple Bantustans alongside a white supremacist state be called progressive? Of course not. So why would we think the equivalent for Palestine is acceptable? Indeed, it’s difficult not to conclude that the whole point of Abu-Manneh’s intervention is to persuade the global protest movement to deradicalize, on the grounds that this will somehow (he doesn’t quite say how) pay off in strategic gains. This comports with the mild, reformist, orientation of Jacobin—a periodical of the Left devoted to hating violence, loving order, exercising patience, and bartering principle for bourgeois respectability.
Third, the energy of the global protest movement and radicalized youth—energy Abu-Manneh seeks to mobilize on behalf of his favored one-state-multiple-Bantustan solution—would hardly exist had Hamas not undertaken the very same Operation Al-Aqsa Flood he so deplores. Had Hamas accepted anything like Abu-Manneh’s counsel, Palestine and the Palestinians would now be virtually invisible and teetering on the precipice of extinction.
The Jacobin contributor believes that “glorifying” Hamas’s violence will frighten people away from joining the protest movement he acknowledges is already huge and global. In fact, the movement Abu-Manneh has set out to save from cloudy strategic thinking is huge and global despite, or perhaps because of, the “cloudy” thinking he deplores. The Jacobin contributor also fears that failing to denounce Hamas’s 7 October resistance allows Israel and its supporters to discredit opponents of the Israeli’s genocide against the Palestinians. Operation Al Aqsa Flood, was, he argues, a miscalculation that is wholly responsible for the slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians. Yet, the operation hardly seems to have been a miscalculation from the point of view of preventing the erasure of Palestine and the Palestinians; it is responsible, at least distally, for revitalizing the pro-Palestinian movement, a revitalization Abu-Manneh welcomes, but all the same fails to give Hamas credit for. The Jacobin writer appears to believe that there are ever more legions of people ready to join the global protest movement if only a very few voices in the Palestinian solidarity movement stop glorifying Hamas’s 7 October attack. His assessment is unconvincing. If more people haven’t joined the already huge and global movement, a more plausible explanation is that they see –to invoke Abu-Manneh’s own assessment of the impotence of public opinion—little point in being “ignored and sidelined by warmongering elites” as Israel enjoys its protection “from the wrath of global public opinion.”
It is unclear why Abu-Manneh believes that failure to decry Hamas’s 7 October uprising plays into the hands of Israel and its supporters, unless he believes, notwithstanding his endorsement of resistance in the abstract, that violent resistance against Israel is illegitimate. Could it be that his reference to the right of Palestinian resistance is mere lip-service? He says resistance is legitimate, but despite this, insists that glorifying the resistance of Hamas on 7 October plays into the hands of the Palestinians’ enemies. This is a contradiction. How could glorifying a legitimate act discredit the movement? Abu-Manneh might say the reason why is because Hamas’s resistance, albeit legitimate, was a miscalculation. But how does glorifying a Hamas miscalculation play into Israeli hands? It doesn’t make sense. It seems more likely that Abu-Manneh is a supporter of violent rebellion in the abstract, as an idea alone, suitable only for discussion in university colloquia, and certainly not as a project to be carried out in the real world.
The reality is that the revitalization of the global Palestinian solidarity movement wouldn’t have happened had Hamas not launched its 7 October operation. Abu-Manneh fails to credit the very same operation whose glorification he deplores for re-igniting the mass movement he welcomes, presenting an argument that can hardly be taken seriously, namely, that the way to build mass support for Palestine is to glorify an international law which has achieved nothing for Palestinians, while defining the Palestinian cause as the achievement of an apartheid Zionist settler state in four-fifths of the Palestinians’ country, alongside multiple Bantustans in what is left over.
Abu-Manneh’s clouded thinking recalls E.H. Carr’s riposte to the advocates of peaceful change. In his Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919-1939, Carr wrote, that the “attempt to make a moral distinction between wars of ‘aggression’ and wars of defense’ is misguided. If a change is necessary and desirable, the use or threatened use of force to maintain the status quo”—one thinks here of Israel’s vaunted right to defend itself—”may be more morally culpable than the use or threatened use of force to alter it.” [11] He continued: “The moral criterion must be not the ‘aggressive’ or ‘defensive’ character of the war, but the nature of the change which is being sought and resisted. ‘Without rebellion, [humanity] would stagnate and injustice would be irremediable.’ Few serious thinkers maintain that it is always unconditionally wrong to start a revolution; and it is equally difficult to believe that it is always and unconditionally wrong to start a war.” [12]
This isn’t to say that Hamas started a war on 7 October. The war is a long-running one, whose origins are found in the actions of Theodor Hertzl and his supporters and successors to create a Jewish state by making an existing country, Palestine, cease to exist. Hamas only opened a new battle in the long-running war on 7 October. The point is that the violent rebellion of the natives must be evaluated against the nature of the change that was sought and resisted (ultimately, the liberation of Palestine, and immediately, the arrest of the disappearance of Palestine and Palestinians.) Hamas appears to have accomplished its immediate aim and for this, for its fight against the iniquities of settler colonialism and apartheid, and for its role in helping to revitalize the pro-Palestinian movement, it deserves credit.
So, is glorifying Hamas’s 7 October rebellion strategically unsound? It may be, but not for the contradictory reasons Abu-Manneh adduces, and nor for any reason I can fathom. The Jacobin contributor has allowed his anger and frustration at Hamas’s Islamist character—which he revealed in an earlier Jacobin article [13]—cloud his judgment about the merits of the organization as a vehicle for the liberation of Palestine. I share Abu-Manneh’s opposition to Hamas’s Islamism, but I recognize the merits of the group’s Operation Al Aqsa Flood. Whether one agrees or disagrees with the political Islam of Hamas is of no relevance to the question of whether the organization’s conduct has advanced the aims of overcoming Zionist settler colonialism and apartheid. Neither Hamas nor its secular compatriot organizations will ever be acceptable to respectable opinion in colonial and settler colonial countries, and bartering away principle for respectability by denouncing Hamas or refusing to give it the credit it deserves, is a fool’s game.
1. Cited in E.H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919-1939, Palgrave MacMillan, 2016, p. 193
2. Three of the five permanent UN Security Council members, the United States, France, and Britain, were once self-declared colonial countries. All retain some colonies today under various euphemistic aliases, such as regions, protectorates, and territories. Puerto Rico, for example, is a de facto US colony, while Guadeloupe and Martinique count among a number of French colonies. Bermuda, Gibraltar, and the Falkland Islands, inter alia, are British colonies. Russia and China were empires, based on the domination of conquered peoples by a metropolitan ethnic elite.
3. For more on this perspective on international law see the Third World Approaches to International Law Review, https://twailr.com/
4. Benjamin Netanyahu has called Israel “the West’s outpost in the Middle East” (and hence, the instrument of the colonial and colonial settler powers which comprise the West). Quoted in Adam Shatz, “The sea is the same sea,” The London Review of Books, (Vol. 40 No. 16, 30 August 2018).
5. “A time of painful birth and major transformation’: a senior Hamas leader reflects on October 7 and its aftermath,” Mondoweiss, October 6, 2024; Our Narrative: Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, Hamas Media Office; Ben Hubbard and Maria Abi-Habib, “Behind Hamas’s Bloody Gambit to Create a ‘Permanent’ State of War,” New York Times, Nov. 8, 2023; Nelly Lahoud “A Catastrophic Success for Hamas?”, Foreign Affairs, October 23, 2023.
6. Summer Said and Rory Jones, “Gaza Chief’s Brutal Calculation: Civilian Bloodshed Will Help Hamas,” The Wall Street Journal, June 10, 2024.
7. “Sinwar certainly achieved his goal of bringing the Palestinian issue to the center of geopolitics,” writes Yaroslav Trofimov in “Sinwar’s Bloody Gambit Changed the Middle East—but Not as He Imagined”, The Wall Street Journal, Oct. 19, 2024: “We make the headlines only with blood,” Sinwar said. “No blood, no news.” Summer Said and Rory Jones, “Gaza Chief’s Brutal Calculation: Civilian Bloodshed Will Help Hamas,” The Wall Street Journal, June 10, 2024.
8. Rashid Khalidi, “The Neck and The Sword,” New Left Review, May/June, 2024.
9. “The U.S., Europe and many Arab governments insist the overdue answer is the two-state solution, under which Israel and a Palestinian state would exist side-by-side. The snag is that Israelis and Palestinians no longer believe in it.” Marcus Walker, Fatima Abdul Karim and Anat Peled, “The Way to Fix the Middle East Conflict Looks Obvious—Except to Israelis and Palestinians, The Wall Street Journal, Aug. 18, 2024.
10. Rashid Khalidi, ‘A new abyss’: Gaza and the hundred years’ war on Palestine, Guardian, 11 Apr 2024.
11. Carr, p. 193.
12. Carr, p. 193.
13. Bashir Abu-Manneh, “The Palestinian Resistance Isn’t a Monolith,” Jacobin, April 28, 2024.
Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy recently misattributed the Himalaya of injustices the Israelis have visited upon the Palestinians to ‘the army,’ as if, absent the IDF, Israel—not only its conduct but its very ethos—would become acceptable to world opinion. [1] But were the IDF to disband, or renounce its genocidal conduct, Israel would still be a Jewish state, founded on the robbery of the Palestinians, and committed to their continued dispossession and exile in order to maintain the state’s Jewish character.
The army’s role in Israel is to defend Jewish supremacy and extend the territory over which Jews come first and Palestinians matter not at all. The 1948-9 theft by Jewish nationalist settlers of the Palestinians’ country, along with their homes, land, and property, is Jewish supremacy’s original sin. The IDF defends and promotes it. The two-state solution ignores and conceals it.
The fruits of the Jewish nationalist plunder are thus defended by violence, and extended to such territory in the West Bank which Jewish settlers have not yet completely taken for their own use. The process is summarized by a single word: Zionism—the racist ideology of Jewish nationalism and Palestinian dispossession. Pro-Zionist, as the Palestinian revolutionary Leila Khaled once pointed out, equals anti-Palestinian.
It is Zionism (the project) and its child, Israel, not the IDF (the project’s instrument), that lies, contra Levy, at the root of the problem of Israel.
To correct Levy, the following injustices, which he attributes to the IDF, are properly understood as the bastards of settler colonial Jewish nationalism.
“…the Sde Teiman base is [Zionism], the human shields used in Gaza are [Zionism], the assassinations are [Zionism]. Forty thousand dead are [Zionism], the destruction of Gaza is [Zionism]; the cruel roadblocks in the West Bank are [Zionism]; the killing of the 3-day-old twins, along with their mother and grandmother, while the father was out obtaining their birth certificate, is [Zionism]; the growing use of drones for killing people in the West Bank is [Zionism]; the pilots, artillery units, armored units, bulldozers, canine units, they are all [Zionism].”
It is difficult to understand how the two-state solution continues to be seen by people ostensibly committed to Leftist or humane values as constituting either a just solution, or even a practical one. Levy himself rejects the two-state solution, not because he dislikes it, but because, with 700,000 Jews in the West Bank, he recognizes that the idea is no longer workable. Scholar Rashid Khalidi calls the two-state solution an Orwellian hoax—a promise to replace the quisling Palestinian Authority with a quisling Palestinian pseudo-state. The two-state solution has always meant one Jewish state plus Palestinian Bantustans, Khalidi argues.
The two-state solution in its current guise rests on UN Security Council Resolution 242, formulated by the United States and Israel, and ratified by the Soviet Union, as a solution to the 1967 Six-Day War, in which Israel conquered the Sinai, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and parts of Syrian territory in Jawlan (the Golan Heights).
The resolution (unheeded by Tel Aviv) demanded that Israel withdraw to its pre-1967 position, roughly the armistice lines which ended the conflict of 1948-9 between the Zionist settlers and four of the Arab states—Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. These states had intervened in the war between the Palestinians, who were seeking to keep their country, and the Zionists, who were seeking to make it their own.
At the heart of 1948-9 conflict was UN General Assembly Resolution 181 of 29 November 1947, which ended the British Mandate in Palestine and ordered the partition of the country between Jewish and Arab states, to be linked by an economic union, with Jerusalem under international control. The resolution assigned 56 percent of the Palestinians’ country to Jewish settlers, most of whom were recent immigrants, and who comprised less than one-third of the population. The Palestinians, the majority, were granted a state comprising only 42 percent of their country. The remaining two percent was allocated to an internationalized Jerusalem.
Neither the Palestinians, who had been disarmed by the British Mandate, and in any event had little military training, or the Arab armies, which were rendered ineffective by division and the absence of a central command, and were outnumbered by Jewish settler forces by at least three to one, could prevail against the well-organized, well-trained, and well-equipped Zionists. The Jewish nationalists could count on the assistance of Western imperialist countries as well as the Soviet Union, which shipped arms to the Zionists through Czechoslovakia. Indeed, it was the colonialist West in partnership with the USSR that presented and approved the partition of the Palestinians’ country. Little wonder that the great powers should play a key role in helping the settler army rob the Palestinians.
The outcome of the war was, from the Palestinians’ perspective, a Nakba. Zionist settlers conquered 80 percent of the Palestinians’ country—not just the 56 percent which Resolution 181 allocated to a Jewish state, but also half the territory allocated to an Arab state, and, on top of that, West Jerusalem. At the same time, they exiled (ethnically cleansed) 700,000 Palestinians, at least half and probably much more than half of the Palestinian population. In 1967, the Zionist settlers gobbled up the remaining 20 percent of the Palestinians’ country. It is on this one-fifth of Palestine—what is deceptively called ‘occupied Palestinian territories’—that apostles of the two-state solution propose to give the Palestinians a rump state. The term ‘occupied Palestinian territories’ is deceptive because it refers only to the territory Zionist settlers have occupied since 1967, and not the larger territory they’ve occupied since 1948.
The inequity of a two-state solution should be glaring enough. How is it fair to grant Palestinians a tiny, disjointed, fraction of their own country? But the problems run deeper than that. A two-state solution ratifies two fundamental injustices.
The first injustice is the decision of the UN General Assembly, under the influence of the United States and the Soviet Union, to partition Palestine, granting more than half the country to recent Jewish immigrants. The UN General Assembly had no more authority to rob Palestinians of a part of their country than did the British in the 1917 Balfour Declaration to promise Jews a homeland in Palestine. Au fond, Resolution 181 is a violation of two principles: democracy (the Palestinians were opposed to their country’s division) and self-determination. It is also an expression of US and Soviet imperialism. Gifting the larger part of Palestine to recent Jewish immigrants, a minority, contrary to the majority’s wish, and over its objection, suited the electoral goals of the US president, who hoped to strengthen his appeal to Jewish voters, and comported with the geopolitical aims of the Soviet Union, which hoped to build influence in the British-dominated Middle East. Palestinians didn’t count. What’s more, neither the General Assembly or the Security Council had the authority to create two new states, let alone, abolish another (Palestine.)
The second injustice is the ratification of Zionist conquests in the 1948-9 war, which allowed Jewish settler forces to extend their plunder of the Palestinians’ country to 80 percent of the territory from the 56 percent allocated in Resolution 181.
The two-state solution thus fails to address the fundamental injustices at the core of the problem, namely:
The negation of democratic principles;
The denial of Palestinian self-determination;
The spoliation of the Palestinians’ country and the forcible transfer of their land, homes, and property to Jewish settlers with the approval and aid of imperialist powers;
The immiseration of the Palestinians by the theft of their land, homes, and property and the corresponding enrichment of Israeli Jews in whose hands these stolen goods have been deposited. The two-state solution offers no mechanism for reversing the colossal inter-ethnic redistribution of wealth, whose major effects have been the ghettoization of millions of Palestinians in squalid refugee camps and the enrichment of Israel and its favored Jewish citizens.
Israel is the outcome of an enormous theft, and an affront against democracy and self-determination, approved (without authority) by the UN, sanctified by international law, backed by the colonialist West, and supported by the Soviet Union. The two-state solution ratifies these crimes, throwing a few crumbs to the plundered and immiserated Palestinians as a sop.
In The Palestine Question, legal scholar Henry Cattan asked whether a two-state solution based on the implementation of Resolution 242 would resolve the Palestine issue. Since it would simply restore the conflict that existed prior to 1967, he answered in the negative.
Would implementation of Resolution 181, and a two-state solution as originally envisaged by the UN in 1947—which at least condescended to allow the Palestinians to keep more of their country—work? No, insisted Cattan, since the resolution was rejected by both the Palestinians in words (who understandably objected to their victimization by a settler colonialism that would deny them self-determination) and Zionist settlers in deeds (who sought in 1948-9 to conquer as much of Palestine as their strength and Soviet arms would allow, and in 1967, when their strength had greatly increased, extended the conquest to the whole of the Palestinians’ country. It has been clear from the beginning, and is all the more evident today, that the Jewish nationalists want all of Palestine, and have no intention of settling for less.)
The solution to the Palestine problem is not, then, a ratification of Zionist settler colonialism, as the apostles of the two-state solution propose; settler colonialism, after all, lies at the heart of the problem. The problem can only be resolved at its core, which is to say, by de-colonizing Palestine, not just occupied ’67 Palestine, that part of the country which the two-state advocates propose to throw to the Palestinians as a sop in the hope of pacifying them, but also occupied ’48 Palestine, the greater part of the country conquered in the 1948-9 war by Jewish nationalist settlers.
Palestine must become a democratic country, from the River to the Sea, in which all people, regardless of religion or ethnicity, are equal. There should never have been a Jewish state in Palestine, any more than there should have been a white supremacist state in South Africa and another in Rhodesia. All the brutalities of the Zionist regime—the genocide, the official racism, the pogroms, the ethnic cleansing, the prison abuses and torture, the incessant colonial expansion—flow ineluctably from the project of maintaining a Jewish state on the stolen land of the Palestinians.
The solution to settler colonialism is de-colonization and equality among peoples—not the two-state solution’s ratification of settler-colonialism, not the repudiation of a democratic state in which settlers and natives are equal, and not the relegation of Palestinians to Bantustans within their own country.
1. There is a danger that I have created a misleading impression of Gideon Levy’s views. To be clear, Levy makes similar arguments to my own. He says that “The decisive moment is ‘48. A people came to a populated land and took it over. That’s the core of everything.” He adds that “any solution which will not include some kind of accountability of ‘48 and some kind of compensation — not only in terms of money — will not be a just solution.” For the future, he envisages “one vote, one person, as in any other democracy,” even though it means “the end of the Jewish state.” See “It’s too late for the Jewish state”.
The Soviet Union’s initial position on the Palestinian question, likely formulated under the influence of the Comintern and definitely under the influence of Marxism, was that there ought to be in Palestine an independent, non-national, democratic state, in which all citizens are equal, regardless of their ethno-religious identity.
This is the same view which was initially taken up by the PLO, and is the stance of those who today “support the dismantlement of Israel’s racist structures and laws and advocate for one decolonised state, from the river to the sea, in which everyone living within it is equal before the law and does not benefit from any racial, ethnic, or religious privileges,” as Joseph Massad recently put it.
It seems odd that a little over one year later, the USSR recognized “the state of Israel, three days after its founding,” and equally odd (or disappointing if not repugnant) that less than a year earlier it had backed the UN partition plan, which granted Jewish settlers in Palestine, who made up one-third of the population, over one-half of the Palestinian’s country.
Worse still, Moscow was recognizing a state that had no intention of even adhering to the legally and morally invalid UN plan, having taken territory by force slated for an Arab state, and expelling 800,000 Palestinians.
It gets worse. Stalin then sent arms via Czechoslovakia to the Israeli army, and dispatched “hundreds of Jewish officers from the Red Army,” to help put down the resistance of the Palestinians and their Arab compatriots to the theft of their land and expulsion.
Soviet support helped “Israel defeat the Arab countries, then seen as British allies by the Soviets.” In the settler-native war of 1948, the Soviets were clearly on the side of the settlers and against the oppressed. Moscow’s appeal to the oppressed to join hands with workers around the world under Soviet leadership, must have seemed to be, for good reason, a bad joke.
Why did the Soviets abandon a position of opposition to settler colonialism in favor of one supporting Zionism? Raison d’etat. Realpolitick. Moscow saw advantage for the Soviet state in backing a movement it saw as against British influence in the Middle East. Since the Zionists had engaged in a war of terrorism with the British mandate authorities, and London controlled Egypt, Iraq, and Transjordan, Stalin thought that support for Jewish settlers in Palestine would deal a blow to British influence in West Asia and North Africa.
It didn’t. The British continued to wield influence in the region and Israel looked to the West for support. Soviet influence in subsequent years remained limited to a few Arab nationalist states—Syria, Iraq, Libya—which had turned to the Soviets for aid against the British and Americans, who objected to their economic nationalism.
Even then, these states were wary of getting too close to Moscow for fear of being turned into Soviet vassals. Given Moscow’s capacity to sacrifice principle in pursuit of realpolitik and its immediate political aims, their fears were not without foundation.
Moscow’s shift from endorsing a decolonized Palestine to supporting Zionist settler colonialism was an instance of opportunism—sacrificing principal and fundamental goals to short-term advantage. Lenin railed against the opportunism of the Second International; on the Palestinian question, Stalin practiced it.
Of course, it could be quibbled that the Marxist notion of opportunism is specific to working class interests, not those of an agrarian people despoiled by settler colonialism. The reply, if we confine ourselves to the Marxist canon, is to paraphrase the words of Marx. No people can be free who help enslave another. Clearly, the Soviets, at Stalin’s direction, helped Zionists figuratively enslave the Palestinians.
It is said, though the story may be apocryphal, that Stalin later recognized his error and apologized. If true, we must ask ourselves—what did he apologize for? His opportunism, or the fact that he failed to obtain even an opportunistic advantage in his abandonment of principle?
In later years, the USSR would support the two-state solution, as do some previously Soviet-aligned communist parties today, for example, the Communist Party USA, the Communist Party of Canada, and the KKE. So accustomed to blindly following the Moscow line with all its twists, turns, opportunism, and raison d’etat, the leaders of these parties long ago lost the power of independent thought, if they ever had it to begin with. So, they ape what the Soviet position was in its final years, and one suspects without the foggiest idea of what they’re supporting or why.
The two-state solution has a practical problem. Exactly where is the Palestinian state to be located, now that the building of Jewish settlements in the West Bank has effectively denied the Palestinians territory on which to build a viable state? And why should Palestinians be crammed into an insignificant slice—or many insignificant, incontiguous, slices—of their own country?
But the practical problems of the two-state solution pale in comparison to the moral problem. A Palestinian state alongside Israel means the continued existence of a Jewish supremacist apartheid state, whose origin is found in settler colonialism, the theft of the Palestinians’ country, and ethnic cleansing.
The Jews are a nation, rather than a religious community;
Dismisses activism against antisemitism as futile (because Zionists believe antisemitism is ineradicable, built into the DNA of non-Jews); and
Favors, as antisemites do, the emigration of Jews from the countries in which they live to Israel.
Strange that no one with even a single progressive bone in their body would have accepted anything less than the complete dismantlement of apartheid South Africa, and the creation, in its place, of a single, unitary, non-national, democratic state in which all people, settlers and natives, were equal. And yet many of the same people, including communists, continue to support a two state solution in Palestine–the companion South African arrangement to a state for whites and Bantustans for blacks.
In 1973, Louis Eaks interviewed the historian Arnold Toynbee on the Palestinian question. Eaks began by outlining what, at the time, now largely forgotten, was the dominant Palestinian goal, “a unitary and democratic state” in all of historic Palestine. Eaks observed that this would offer, “both for the Jewish settlers in Palestine and for the Palestinians, safeguards for their existence in Palestine and for their civil rights.” He lamented, however, that “there doesn’t seem to be any kind of debate about the merits of the Palestinian plan.”
Toynbee opined that the plan “has two merits. It would produce the greatest possible amount of justice, with the least possible amount of suffering for everybody. Nobody would be turned out of his home.” Then Toynbee turned to what he saw as the plan’s weakness. It is “recognized to be politically impracticable. I don’t think that the Israelis would ever agree voluntarily, and I don’t think that America would be willing to compel them to agree to this. Therefore, I don’t think it is possible to carry out this plan.”
Eaks objected. “You say that it is a plan which is now almost impossible to achieve, but the United Nations solution [of cutting the Palestinian baby into two ethnic national states, one Jewish and one Arab] seems equally impossible to achieve, and particularly that aspect which the Palestinians must consider to be the most crucial paragraph, which concerns the right of the refugees to return.”
Eaks, of course, was right. A half century later, the two-state formula remains as much an unrealizable fantasy as it was in 1973, indeed as much as it was in 1947, when it was first proposed as the UN Partition Plan. It has been rejected in deeds and in some cases words by all parties involved ever since.
Eaks continued: “Do you think it is wise in the long run to compromise with Zionism, which is based very much on racial discrimination? Do you not see any future threat to the East if one accepts this kind of racialist state.”
“Yes,” conceded Toynbee, “I think a racialist state is as bad and as dangerous in the Middle East as it is in southern Africa.”
Eaks wasn’t finished. “It seems to me,” he continued, pressing the point, “that no one who says that apartheid is wrong would say that South Africa is here to stay, and that therefore the African states should accept it and recognize it. Yet many people who say that Zionism is evil and wrong, claim that Israel is here to stay and that we must accept it. Why is there this contradiction between the attitudes towards Zionism and towards apartheid?”
As for China, the capitalist giant which occasionally sings rhapsodies to Marx to excite its gullible communist supporters in the West, its president Xi Jinping “recently reiterated his support for a two-state solution”, which is to say, for the continued existence of a Jewish supremacist state based on settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and racist institutions.
As Xi rejects a two-state solution for China—where two independent Chinese states, Taiwan and the PRC, could live side by side, in peace—he endorses a two-state model for the Palestinians. The Chinese, in his view, deserve better. They won’t concede a part of their country in the name of peace—as Xi expects the Palestinians to do.
Xi cares about China, tout court, not the global south and not the Palestinians, any more than Stalin did. As leaders of major states, Stalin then and Xi now, pursue as their priority the interests of the states they lead; everything else is secondary, available to be sacrificed in pursuit of raison d’etat, realpolitik, and opportunism.
Follow-up
In his critique of the KKE’s endorsement of the two-state solution, Jorge Martin makes many of the same arguments I do, but develops some themes more fully. Here are what I think are the parts of his analysis that are particularly relevant to my discussion above.
“[T]he two-state solution has been proven to have been impossible in practice, as we have explained in detail elsewhere. The Oslo Accords of 1993 were seen precisely as a road map towards a two-state solution by the Palestinian leadership. In fact, they were a complete betrayal and sell out of the Palestinian struggle. Israel kept control of a large section of the West Bank and of the external borders, Jewish settlers were allowed to remain in the Palestinian territory and settlements have continued to expand.
“Meanwhile, the questions of the right of return and the state of East Jerusalem were postponed to be discussed in the long distant future (read: never) and in exchange a pitiful Palestinian ‘Authority’ with no real power was created with the sole aim of subcontracting the policing of the Palestinian masses to the rotten leadership of the PLO.
…
“So as long as the capitalist state of Israel exists, the Israeli bourgeoisie will never accept the existence of a genuine viable Palestinian state as it considers it a threat to its ‘national security’. This has been proven, not in theory, but in practice. Since the Oslo Accords, the number of Zionist settlements in the West Bank has continuously increased, while Gaza remains completely blockaded by the state of Israel. Israel’s military interventions in Gaza, as well as in the West Bank, have become increasingly frequent and violent, undermining the very existence of even the limited Palestinian entity that is the Palestinian Authority.
“Furthermore, it is difficult to see how a capitalist state of Palestine would be viable in the territory of the 1967 borders, side-by-side with a powerful imperialist capitalist state of Israel. Such a capitalist Palestine, if it were possible, would be economically dominated by its powerful neighbor and remain at best its semi-colony.
“It is the practical experience of the last 30 years that has led a majority of Palestinians to reject a two-state solution. In September this year, a poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that 67 percent of Palestinians reject a two-state solution, with only 32 percent in support. The same poll shows that “71 percent believe the two-state solution is no longer practical due to settlement expansion”. A separate poll conducted by the Arab World for Research and Development on 15 November found that 74 percent of Palestinians are in favor of one state, while only 17 percent want a two-state solution. An overwhelming majority of Palestinians reject the Oslo Accords altogether.
“Incidentally, even if one were to accept the idea of a two-state solution, why should a Palestinian state be established ‘on the 1967 borders’ (presumably what the KKE means is the pre-1967 war borders) which represented only 22 percent of historic Palestine? Why not go back to the 1947 UN partition plan borders, where a Palestinian state represented 44 percent? The 1967 borders represent not only accepting partition itself but also the further territorial conquests by the State of Israel in the period after it.
…
“In 1947, the Soviet Union backed the partition plan at the United Nations. This was not done in solidarity with the Jewish people .. but rather in an attempt to undermine the position of British imperialism in the Middle East. [My note: It could have been done for both reasons.] The USSR was the first country to recognize the newly created State of Israel and Stalin supplied the Zionists with weapons via Czechoslovakia. Soviet support for the setting up of the State of Israel in 1948 was a betrayal with catastrophic consequences for all the communist parties throughout the Middle East and beyond. Such a position cannot be justified and made the USSR complicit in the crime that was committed against the Palestinian people.”
Last October, Talk TV host Piers Morgan hectored Husam Zomlot, Palestinian ambassador to the UK, demanding to know whether Zomlot considered Hamas a terrorist organization. Zomlot countered by asking Morgan whether he thought Israel is a terrorist organization. Neither would answer the other.
Morgan’s show is a forum for entertainment, not insight, enlightenment, or rational debate. But if questions could be debated rationally on his show, how might the question of whether Hamas is a terrorist organization be answered?
The first thing we need to do is define our term. What is terrorism? In his exchange with Morgan, Homlot made a promising start by offering a definition: Terrorism is the unlawful use of violence against civilians for the sake of a political agenda.
There are many definitions of terrorism, but most feature the three elements Homlot included in his definition: (1) the actual or threatened use of violence, (2) against civilians, (3) in the pursuit of a political goal.
Terrorism, then, is a form of violent conduct, action, or behavior, aimed at civilians, with a political dimension. It is not a characteristic of an individual, group, or state. There are no definitions of a terrorist, terrorist organization, or terrorist state apart from definitions of what terrorist conduct is.
Obviously, it could be said that an organization that uses violence against civilians in pursuit of a political aim is a terrorist organization, but this is problematic. It is fairly certain that every person, organization, or state that has used violence against civilians to further a political agenda, has also used non-terrorist methods.
An organization might seek to achieve its political aims by lobbying, appeal to the courts, boycotts, strikes, demonstrations, civil disobedience, participation in elections, negotiations, diplomacy, or through armed conflict against enemy combatants.
So, if an organization does any of these non-terrorist things, and at the same time, engages in acts of terrorism, is it a terrorist organization or a non-terrorist one?
If we call it a terrorist organization because it has engaged in terrorist conduct then by the same reasoning, we must also call it a non-terrorist organization because it has engaged in non-terrorist conduct. The problem here is one of insisting on assignment to only one of two categories that are not mutually exclusive.
Few, if any, organizations with military branches have completely avoided or will in the future completely avoid the threatened or actual use of violence against civilians to further their aims. This means that these organizations are simultaneously terrorist organizations and not terrorist organizations. Trying to force people, organizations, and states into the Procrustean bed of one of two categories that are not mutually exclusive, misrepresents the world as it is.
We are encouraged to assign the United States to the category of non-terrorist state. And while it does engage in non-terrorist conduct in pursuit of its political goals, it also acts in terrorist ways.
To see this, consider Richard Grenell, a man burning with the ambition to be the next US secretary of state. Grenell worked for former president Donald Trump as his ambassador to Germany, acting national intelligence chief, and special envoy to the Balkans. Here he is explaining how he would handle negotiations with foreign states. Grenell says he would tell his interlocuters:
“Guys, if we don’t solve this here, if we don’t represent peace and figure out a tough way, I’ve got to take this file, go back to the United States and transfer it to the secretary of defense, who doesn’t negotiate. He’s going to bomb you.”
Since US bombing inevitably and knowingly produces civilian casualties, Grenell’s proposal to use the threat of bombing to achieve US political objectives is terrorism. What he proposes to do is use terrorism as his main method of statecraft.
But Grenell would only be carrying on a US tradition. The United States is history’s greatest practitioner of terror bombing—the raining of high explosive and incendiary munitions upon civilians and civilian targets to terrorize enemy populations. These campaigns of terrorism have produced massive civilian casualties, a point made recently by former US chairman of the joint chiefs Mark Milley. “Before we all get self-righteous about what Israel is doing,” intoned Milley, we should remember that “we slaughtered people in massive numbers, innocent people…men, women, and children.”
Ret. Gen. Mark Milley says the US has committed so many war crimes over the years, it has no right to criticize Israel's devastation of Gaza
Palantir CEO Alex Karp chimes in: "The peace activists are actually the war activists, and we're the peace activists."
US and Israeli generals say their use of violence against civilians in pursuit of state aims (that is political agendas) is not terrorism, claiming that they don’t deliberately target civilians. This is beside the point. Whether civilians are targeted or not, they are still exposed to massive violence even when they’re not targeted—slaughtered in massive numbers, innocent people, men, women, and children, as Milley reminds us.
Even if the violence to which civilians are exposed is incidental to the targeting of military objectives, it is still the inevitable and predictable consequence of the pursuit of these objectives—and hence represents terrorism.
In its campaign in Gaza, it is clear that Israel has exposed civilians to horrors beyond comprehension in the pursuit of military aims and a larger political agenda. There is no question that this is terrorism.
Has Hamas also undertaken terrorist acts? It appears so. But the violence it has inflicted on Israeli civilians is not on a scale that even remotely rises to the level of the violence Israel has visited upon Palestinian civilians.
Israel has killed or wounded almost 120,000 Palestinians in Gaza since October 7. Let us assume, for the sake of simplicity, that only women and children are civilians. They are estimated to make up 60 percent of Palestinian casualties. Israel has, then, used violence to harm 72,000 civilians (and likely more since many uncounted bodies are believed to remain buried beneath the rubble.)
Let us assume further that all of the roughly 1,200 people who were killed by Palestinian fighters on October 7 were civilians, and that all were targeted by Hamas. This isn’t true, but for the sake of simplicity, let’s assume it is.
Taking these simplifying assumptions into account (all of which favor Israel), the level of Israeli terrorist violence against Palestinian civilians since October 7 has been at least 60 times greater than the level of Hamas terrorist violence against Israeli civilians.
The level of Israeli terrorism thus greatly overshadows that of Hamas, and yet Israel and its backers would have us believe that the terrorist conduct of Hamas is heinous while the far greater terrorist conduct of Israel is not terrorism at all, but the just exercise of a state’s right to defend itself.
Does Hamas’s terrorism justify Israel’s terroristic response? Piers Morgan has tried to excuse Israel’s terrorism by pointing to US, British, and Canadian terror bombings in World War II, arguing that these responses were necessary to defeat a great evil (and therefore by implication that Israel’s greater terrorism is necessary to eliminate Hamas’s far lesser terrorism.) But the same argument can be used to justify Hamas’s terrorism. It too could be said that Hamas must use violence against civilians in order to defeat the evil of Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid.
In this case, whether terrorism is seen to be legitimate or not depends on which evil you support and which you oppose, that is, whose side you’re on—that of the oppressor or the oppressed?
So, has Hamas committed terrorist acts? Yes. But it’s doubtful that any organization with an active military branch, including most states, hasn’t done the same. States have carried out far more acts of terrorism with far deadlier consequences than Hamas—a small, weak, lightly armed non-state organization—has or ever will.
My aim in pointing this out is not to mount a tu quoque (yeah, but what about?) defense of Hamas’s use of violence against civilians, but to show that the understanding of the organization as a bloodthirsty outlier—which people who call Hamas a terrorist organization would like to instil in the public mind—is false. It has acted in far less violent ways toward civilians than the Palestinians’ oppressors have. This is explainable in part by the fact that Hamas lacks the means to mount massive campaigns of violence, while Israel—supplied by the United States, including with 2,000 lb. bombs, which, when used in the dense urban setting of Gaza, knowingly massacre civilians in large numbers —is able to inflict cruel horrors without end on Palestinian civilians—horrors rising to the level of genocide.
The Lemkin Institute has had it with the cynical lies and propaganda from Israel and the USA. One can have different views about the definition of genocide, but one may not use definitional disputes to deny genocide. If a genocide may be occurring, every nation is compelled by… pic.twitter.com/KTZrbACgyW
— Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention (@LemkinInstitute) May 28, 2024
A final question: Is Israel’s use of violence against Hamas fighters legitimate? The answer depends on what kind of conflict you think this is—a war of two states, in which contending ruling classes vie for advantage, or a conflict of oppressed against oppressor? There’s no question that this is a conflict of the latter type, that the Palestinians are oppressed by the Israelis, and that Hamas is fighting to overcome the oppression of its members and compatriots. Unless you think the violence of the slave master to crush the rebellion of the slave is legitimate, Israel’s use of violence against Hamas fighters has no sort of moral sanction at all.
The only legitimate response Israel has to the October 7 revolt is to end its oppression of Palestinians, to de-Zionize itself, and to accept a non-national, democratic political arrangement from the River to the Sea, in which all people—native Arabs (including returned refugees) and settler Jews—live together as equals.
Follow-up
US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby defended Israel’s terrorism by pointing to that of the United States, in the same way Mark Milley did earlier.
The premise lurking in the Kirby-Milley argument is that the use of violence against civilians in furtherance of a political agenda is okay when the United States, Israel (and other US allies) do it, but when the enemies of the United States and Israel do it, it is heinous, and is terrorism.
All armed organizations use violence against civilians in pursuit of political goals. Whether the violence is labelled as terrorism or not, depends on one’s relationship to the organization in question. If one is against the organization, its politically-inspired violence against civilians will be denounced as terrorism. If one is for the organization and its aims, the terrorism label will be avoided altogether in favor of a pleasing alternative which sets a halo upon the head of the organization in question.
Everyone does it. Here is the Leila Khaled version.
I admire Leila Khaled, support her struggle, and agree that Zionists have used terrorist methods liberally. But struggle and terrorism are not mutually exclusive terms. That the other side uses terrorism doesn’t mean that your side shuns it. That each side prefers to call their terrorism struggle or self-defense or what have you, doesn’t change the fact that it is politicly-inspired violence against civilians–which, perhaps, is the most fitting label to use to describe a form of warfare that appears to be an ubiquitous part of armed conflicts used by all sides.
Recently, Laurence H. Shoup presented data in Monthly Review that shows that the key personnel of the organizations comprising the Israel lobby, as identified by political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in their book The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, are also the key personnel of the leading US foreign policy think-thank, the Wall Street-based Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). The key foreign policy members of the Biden cabinet, the secretaries of state, treasury, defense, along with the director of the CIA, national security advisor, and US ambassador to the UN, are all CFR members. Cabinets in previous administrations have also drawn heavily from the Wall Street-based organization to fill top cabinet posts.
Shoup has argued in two books and multiple articles that US foreign policy is shaped by a Wall Street power elite operating largely through the Council on Foreign Relations to serve the economic interests of the US economic elite, the country’s ruling class. This is a Marxist view.
The Marxist view contrasts with the view of John Mearsheimer who has recently argued that US foreign policy—not just that touching Israel, but all US foreign policy—is shaped by a powerful lobby of Jewish and Christian Zionist business people who have used their wealth and influence to pressure US decision-makers to put Zionist interests ahead of US interests.
These two views differ on the following questions:
Who decisively influences US foreign policy? Mearsheimer says wealthy and powerful Zionists, both Jewish and Christian. A Marxist view says that a Wall Street power elite holds decisive sway over US foreign policy, and Shoup shows that the group includes members of and overlaps the Israel lobby.
What is the aim of US foreign policy? Mearsheimer says the aim is to protect and advance the Zionist project, in contrast to a Marxist view which says it is to protect and advance Wall Street’s interests around the world.
Is Israel a foreign policy asset? Mearsheimer says that far from being an asset, Israel is a liability, because Zionism creates problems in the Middle East which demand incessant US attention, diverting Washington from devoting its full energies to containing China, its principal foreign policy threat. A Marxist view holds that defending and promoting the interests of its patrons has always been central to the Zionist project and that this makes Israel a valuable instrument to be used in defending Wall Street’s interests in the Middle East.
Mearsheimer recently presented an argument that supports the idea that the US foreign policy establishment subsumes the Israel lobby, as Shoup has shown, though it was hardly Mearsheimer’s intention to support a Marxist view. We might suppose that the Israel lobby focuses on US-Israel relations, while the ambit of the US foreign policy establishment is broader—the world as a whole. But Mearsheimer sees the lobby’s ambit as coterminous with that of the US foreign policy establishment; in his view, Israel is not the only matter that commands the Israel lobby’s attention; it is also concerned with US foreign policy as a whole. Even to Mearsheimer, then, the Israel lobby looks like the US foreign policy establishment in the breadth of the regions in which it takes an interest.
But here’s where Mearsheimer introduces a new element into his thinking. Not only does he believe that the Israel lobby has pressured the US foreign policy establishment into robustly backing Israel, he also makes an argument that can be construed to mean he believes the Israel lobby has pressured US decision-makers into adopting an interventionist foreign policy everywhere in the world. Asked whether the lobby is concerned with US-Israel relations alone, Mearsheimer replies (at 14:32):
“The fact is that the lobby is deeply interested in seeing the United States involved militarily all over the planet. The reason is, is that if the United States is intervening all over the planet, that means it will have a commitment to intervening in Israel. You don’t want a situation where the United States pulls back its forces, implements a policy, a foreign policy, of restraint, and is very reluctant to interfere in other places around the world, because if that’s the case it means that Israel may get into a conflict and the United States might not be willing to intervene on its behalf. So, the lobby has had an interest in seeing the United States pursue a very aggressive foreign policy all across the globe.”
One interpretation of the text above is that Mearsheimer believes the Israel lobby has caused US foreign policy to be globally interventionist. Another is that he sees the lobby as favoring a broadly interventionist policy, but doesn’t go so far as to suggest it has caused US decision-makers to adopt one. But if the Israel lobby is powerful enough to cause US decision-makers to support Israel unconditionally as Mearsheimer contends, we might expect it also to be powerful enough to cause decision-makers to support a globally interventionist foreign policy that supports the Jewish state. It seems likely that Mearsheimer is arguing that the Israel lobby not only causes US decision-makers to favor Israel unconditionally but that it also causes them to adopt a globally interventionist foreign policy. This extends the Mearsheimer-Walt thesis considerably, from: the Israel lobby causes US decision-makers to back Israel unconditionally to: the Israel lobby causes US foreign policy to be robustly interventionist around the world.
Mearsheimer defines the lobby as a group of wealthy and powerful people who are committed to Israel. We might ask what lies behind their commitment. Mearsheimer cites Zionist convictions. The Israel lobby comprises people who are either Zionist Jews or Christian Zionists, he argues. But is that the only reason to be committed to Israel? Could one not also be committed to a policy of the United States backing Israel owing to the role the Jewish state is able to play as an outpost of US elite interests in the Middle East? Pace Mearsheimer, could it be that US foreign policy is shaped by US decision-makers guided by a Wall Street-based power elite that perceives Israel as an asset able to defend US ruling class interests in the Middle East in return for helping it carry forward the Zionist project?
Political Zionism has always rested on the idea of a quid-pro-quo between settler Jews emigrating from the West and the governments of the Western states from which they emigrated. The former would represent the interests of the latter in West Asia and North Africa, serving as a bulwark against Arab and Muslim nationalist interests, in exchange for the latter’s support for the Jewish settler project in Palestine. That project would inevitably arouse the enmity of the natives, who would naturally bristle at their displacement and the negation of their national aspirations. A Western backer would be vital to the project’s success, and Israel would return the favor by countering forces that opposed its sponsor’s interests in the region.
Israel, of course, isn’t the West’s only choice as proxy in the Arab and Muslim worlds. Washington could look to Arab states to help police the Middle East and assert US profit-making and strategic interests in the region. Indeed, Washington has done this, establishing relations with a series of royal and military dictatorships, including Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Oman, Bahrain, Qatar, and Kuwait.
The trouble is that US support in the Middle East is largely limited to the autocrats Washington helps keep in power over the opposition of their populations. It would be difficult for US-backed Arab despots to mobilize their countries against other Arabs and Muslims, specifically Iran, Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Ansar Allah in Yemen—states and movements which reject US domination of the Middle East. US-backed autocrats command little support at home. Their populations are imbued with nationalist aspirations, and unlike Israeli Jews, reject the idea that the region ought to be subordinate to US leadership. Tel Aviv, in contrast, can mobilize Israeli Jews against Arabs and Muslims, who are viewed as hostile barbarians, embittered against Israel, and bent on eliminating the Jews as a people.
To put it another way, Israeli Jews, who largely see themselves as Westerners, identify with the Western world and its project of imposing US leadership on the globe, including on the energy-rich and therefore strategically important Middle East; Arabs and Iranians are far less likely to share this view. Native states are, thus, poor choices as effective proxies for US interests in the Middle East. Israel, which sees itself as the West’s outpost in West Asia and North Africa, is, in contrast, a superb choice, motivated to cooperate with the US agenda by its security concerns which can only be satisfied by the United States and its Western partners and a common Western culture and commitment to the ideas of manifest destiny, Western superiority, and the desirability of US global leadership.
Mearsheimer has been known to reply to challenges to his view by asking, “Then why does the lobby exist?” The fact of the existence of an organization with a specific aim is hardly evidence that the organization has achieved its aim. The Democratic Socialists of America exist as an organization to bring socialism to the United States. Is the United States socialist?
The reason the Israel lobby exists is to shape public opinion, media coverage, intellectual discourse, and the research agendas and curricula of the universities and schools, and where public opinion cannot be manipulated to Israel’s advantage, to discourage elected representatives from responding to public opinion by initiating legislation or government action that could interfere with Washington’s accustomed support of its Israeli client. The lobby, as Shoup points out, is largely focused on electoral contests, not on twisting the arms of the unelected Wall Street-connected personnel who occupy the consequential foreign policy roles in the state—the secretaries of state, defense, treasury, chief of the CIA, and UN ambassador, and their phalanx of deputies and undersecretaries—all of whom are largely removed from the influence of public opinion. The role of the Israel lobby is, in short, to persuade US society and its elected representatives to accept US support of a client in the Middle East whose conduct is likely to inflame public opinion against it.
The idea that the Israel lobby is able to shape all of US foreign policy, as Mearsheimer contends, is, to use one of his favorite locutions, just not a serious argument. The idea that the Israel lobby causes US decision-makers to put Israeli interests ahead of US interests, fails to grasp (i) the complementarity of the two country’s interests; (ii) the trouble that local forces of independence and national assertiveness in the Middle East can create for US ruling class interests in the region; and (iii) the role Israel plays as the “rock, an extension of the West, against which the waves of… Arab [and Muslim] nationalism will be broken,” as Moshe Dayan, an Israeli chief of defense staff, minister of defense, and minister of foreign affairs, once put it.
Mearsheimer’s view comes perilously close to the idea that a cabal of rich Jews and their Christian Zionist friends pull the strings in Washington, diverting the country’s government from pursuing US interests to pursuing Jewish Zionist interests in the Middle East. Some might say the Marxist view is hardly different; it too attributes US foreign policy to a cabal, except, in this case, a cabal of Wall Street financiers. While it might seem on the surface that this is so, the Marxist view sees US foreign policy as reflecting the character of US society—one devoted to capitalism, indeed, thoroughly dominated by it, where the idea that billionaires, wealthy investors, and top-level corporate executives exercise considerable sway over almost every aspect of US society, including public policy, is almost axiomatic. As a 2014 study of over 1,700 US policy issues by the political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page showed, “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial impacts on government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.” The Council on Foreign Relations is only one of many instruments the US ruling class uses to influence public policy. It also funds the political campaigns of candidates that will support pro-business policies; donates to universities to shape their research agendas and influence who they hire and fire; owing to its significant wealth, lobbies the legislative and executive branches of government to a degree which unions, working people, and grassroots groups, which command significantly less wealth, are unable to do; and owns and controls the mass media, allowing it to shape public opinion and set the public policy agenda. The US ruling class uses all of these mechanisms to influence US foreign policy and tilt it in favor of US ruling class interests. The Marxist view, thus, holds that a class, not a cabal, pulls the strings in Washington, using its ownership and control of the economy to fund political campaigns, lobby government, and shape the public discourse, in its interests.
In contrast, Mearsheimer’s view is hardly different from the idea that a cabal of wealthy Zionist Jews and Zionist Christians has hijacked the US state in order to use it to serve the interests of Jews in Israel at the expense and to the detriment of the citizens of the United States. This view shares similarities with reactionary views that date as far back as 1789 and continued into the late nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century–ideas about conspiracies of wealthy Jews operating in the background to pull strings and shape world politics to the benefit of Jews and at the expense of everyone else. If wealthy Jews were once thought by reactionaries to be behind everything they hated–the French Revolution, the Bolsheviks, international capitalism–they have become, in Mearsheimer’s hands, the reason why the United States supports Israel; in other words, they have been made to reprise their role as scapegoats.
The Israel lobby is run by the same people who hold enormous sway over public policy, the universities, and the mass media: the corporate elite
May 16, 2024
Updated May 17, 2024
By Stephen Gowans
Political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt believe Israel is a US foreign policy liability, and that the only reason Washington strongly backs the Zionist state is because US decision-making has been hijacked by a powerful Israel lobby that is able to use its vast resources to severely punish politicians and decision-makers who fail to support Israel. US politicians and cabinet officials, in their view, recognize that support for Israel is inimical to US foreign policy interests but support Israel anyway for fear of running afoul of the powerful Israel lobby.
A recent study by Laurence H. Shoup in Monthly Review shows that the organizations Mearsheimer and Waltz identify as the Israel lobby are largely led by the same wealthy patrons who lead the United States’ premier foreign policy think-tank, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). The think-tank is directed by the colossi of Wall Street.
Wall Street, the Israel lobby, the CFR, the boards of universities and large mass media companies, are all interconnected as part of the same moneyed class.
The CFR regularly places its members in the top foreign policy cabinet positions. The current secretaries of state, defense, and treasury are members of the Wall Street-directed group, as well as Biden’s national security adviser, the director of the CIA, and the US ambassador to the UN.
Hence, the people who occupy the commanding heights of the US business world lead both the Israel lobby and the US foreign policy think-tank which supplies the personnel to staff the key foreign policy posts in the US government. Washington is unreservedly pro-Israel, because Wall Street is.
To illustrate the point, The New York Times reported on May 15 that “Wall Street’s big donors” are turning away from Biden owing to their “growing dissatisfaction with what [the donors] see as the White House’s hardening stance against Israel in its war on Gaza.” Biden’s pausing (not cancelling) a shipment of 2,000 lb. bombs in an effort to dissuade Israel from launching a major assault on Rafah (which was soon followed by Biden approving a major transfer of other arms to Israel), and the United States abstaining from a UN vote censuring Israel for its conduct in Gaza, hardly amount to much of a hardening stance against Israel. All the same, many “big donors are put off by [what they see as Biden’s] softening support for Israel,” the newspaper reports.
Today, the web site Responsible Statecraft posted an investigation, “Biden’s Gaza policy risks re-election but pleases his wealthiest donors“, which reveals that “over one third of the president’s top funders – those giving in excess of $900,000 to the Biden Victory Fund—appear to see little nuance in the conflict [between Israel and the Palestinians] and show overwhelming sympathy for Israel, at times verging into outright hostility to Palestinians and anti-Muslim bigotry.”
On May 16, The Washington Post revealed that a group of approximately 100 “billionaires and business titans” was “formed shortly after the Oct. 7” revolt in order “to ‘change the narrative’ in favor of Israel, partly by conveying ‘the atrocities committed by Hamas … to all Americans.’” The group’s self-stated mission was to “’help win the war’ of U.S. public opinion by funding an information campaign against Hamas.”
The group was formed by “billionaire and real estate magnate Barry Sternlicht.” The Post cited a November report from the news site Semafor “that Sternlicht was launching a $50 million anti-Hamas media campaign with various Wall Street and Hollywood billionaires.”
The group includes “former CEO of Starbucks Howard Schultz, Dell founder and CEO Michael Dell, hedge fund manager Bill Ackman and Joshua Kushner, founder of Thrive Capital and brother to Jared Kushner, former president Donald Trump’s son-in-law.”
The business titans also include “Kind snack company founder Daniel Lubetzky, hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb, billionaire Len Blavatnik and real estate investor Joseph Sitt” who met with New York City mayor Eric Adams to pressure him to deploy the police to clear the anti-genocide encampment at Columbia University.
The obvious conclusion is that the US capitalist class—the country’s billionaires and top-level executives—are decidedly pro-Israel, while the rest of the population is either less so, or strongly opposed to Israel’s conduct in Gaza. To put it another way: Wall Street supports the genocide (and therefore so too does Washington) while many ordinary Americans are appalled.
Since the capitalist class holds enormous sway over public policy—through its funding of political campaigns; by underwriting think-tanks to recommend public policy; by placing its representatives in key positions in the state; by donating to universities to shape their research agendas and influence who they hire and fire; by means of its extensive lobbying of the legislative and executive branches of government; and by its control of the mass media—it is inevitable that public policy will reflect the corporate elite’s strong backing of Israel.
Saying, as Mearsheimer and Walt do, that the Israel lobby shapes US foreign policy conceals a more important truth. Economic elites and organized groups representing business interests both strongly support Israel and shape US foreign policy. The Israel lobby predisposes Washington to support Israel only so far as the lobby is part of, and directed by, a capitalist class that leans strongly toward the Zionist state and has the resources and connections to strongly influence US foreign policy positions.
A 2014 study of over 1,700 US policy issues by the political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page found that “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial impacts on government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.”
The Israel lobby has a substantial impact on government policy because it is run by economic elites and organized business interests and because these elites are strongly pro-Israel. Mearsheimer and Walt call the Israel lobby powerful, but don’t inquire into the source of its power. The lobby is powerful because it is handsomely funded. The only class in a position to handsomely fund a lobby to make it powerful enough to decisively shape public policy is the class of top-corporate executives, financiers, and billionaire investors.
So, why is the US capitalist class overwhelmingly supportive of Israel?
Among members of the US economic elite, support for Israel may derive in some cases from Zionist convictions (either Christian or Jewish), but Zionist beliefs are far less important as the basis for pro-Israel views among members of the US capitalist class than is elite consciousness of the reality that Israel serves their class interests in an economically rich and strategically significant part of the world. US control of Middle Eastern oil provides corporate America with a rich source of profits. It also gives the corporate elite leverage over its business rivals in Europe, Japan, and China, who depend critically on Middle Eastern petroleum resources for survival. Israel helps Washington control the Middle East in a way no other state in the region is able to do.
Arab nationalist leaders have always been clear about why the US capitalist class supports Israel unreservedly. Israel is a watchdog, a snarling beast, “a dagger pointed at the heart of the Arab world,” that Washington uses to hold Arab and Muslim nationalist forces in check, to ensure the vast economic and strategic prize of Middle Eastern oil remains under the control of corporate America’s political servants in Washington and their Arab satraps, the kings, emirs, sultans, and military dictators who, to a man, loath democracy, and collaborate with Wall Street-backed US power against the ordinary people of the Arab and Muslim worlds.
Middle Eastern oil is not a prize corporate America is willing to yield to local forces of independence and national assertiveness. In return for Washington supporting Israel in carrying the Zionist project forward, Israel helps look after corporate America’s interests in the Middle East. It’s a mutually beneficial pact of Jewish nationalist forces collaborating with US business interests to keep the Arabs and Iranians down, the Americans in charge, and the Israelis supplied with arms and diplomatic support to enforce their regime of Jewish supremacy in the Levant.
“America is Israel. Israel is America and Europe combined in Palestine.”—Leila Khaled, 1973.
An article by Laurence H. Shoup in the May 2024 issue of Monthly Review, examining the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the premier think tank of the US foreign policy establishment, shows that the organization, whose members include the holders of the key US foreign policy cabinet positions, largely overlaps with the Israel lobby. The Israel lobby and the US foreign policy establishment are, in the main, the same. This poses problems for the Mearsheimer-Walt thesis, which holds that the US foreign policy establishment operates as a network of decision-makers that exists apart from an independent and powerful network of Israel supporters who twist the arms of the decision makers, compelling them to put Israeli goals ahead of US interests.
Shoup has written two books on the CFR—Imperial Brain Trust (with William Minter) and Wall Street’s Think Tank—as well as a number of articles on the think tank. His work explores the connections between Wall Street and the US foreign policy establishment, and focuses on the CFR as the organization that links the two.
The Council is a private organization with a chairman (for years David Rockefeller, who, until his death, remained the honorary chairman) and board members (typically billionaires or near billionaires) and approximately 5,000 members, who are selected by the board.
The raison d’être of the organization is to bring together intellectuals, prominent business people, leading members of the media, state officials, and top military leaders, to formulate foreign policy recommendations and promote them to the public and government. The majority of the key foreign policy cabinet positions, State, Defense, Treasury, National Security Adviser, and US Ambassador to the UN, are filled by Council members.
Antony Blinken (Secretary of State), Janet Yellen (Secretary of the Treasury), Lloyd Austin (Secretary of Defense), Linda Thomas-Greenfield (UN Ambassador), William J. Burns (Director of Central Intelligence), and Jake Sullivan (National Security Advisor), are all members of the CFR.
The directors of the organization are drawn from the colossi of Wall Street. For example, Larry Fink, the longtime CEO of Blackrock, was a CFR director from 2013 until 2023. “Blackrock is the world’s biggest asset manager, to the tune of about $10 trillion in assets, a figure larger than every nation’s GDP outside of the United States and China,” notes Shoup.
Shoup’s latest inquiry into the CFR concerns its relationship to the Israel lobby. Political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt (both CFR members) criticized the lobby in a major paper and subsequent book titled The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy. The authors argued that Israel is not a US foreign policy asset, and, to the contrary, is a liability. How is it, then, that Washington is unfailingly devoted to Israel, supplying it with weapons, shielding it from penalty for its violations of international law, and attacking its critics? The answer, they argue, is the Israel lobby. In effect, a powerful network of Israel’s supporters has pressured the US foreign policy establishment to take positions that promote Israel’s interests at the expense of those of the United States.
Critics of the Mearsheimer-Walt thesis counter that even in the absence of an Israel lobby, Washington would support Israel, because the client state acts as a proxy for the United States in West Asia and North Africa in a way no other state in the region could.
What makes Israel especially suited for service as an outpost of the United States and the West in the Middle East, as Benjamin Netanyahu once described his country, are the cultural, familial, ideological, educational, and economic connections of a sizable portion of its leaders, military officials, and citizens to North America and Europe, the regions from which they, or their ancestors, arrived in Israel. Jewish settlers in Palestine see themselves as representatives of Western civilization in a land of barbarism. Bringing Western thought, culture, technology, and politics to the barbarian East is a leitmotif of political Zionist thinking, and has been since its origins in nineteenth century Europe.
Political Zionism has always rested on the idea of a quid-pro-quo between settler Jews emigrating from the West and the governments of the Western states from which they emigrated. The former would represent the interests of the latter in West Asia and North Africa, serving as a bulwark against Arab and Muslim nationalist interests, in exchange for the latter’s support for the Jewish settler project in Palestine. That project would inevitably arouse the enmity of the natives, who would naturally bristle at their displacement and the negation of their national aspirations. A Western backer would be vital to the project’s success, and Israel would return the favor by countering forces that opposed its sponsor’s interests in the region.
Israel, of course, isn’t the West’s only choice as proxy in the Arab and Muslim worlds. Washington could look to Arab states to help police the Middle East and assert US profit-making and strategic interests in the region. Indeed, Washington has done this, establishing relations with a series of royal and military dictatorships, including Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Oman, Bahrain, Qatar, and Kuwait.
The trouble is that US support in the Middle East is largely limited to the autocrats Washington helps keep in power over the opposition of their subjects. It would be difficult for US-backed Arab despots to mobilize their countries against other Arabs and Muslims, specifically Iran, Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Ansar Allah in Yemen—states and movements which reject US domination of the Middle East. US-backed autocrats command little support at home. Their populations are imbued with nationalist aspirations, and unlike Israeli Jews, reject the idea that the region ought to be subordinate to US leadership. Tel Aviv, in contrast, can mobilize Israeli Jews against Arabs and Muslims, who are viewed as hostile barbarians, embittered against Israel, and bent on eliminating the Jews as a people.
To put it another way, Israeli Jews, who largely see themselves as Westerners, identify with the Western world and its project of imposing US leadership on the globe, including on the energy-rich and therefore strategically important Middle East; Arabs and Iranians are far less likely to share this view. Native states are, thus, poor choices as effective proxies for US interests in the Middle East. Israel, the West’s outpost in West Asia and North Africa, is, in contrast, a brilliant choice, motivated to cooperate with the US agenda by its security concerns which can only be satisfied by the United States and its Western partners and a common Western culture and commitment to the ideas of manifest destiny, Western superiority, and the desirability of US global leadership.
Shoup’s latest article, which examines the CFR and the Israel lobby, makes a few points which raise questions about the validity of the Mearsheimer-Walt thesis (though it’s not clear that it was Shoup’s intention to do so.)
Shoup argues that the CFR is part of the Israel lobby. He does so by showing extensive overlaps between the organizations that Mearsheimer and Walt identify as the principals of the lobby and the CFR itself. People who hold key positions in the lobby also hold key positions in the CFR and vice-versa. At the same time, people who hold key positions in the US state, tend to come from the CFR and hence, its overlapping Israel lobby.
If we consider Shoup’s findings, that (1) most of the people who direct US foreign policy are members of the CFR; (2) by implication the CFR is, in effect, the US foreign policy establishment, or at least the source of most its foreign policy-related cabinet members; and (3) the CFR is part of the Israel lobby and the Israel lobby is part of the CFR, then, it must be true that the US foreign policy establishment is the Israel lobby and the Israel lobby is the US foreign policy establishment.
Shoup’s findings therefore identify a critical flaw in the Mearsheimer-Walt thesis, namely, that it treats the Israel lobby as existing apart from the US foreign policy establishment. US decision-makers are presented as pressured by an external agency, one committed to protecting and advancing Israeli interests, which pressures US decision-makers to prioritize Israel’s goals over US interests. People who put Israel’s interests ahead of those of the United States, are, in the Mearsheimer-Walt view, pressuring the US foreign policy establishment to pursue Israel’s aims. This, however, cannot be true if the lobby and the foreign policy establishment are one and the same, as Shoup reveals. Indeed, in light of Shoup’s findings, the Mearsheimer-Walt thesis reduces to a necessary truth—the US foreign policy establishment influences the US foreign policy establishment.
Shoup shows that contrary to what is implicit in the Mearsheimer-Walt view, the US foreign policy establishment subsumes, overlaps, and is highly interlocked with the Israel lobby, and is not independent of it. The two do not exist as separate networks, but as highly interpenetrated ones. The US foreign policy establishment is the Israel lobby and the Israel lobby is the US foreign policy establishment. This reveals that the Mearsheimer-Walt thesis is a tautology: The US foreign policy establishment backs Israel because the lobby, i.e., the US foreign policy establishment, backs Israel.
Based on Shoup’s findings, Mearsheimer and Walt might reply that the problem is even worse than they had anticipated; that the US foreign policy establishment has been completely taken over by Israel’s supporters who have turned the US security state into an unqualified instrument of Israel. But this would merely assign to Israel’s backers the role of bouc emissaire, scapegoats, to blame for why US foreign policy hasn’t embraced Mearsheimer and Walt’s policy recommendations. From a psychological point of view this is what lies behind the Mearsheimer-Walt thesis, viz., we say, US policy should be x; it’s not x; therefore, some external force must have intervened to disrupt the causal path that goes from our identification of the best course for US foreign policy to take and the foreign policy establishment’s endorsement of it. How could the foreign policy establishment not see the brilliance of our policy prescriptions? It must be that its members were suborned not to see it.
However, as we have seen, there are compelling reasons to reject the duo’s policy prescriptions on the grounds that the theorists have failed to grasp the role Israel plays to support US interests against Arab and Muslim nationalism, an enemy shared by both Israel and Wall Street. Washington opposes these forces because they threaten US control of the Middle East’s petroleum resources, a highly important strategic asset which is not only a source of immense profit for US corporations, but a source of considerable strategic leverage for Washington over Europe, Japan, and China, US economic rivals that depend for a good deal of their energy on the Middle East. Israel opposes forces of independence and nationalism in the Middle East because they threaten Israel’s continued existence as a colonial settler state. Israel critically depends on Washington to provide it the weapons, military and intelligence support, and diplomatic protection it needs for its colonial settler project to survive. Without US support, Israel would soon perish. For its part, Washington needs Israel to crush the nationalist aspirations of the natives which, if they were to flourish, would impede US profit making in a strategically significant region. The relationship is symbiotic.
The Israel lobby, which largely focusses on electoral contests and the shaping of public opinion in favor of Israel, is part of the US foreign policy establishment, and the US foreign policy establishment is part of the Israel lobby. The two networks overlap because the interests of Israel as a settler colonial state and the interests of Wall Street as an implacable opponent of foreign nationalism, intersect, not because Zionist Jews and Christian Zionists have hijacked the foreign policy establishment and turned the US government into an instrument of Israel against the interests of the United States. What Mearsheimer and Walt fail to grasp is that the interests of the two countries are not inimical; that Israel’s settler colonial interests and the profit-making and strategic goals of Wall Street, in large measure, complement each other. Israel is the tool of the United States, and the United States, as the guarantor of Israel’s survival, is the tool of Israel. The relationship between the two states is not, for the most part antagonistic, and is largely symbiotic and complementary.
Why then does the lobby exist? It exists, not to capture the apparatus of the state, which is already dominated by Wall Street interests which see US support for Israel as favorable to the goal of protecting US profit-making interests in the Middle East. The lobby exists, instead, to shape public opinion, media coverage, intellectual discourse, and the research agendas and curricula of the universities and schools, to favor Israel and, where public opinion cannot be manipulated to Israel’s advantage, to discourage elected representatives from responding to public opinion by backing legislation or government actions that could interfere with Washington’s accustomed support of its Israeli client. The lobby, as Shoup points out, is largely focused on electoral contests, not on twisting the arms of the unelected Wall Street-connected personnel who occupy the consequential foreign policy roles in the state—the secretaries of state, defense, treasury, director of national intelligence, chief of the CIA, and UN ambassador, and their phalanx of deputies and undersecretaries. The role of the Israel lobby is, in short, to persuade US society and its elected representatives to accept US support of a client in the Middle East whose conduct is likely to inflame public opinion against it.
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