The war of the enslaved against their enslavers [is] the only justifiable war in history. – Karl Marx, The Civil War in France
The journalist Max Blumental, who edits the GRAYZONE, posted a video of former US chairman of the joint chiefs Mark Milley cataloguing, in a maladroit effort to justify Israeli atrocities in Gaza, US campaigns in which civilians were slaughtered in numbers matching or exceeding the Israeli-engineered, US-arms-supplied, Washington-approved, genocide in Gaza.
“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.”
“War is a terrible thing,” he added.
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."
Unlike Milley, I don’t condone the killing of innocent civilians, including those killed by Hamas.
But this invites the question: Which civilians are innocent and which are not? Anyone incapable of fighting—children, the aged, the ill—must be considered innocent. Civilians who take up arms and thus become combatants, are not innocent. In a war of oppressors against the oppressed, are civilians who knowingly participate in, benefit from, or approve of oppression, innocent? Is a settler innocent?
We might ask too about how the US and Israeli goals in war compare with those of the Palestinian resistance.
The US goal is to impose the will of the US economic elite on other people so that the global economic order remains tilted in favor of US investors, billionaires, and corporations. Today, the United States overtly prepares for a war of aggression against China, openly acknowledging the reason: Because the East Asian giant, by its size and rapid economic development, threatens to disrupt the US-at-the-top global economic order and topple the US corporate class from its commanding position at the apex.
The Israeli goal is to impose the will of the self-appointed leaders of an ethno-religious group, Jews, on Arabs in the Levant.
The goal of the Palestinian resistance, by contrast, is to liberate Palestinians from the ethno-religious oppression of a racist Zionism that is backed by Washington and which uses Israel as its instrument to pursue US economic and strategic goals in West Asia and North Africa against the interests of the local populations.
By his words, Milley implies that US and Israeli wars are just, and that the killing of civilians in these wars is therefore acceptable. By contrast, his words suggest that the armed action of the Palestinian resistance is unjust and that the killing of civilians in pursuit of liberation is therefore horrible, brutal, and vicious. Twelve hundred people killed in a Hamas attack is flagitious and intolerable in Milley’s view, but tens of thousands of people, mostly women and children, slaughtered in a demented, openly genocidal Israeli campaign, is, in Milley’s view, just the regrettable reality of war.
Milley defends the consequences of US and Israeli aggressions by describing war as horrible, brutal, and vicious. In Milley’s words, US pilots don’t drop bombs and Israeli soldiers don’t fire US-supplied artillery shells; instead, civilians are slaughtered in sickening numbers by an impersonal thing called war. On the other hand, Israeli civilians are killed by a very personal thing called Hamas.
Milley’s tacit assertion that US and Israeli wars are just—wars which are, au fond, motivated by goals of exploitation and oppression—speaks volumes about what the Washington elite believes, as does the retired general’s implied condemnation of the war for liberation that lies at the center of the Palestinian resistance; a war of the enslaved against their enslavers.
In the world of the US ruling class, when Hamas does it, killing civilians is horrible, wicked, and intolerable, but when the US and Israel do it—producing civilian corpses in numbers vastly greater than any Hamas could ever come close to even remotely matching—it’s just the inevitable, yes, terrible, but all the same, excusable, consequence of war.
In the US view, then, killing many civilians in an unjust war is perfectly alright, even if horrible. On the other hand, killing comparatively few civilians in a just war is intolerable.
Given that Milley, not alone in the US-Israeli establishment, is willing to tolerate civilian deaths in massive numbers as, what he characterizes as, the regrettable but acceptable consequence of war, one can only conclude that what really bothers him and his fellow worshippers of Mars in the service of economic and ethno-religious elites, is not the killing of Israeli civilians by Hamas on October 7, but the reality that the enslaved Palestinians rose against their Israeli enslavers.
Paris is trying to shut down the anti-genocide campaign of the French political party, la France insoumise, by criminalizing it as antisemitic, pro-terrorist, and pro-Hamas. Prosecutors are investigating a number of the statements made by party leaders, including this blandly factual description: “The armed offensive by Palestinian forces led by Hamas comes in a context of intensification of Israeli occupation policy in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.” The alleged crime in the party’s statement is its description of the October 7 attacks as an armed offensive rather than presumably, as a vile, reprehensible act of terror; description in lieu of denunciation has become verboten; failure to endorse the moral evaluations of established authority will be punished.
France’s tradition of resistance to occupation lives on, it seems, only in la France insoumise, and not in the current government. The orientation of bien pensant France appears to be more faithful to the Vichy tradition of complicity with an occupier. Inasmuch as France deplores the right of the occupied to use violence to resist their occupation (as the French did against Nazi occupiers in World War II), it condones the Israeli occupation and apartheid of which the armed offensive of Hamas is but the response. Describing the Hamas attack as an armed offensive in no way condones the killing of unarmed civilians, or their abduction, or even points to the right of the occupied to use violence to end their occupation. All the same, the right does exist. In my opinion, the right is not an unlimited one; the oppressed haven’t the right to use violence in any way they please. But the use of violence by the oppressed against those who oppress them is just. Whoever acts to pacify the slave, or impedes those who arouse him against his oppression, aids the slave-master.
France, as well as Germany, claim that their respective roles in the Holocaust obligate their support for Israel as atonement for past sins. This rests on an invalid idea: That because the Germans visited a holocaust on the Jews who were living on land in Eastern Europe that Germany coveted, that Zionists should be supported in visiting a holocaust on the Palestinians who live on land Zionists covet. In other words, we will atone for our own crimes, say Paris and Bonn, by supporting the self-appointed leaders of the people we harmed to inflict the same harm upon another people. This isn’t atonement for a crime; it is the universalization of it; its redux.
French and German efforts to shut down support in their own countries for protests against Israeli apartheid and genocide, and efforts in the United States to punish students for participating in campus protests, as well as to produce legislation to gag critics of Israel by defining anti-Zionism as antisemitism, reveal a truth about free speech: it’s a myth. Free speech is tolerated, indeed, welcomed and boasted about, but only when it doesn’t challenge the established order, or does, but has limited reach. Speech which threatens to mobilize people against an order that favors those in power is almost always, and everywhere, prohibited, energetically discouraged, and punished. Often, verboten subjects are presented as that part of free speech that isn’t absolute, or as an abuse, where abuse, not expressed as such but implied all the same, means saying something that threatens to mobilize people against those who oppress and exploit. So it is that criticism of Zionism must be squelched by the enablers of Zionist crimes because too many people are rallying to oppose them; so it is that this speech must be calumniated as criminal and an abuse of the norms of free expression.
“One of Brown University’s major donors, the billionaire real estate mogul Barry Sternlicht” has “sharply criticized the school’s agreement to hold a board vote on cutting investments tied to Israel.” The decision is “unconscionable” he says, and he has “paused” donations to the school, as a means of discouraging further outbreaks of advocacy he and his fellow Zionists despise. Sternlicht has invoked a tu quoque (you, as well) defense of Israel’s genocidal conduct. The moneybag’s argument takes the following form: The United States has slaughtered many more people in war than Israel has. If the United States can engage in wanton slaughter, then so too can Israel. Moreover, he asks, where were the protests against the hundreds of thousands of civilians killed in wars in Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq? Tu quoque arguments are logically invalid, and so I will address this aspect of Sternlicht’s argument no further. There were indeed protests against the wars he cites; perhaps the real-estate mogul was too busy accumulating his billions to notice. However, it must be conceded that protests against the wars that the United States visibly and directly led were not generally as large or sustained as the current broad grassroots campaign against Israel’s genocide. This might be because US officials in recent US wars, unlike Israeli officials, soldiers, and citizens in their current war on Gaza, never expressed the intention or desire to exterminate a people. But there may be another reason, too. Radicals can generally be expected to be as fervent in their opposition to US wars as those of Israel, but is this true of non-radicals? Are they more likely to see their own country than others as, au fond, morally decent?
The idea that the United States, Germany, France and other US allies are not themselves directly implicated in the horrors perpetrated by Israel against the Palestinians is another myth. The Wall Street Journal recently warned that an Israeli attack on Rafah could further impair Tel Aviv’s relationship with the United States government. Further impair? In what way has it been impaired at all? Washington recently approved $26 billion in Israeli military aid (on top of regular annual contributions of $3.8 billion), and remains indefatigable in pledging ironclad support, despite Israel’s enforcement of apartheid in Palestine and pursuit of genocide against the Palestinians, despite settler pogroms against Palestinians in the West Bank, and despite a policy of starvation, destruction, and extermination in Gaza. The idea that the US-Israeli relationship has been impaired by Israeli atrocities is a myth, conjured, it would seem, to shield US citizens from the reality that their government is as much implicated in apartheid and genocide as is its Zionist protege. To paraphrase the iconic Palestinian revolutionary, Leila Khaled, the United States is Israel, and Israel is the United States in Palestine. The notion that the Zionist State is tarnishing the moral standing of its US patron, and that the malignant conduct of Tel Aviv is trying Joe Biden’s patience, is a fairy-tale manufactured to exculpate Washington for its contribution to efforts to erase the Palestinians.
Washington stands behind the war on Palestinians as much as it stood behind wars on Iraqis, Afghans, and Syrians. It ought to be opposed, criticized, and demonstrated against in measures equal to the opposition and criticism of Israel. Genocide Joe is as apt an epithet as Genocide Bibi, just as much as Genocide USA (and Genocide Germany, France, Britain, Canada, etc.) is as apt an epithet as Genocide Israel.
Yesterday, the House of Representatives voted to pass the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which would require the Education Department to use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism when enforcing federal antidiscrimination laws.
The IHRA defines the following as an example of “antisemitism in public life”: “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.”
In connection with this, it should be noted that, “the Jewish people” do not have a right to self-determination senior to, or negating, the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination on the historic territory of the Palestinians.
Israel, exercising de facto control over the traditional territory of the Palestinians from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, by the force of arms largely supplied by the United States and Germany, is an apartheid, racist, state, which enforces Jewish supremacy over the native Palestinian population. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem, and other human rights organization have characterized Israel as an apartheid state.
Political Zionism, which elevates the interests of Jewish settlers above those of Palestinian natives in historic Palestine, is a racist doctrine.
Political Zionism, Israel, and the settler colonial project in the Levant, are the instruments of great powers, and most especially, since 1967, the United States. They could not exist without Washington’s ironclad support. In return, they help keep Arab and Muslim nationalist forces in check in order to safeguard US domination of West Asia and its petroleum resources and key energy supply routes.
The IHRA does not deny that the State of Israel is a racist endeavor; it only seeks to discredit those who say it is, by labelling them antisemites.
The IHRA is far from a neutral organization. It is a political animal which represents the combined interests of the United States and its key allies, and their client, Israel, whose aim it is to police criticism of Israel and the US-backed settler colonial project in the Levant under the guise of combatting anti-Jewish racism and promoting remembrance of the Holocaust.
The IHRA and its supporters are keen to foster remembrance of the anti-Jewish genocide and are equally keen to suppress opposition to what the International Court of Justice has judged to be the plausible possibility of an Israeli-perpetrated genocide in progress against the Palestinians.
Whether the Israeli military assault on Palestinians in Gaza, on civilian infrastructure, and efforts to starve the population, along with the pogroms against Palestinians in the West Bank, rise to the ICJ definition of genocide, it is clear that key Israeli decision-makers and Israeli soldiers have expressed genocidal intent and that the Israeli military campaign in Gaza is undeniably one of massacre.
The IHRA lists many examples of what it says is antisemitism but the list is open; the organization says there are other examples, which it does not enumerate. This allows the definition to expand in order to traduce critics of Israel and political Zionism’s racist settler colonial project as circumstances demand. Doubtlessly, the IHRA definition will be used, and probably already has been, to define the designation of Israel as a state plausibly carrying out a genocide as an act of anti-Jewish hatred.
Apart from the problem of the IHRA definition’s manifest political intent to intimidate critics of Israel into silence, is its logical flaw. The definition illegitimately conflates Jews and Judaism with Israelis and Israel—not all Jews are Israeli, and many Jews reject any identification with the state—so that criticism of the Zionist project is dishonestly equated to hatred of Jews. The description of Germany from 1933 to 1945 as a racist, imperialist, state, bent on genocide, hardly amounts to hate speech against Germans. By the same principle, the description of Israel as a racist endeavor, carrying out a plausible genocide against a people it has been trying to erase since 1948, is not hate speech against Jews; it is criticism of Israel and its racist project.
Israeli officials employ the legerdemain favored by the IHRA to shelter the state from criticism and opposition. Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, for example, is apt to defend every Israeli crime by labelling opposition to them as an assault on “the world’s one and only Jewish state”, as if criticizing Israel for a plausible genocide, or its apartheid, amounts to criticism of Jews as a people. Zionists would dearly love to be the spokespersons of the Jewish people, but the position is a self-appointed one, and the United States and Israel’s other patrons participate in the deception. Just as the Nazis appointed themselves as spokespeople for the Germans, over the opposition, it might be noted, of many million Germans, so too do the Israeli clients of the United States affect to be the spokespeople for the Jews (over the opposition of many Jews.).
Sadly, the frequent abuse of the word “antisemitism” for the political gain of Israel and its great power patrons, debases efforts to combat genuine anti-Jewish hatred. Stretch a definition too far, and it becomes meaningless. Still, in their zeal to defend settler colonialism in the stolen country of the Palestinians, the Zionists and their great power patrons will stop at nothing, including turning the concept of antisemitism into a politicized slur. In so doing, they impede sincere efforts to combat genuine antisemitism.
This, however, is consistent with the fundamentally antisemitic character of Zionism, a doctrine which:
a) denigrates the fight against antisemitism as pointless, since, in the Zionists’ view, hatred of Jews is ineradicable;
b) promotes the view that to secure themselves against the ineradicable antisemitism of non-Jews, Jews must emigrate from the countries in which they now live to take up residence in the Jewish state erected on the stolen land of the Palestinians;
c) defines Jews as members of a nation, rather than followers of a religion.
Points (b) and (c) are consonant with the antisemites’ belief that Jews are aliens, a nation within the nation, who must emigrate from the lands in which they live.
Thus, apart from the racism inherent in Zionism as a doctrine of Jewish supremacism in the stolen country of the Palestinians, Zionism also rejects the project of combating antisemitism and shares with antisemites their core beliefs.
In the context of the October 7 Hamas attacks and Israel’s response to them, the statements: “Israel has a right to defend itself” and “Palestinians have a right to resist” are shibboleths that conceal an unstated suffix: “By any means necessary.”
Those who say “Israel has a right to defend itself” mean to say that Israel has a right to reply to the Hamas attacks in a manner of its own choosing, unrestrained by international humanitarian law, and that it ought to be able to do so free from the censure of outside parties.
They may also mean that Israel has a right to exist as an ethno-religious state, that it has national rights, and that its national rights are superior to those of Palestinians, whose own rights must give way to those of Zionist Jews.
What’s more, lurking within demands to acknowledge Israel’s right to defend itself is a threat: fail to do so and live with the ignominy of being branded an anti-Semite.
Likewise, the expression in connection with the October 7 attacks of solidarity with the Palestinian people conveys an implicit message: The Palestinians have a right to conduct their struggle by any means necessary and that the October 7 attacks are therefore just and ought to be free from censure.
In this, the stance of many supporters of the Palestinians parallels the position of many supporters of Israel.
The parallel shibboleths of both groups reduce the question of jus in bello (is a war conducted justly?) to the question of jus ad bellum (is the reason for the war just?) Both sides argue implicitly that as their side’s part in the war is just, their side’s conduct of the war must also be just (and that the other side’s is unjust). This, however, is an non sequitur. Whether a war is just has no bearing on the question of whether it is pursued in a just way. Similarly, whether a war is conducted in a just way tells us nothing about whether it is undertaken for just reasons.
By confusing justice in war with the justness of a war, supporters of the two sides evade tough questions, or recoil in fear from asking them. If we can be accused of anti-Semitism for refusing to concede Israel’s declared right to defend itself, we can also be accused of supporting Israel, or denying the justness of the Palestinian struggle, for criticizing Hamas.
Was Hamas’s decision to undertake a war [1] it hasn’t the slightest hope of winning, and for which Palestinian civilians will bear the brunt, defensible on either strategic or moral grounds? It was obvious that Hamas’s October 7 attack would inevitably elicit a typically disproportionate Israeli reply that would kill many Palestinian civilians, injure many more, destroy homes, schools, healthcare facilities, and other civilian infrastructure, and degrade the conditions of life in Gaza even beyond their already abysmally low level. The pattern of Hamas attacks followed by overwhelming Israel retaliation and significant damage to Palestinian civilians and infrastructure is well established. Hamas had an obligation to ensure that the enormous cost its actions would ultimately visit upon Gazans—who had no say in the matter of their bearing these costs—were likely to be preponderated by the gain. Did it meet that obligation?
What’s more, does a shared opposition with Hamas to Israel obligate any of us to defend Hamas’s actions no matter what they are? And to what extent do the reasons for our opposition overlap those of Hamas? Being against the same thing doesn’t mean being for the same thing. Various groups are against the oppression of Palestinians, but have very different views about how to bring about oppression’s end, and what the end of oppression looks like. Likewise, the non-Zionist Left may share with Zionists an antipathy to anti-Semitism, but that doesn’t mean they have the same vision of how to achieve a world free from it.
On the Israeli side, how can Israel be a haven for Jews, when the conduct and very nature of it, as an apparatus of Jewish primacy and subordination of Palestinians, promotes Palestinian violence against Israeli citizens? Marx’s observations about the Indian Revolt of 1857 applies just as strongly to the October 7 Hamas revolt. He said that while the conduct of the Indian rebels was repugnant and unspeakable, it was the reflex, in concentrated form ,of Britain’s own conduct in India. Likewise, the infamous and ineffable conduct of Hamas is the reflex of the Zionists’ own repugnant and unspeakable conduct in Palestine. If Hamas lashes out violently against Jewish residents of Israel, it does so, not because the residents are Jews, but because they accept, tolerate, and defend an ethno-religious hierarchy that subordinates the lives, safety, and wellbeing of Palestinians to that of Jews.
As a matter of reality, and not right, anyone who is complicit in, or accepting of, an injury to others, may become the object of retaliation by the injured party. Israeli Jews are vulnerable to attack by some Palestinians, not because they’re Jews, but because they participate in a project of Jewish primacy and Palestinian subordination.
There are important questions that are little examined in these parallel shibboleths.
For example, what is a right, and where does it come from? Is the concept of right simply a way of justifying conduct whose origin lies, not in considerations of justice, but in self-, class-, or national-interest? Is saying Israel has a right to exist no more than saying we should accept Israel’s assertion of Jewish primacy and its subordination of Palestinians? Is saying that Palestinians have a right to resist no more than a demand that we accept, if not celebrate, all Palestinian actions in the name of resistance, even those that are fatuous or infamous?
What cause is being defended when we say we’re showing solidarity with the Palestinian people? Palestinians are not a monolith; Hamas does not equal the Palestinian people. For which Palestinians and which Palestinian cause are we expressing support? Hamas represents only one of many, conflicting, Palestinian visions. Are we expressing support for the creation of an ethnic Palestinian state (one of Palestinian primacy and Jewish subordination) alongside an ethnic Jewish state? Does the ethnic supremacy of one state balance the ethnic supremacy of another, making ethnic supremacy somehow acceptable? Or are we supporting a single liberal democratic state, in which all people are equal and none have primacy and none are subordinate? Is an Islamic state from the river to the sea, where Islam has primacy and Jews are expelled, our vision?
The best way for Israelis to defend themselves is by working out a modus vivende with Palestinians, in good faith, rather than continuing to subject Palestinians to infamous and ineffable injuries with the inevitable consequence of infamous and ineffable responses such as the one that materialized on October 7.
But the reality is that Israel doesn’t have to work out a modus vivende with Palestinians and so doesn’t. It is far stronger than its Palestinian opponents, largely because it has the unqualified support of the United States and other members of the G7 and can readily limit whatever dangers Palestinian recalcitrance presents. There is little reason for Israel to make concessions. Demosthenes observed that “all men have their rights conceded to them in the proportion to the power at their disposal.” Palestinians have little power at their disposal, and so their rights are not conceded to them. In a similar vein, Thucydides noted that “Right is in question only between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” Israel, far stronger than the Palestinians, does what it can and the Palestinians, far weaker than Israel, suffer what they must.
In 1973, Louis Eaks interviewed the historian Arnold Toynbee on the Palestinian question [2]. 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?”
There are three points in the Eaks-Toynbee exchange that are worth highlighting. The first is that what was once recognized as the just solution to the Palestinian question, and was favored by the Palestinian resistance itself, was damned to oblivion by (a) the argument that it was politically unworkable and (b) the accompanying fiction that a two-state arrangement was a pragmatic, if a less morally acceptable, alternative. What the two-state proposal has turned out to be is a false promise, which no one intends to keep, whose purpose is to pacify the Palestinians while a regime of Jewish primacy slowly engulfs that remainder of Palestinian territory that Israel has not already taken by force. It is a false sop thrown to Palestinians while the Zionist project is pursued to completion, much beloved by the Machiavels who pay lip service to it and the simpletons who accept it.
The second point is that of the four major proposals for the resolution of the Palestinian question, only one addresses the concerns of all parties to the conflict, with the exception of the demands of religious fanatics [3], and therefore only one has any realistic chance of success.
The four major proposals are:
A nation of Jews. Jewish primacy and Palestinian subordination or expulsion.
A nation of Palestinians. Palestinian primacy and Jewish subordination or expulsion.
A nation of Jews side by side with a nation of Palestinians. Jewish primacy and Palestinian subordination on at least three-quarters of historic Palestine and Palestinian primacy and Jewish subordination or expulsion on the remaining one-quarter.
A nation of all its citizens (not a nation of Jews or a nation of Palestinians.) A liberal democratic state in all of historic Palestine, with equality for all regardless of ethnicity, religion, or nation, and the guarantee of minority rights.
Proposal one ignores the Palestinians and proposal two ignores the concern of Jews that credible and sound safeguards exist to protect them from the recrudescence of violence and persecution that has historically plagued their community in Europe (the motive foundation of Israel and the Zionist project.) Proposal three is blatantly unfair to the Palestinians, and therefore has little chance of resolving Palestinian antagonism and Israel’s oppressive response to it.
Proposal three is often accompanied by the demand for the return of Palestinian refugees to the territory from which they or their ancestors fled or were driven and were not allowed by Israel to return. The return of refugees would create a Palestinian majority in Israel, that is, an Arab majority in a Jewish state. The paradox of a Jewish state with an Arab majority would have to be addressed in one of two ways: The Arab majority would be denied suffrage, to maintain the Jewish character of the state; or the returned Arab refugees would be granted suffrage, in which case the state would no longer be Jewish but a state of all its citizens (proposal four). There would, therefore, exist a liberal democratic state on the bulk of historical Palestinian territory, and a small ethnic Arab Palestinian state on the remaining territory. Were Arabs denied suffrage, their antagonism would continue and nothing would be resolved. Alternatively, suffrage for returned Arab refugees would make option three more or less the same as option four. It’s not clear why anyone would propose option three together with the return of the refugees since this would either result in the intensification of conflict if the Arab majority was denied suffrage or it would mean a democratic state if the majority was granted suffrage. Since proposal three has no hope of securing civic harmony unless it evolves into a democratic state by the granting of suffrage to returned refugees, why not simply promote proposal four as the more elegant and certain solution?
Proposal four, a nation of all its citizens, addresses the aspirations of all people, both Jews and Arabs, settlers and indigenous, for freedom from ethnic, national, and religious oppression, persecution, and inequality. It would lead to a significant improvement in the lives of Arabs and guarantees for Jews of equality and freedom from persecution. Because this proposal addresses the concerns of both sides, and the others favor one side over the other, it has the greatest probability of success. That doesn’t mean its success is guaranteed, only that its chance of success is greater than that of its rival proposals. The idea that a two-state arrangement is the only realistic proposal is a myth.
The two-state formula depends on demographic engineering. The goal is to provide political rights only within territory in which the favored ethnic group comprises a majority. If one ethnic group can, through its superior numbers, outvote all others, the favored ethnic group has political primacy, despite the presence of democratic institutions. Various manoeuvres must therefore be undertaken to secure a majority for the favored ethnic group if its primacy is to flourish within a democratic framework. Ensuring that a rump Arab state, covering, at best, one-quarter of historic Palestine, contains a majority of Arabs, presents no obstacle, since Palestinians (residing in historic Palestine or outside as refugees) preponderate Jewish residents. While Israel controls all of historic Palestine, and, in its annexation of the Golan Heights, a part of Syria, Jews are not a majority in all the territory it controls. So, through a sleight of hand, it arbitrarily declares only those parts of historic Palestine in which Jews constitute a majority to be Israel. It can thus be at once a democratic and a Jewish majority state. But were democratic institutions to be extended to all the territory Israel controls—Gaza, the West Bank, Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights—Arabs would comprise a slight majority. But if Palestinian refugees and their descendants were allowed to return to the territories from which they were expelled, Arabs would comprise a firm majority. Would they use their majority against the Jewish community? Not in a liberal democracy. The liberal part of liberal democracy, means that minority rights are guaranteed against the tyranny of the majority. It can be rejoined that Israel’s own liberal democracy has failed in many ways to protect the Palestinian citizens of Israel, who comprise a minority population; that protections against the tyranny of the majority are fine and well until the majority dissolves them. Yet it would be going to too far to describe Israel, an ethno-state, as a liberal democracy. The majority’s encroaching on the rights of minorities, despite minority protections, appears to be more a phenomenon of a de facto ethnic state masquerading as a liberal democracy than a nation of all its citizens. Israel, it has been pointed out sardonically, is a liberal democratic state for Jews, and a Jewish state for its Arab citizens. Proposal four seeks to avoid this weakness by making a unitary state covering all of historic Palestine as a civic, as opposed to ethnic, nation, that is, a state of all its citizens, not a liberal democracy for Jews and a Jewish state for the rest alongside a rump-Arab state, as the two-state formula envisages.
Earlier, it was noted that inasmuch as the motive foundation of Israel and the Zionist project is to protect Jews from anti-Semitism, that any proposed alternative to the project must establish credible and sound protections for Jews against the recrudescence of violence and persecution that have historically plagued their community, if the proposal is to be acceptable to them. This must be realized, not only in the establishment of a liberal democratic state in all of historic Palestine, with guaranteed minority rights, but also in the advance of liberal democratic values and minority protections throughout the world. Jews must feel safe and comfortable everywhere. The reality that more Jews choose to live outside Israel than within, and mainly in liberal democratic societies, is testament to the power of liberal democratic institutions as safeguards against anti-Jewish persecution and violence. Jews are the most successful minority population in the United States, and are more secure there, than are Jews who live in Israel, who must rely on an iron wall as protection against the Palestinian population whose oppression is the sine-qua-non of Jewish primacy in Israel.
This may be true, reply diaspora Zionist Jews, from the safety of the liberal democracies in which they choose to live, but Israel stands as a haven (a kind of back-up plan) to which we may flee, in the event our countries are envenomed by the recrudescence of a Nazi-like anti-Jewish terrorism. This is pure delusion. Israel would collapse within a week without the massive military, economic, and diplomatic support it depends on from the United States and its allies. And what would be one of the first acts of these countries were they to turn to a feared methodical anti-Semitism? Terminate their support for the self-proclaimed Jewish state. The supposed haven for Jews would quickly disappear. The reality is that Israel is no haven for Jews; it’s an instrument of US foreign policy in the Arab world which uses Jews against Arabs.
The third point is that the better alternative of a unitary democratic state, in which all peoples are equal, and none are subordinate to the other, can only become a possibility if the gross disparity in power between the G7-backed Israelis and the Palestinians is redressed. It can be redressed only by citizens of the G7 demanding the projection of liberal democratic values into the Palestinian question, in lieu of the current promotion of the illiberal and undemocratic value that supports an ethnic state of Jewish primacy and Palestinian subordination, and holds out the false hope of creating an ethnic state of Palestinian primacy and Jewish subordination as its complement. The two-state formula not only tolerates Zionist racism, it proposes Palestinian racism as the antidote, as if, to paraphrase Fred Hampton, the better way to fight fire is not with water, but with more fire.
The fantasy, that some will indubitably entertain, that the power imbalance can be rectified by the emergence of a multipolar world, is sheer naivete. Russia and China are not going to enroll as champions of the Palestinians, largely because they are too many realpolitik advantages in staying on good terms with the Israelis, and because states look after their own interests, not those of other peoples. The two US rivals are no more inclined to become paladins of the weak, dispossessed, and wronged, than is their chief competitor.
In light of this, the appropriate shibboleths are “equality for all, regardless of race, culture, or religion” and “a civic nation and state of all its citizens from the river to the sea.” Since what happens in historic Palestine largely depends on what the US-led G7 allows to happen, bringing to flower the best in the Western tradition (equality) and eradicating the worst (colonialism and ethno-religious hierarchy) will depend on the exponents of equality pressuring their governments to abominate the project of Jewish primacy and Palestinian subordination and live up to their declared liberal democratic values.
The best way to show solidarity with the aspirations of Palestinians for equality and Jews for freedom from persecution is to demand a liberal democracy of universal equality in all of historic Palestine, or, in broader terms, working for the universalization of equality throughout the world and an end to the division of humanity by nation and class.
[1] War is defined here as the overt use of major violence. The Hamas-Israel War can be defined as an ongoing conflict, characterized by the more or less continuous use of low-level violence, punctuated by periods of major violence, or as a series of wars in which each war is defined as a period of major violence within a larger ongoing conflict. The October 7 attacks marked the beginning of a new round of major violence in the ongoing conflict, or a new war in a series of inter-related wars
[2] Arnold Toynbee and Louis Eaks “Arnold Toynbee on the Arab-Israeli Conflict,” Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 2, No. 3 (Spring, 1973), pp. 3-13).
[3] These include (a) Jews who believe that a supernatural being gave all of Palestine to a group of people called the Jews and that this being’s will must be realized; (b) Muslims who believe that all territory conquered in the Muslim expansion must be governed by the Quran; and (c) evangelical Christians who believe that a Jewish conquest of all of Palestine is necessary to bring about the return of Jesus.
Freedom does not consist in the dream of independence of natural law, but in the knowledge of these laws, and in the possibility this gives of systematically making them work towards definite ends. Friedrich Engels, Anti-Duhring, 1877.
June 26, 2021
Stephen Gowans
The United States dominates the Arab and Muslim worlds. This is a fairly uncontroversial statement. What’s less uncontroversial is the reason why.
US domination of West Asia is often understood to be related to Washington’s need to secure its energy supplies, but the United States has always been one of the world’s top producers of oil and natural gas, and often the top producer, which has allowed the country to be either energy self-sufficient, or close to it, and when it hasn’t been self-sufficient, it has relied on energy imports from Canada and Mexico to top up its energy supply more than it has relied on West Asia. The idea, then, that the United States needs access to Arab oil to satisfy its energy requirements is a myth.
The US domination of the Arab world has always been an outcome, not of a quest for energy security, but for oil profits, and for the geostrategic advantage that comes from control of a source of oil on which many other countries depend.
China, Germany, and Japan, the United States’ top economic competitors, depend on oil from the Arab and Muslim worlds. By controlling this region and the maritime shipping and pipeline routes through which the region’s oil travels to its markets in Europe and East Asia, Washington gains enormous leverage over its economic rivals. If any of these countries steps too far out of line, Washington can close the spigot. The dictum of Henry Kissinger, a former US secretary of state and national security advisor, was: Control oil and you control nations.
Expansionary Compulsion
It is the nature of profit-making enterprises that they incessantly look for new business opportunities, to enter new markets and sell more goods and services—in short, to generate more profit. They look to their governments for aid in securing and protecting these opportunities, both at home and abroad. Because business people as a class have enormous sway over governments, the aid is routinely given.
Capitalist expansion often leads to conflict among governments acting on behalf of their profit-driven, perpetually expansion-seeking, business class.
The first is the conflict between competing states to secure profit-making opportunities for their own business people and, if they can, to deny the same opportunities to the business people of other nations.
Conflict among countries for profit-making opportunities led to the First and Second World Wars, but since the end of WWII, and the rise of the United States as an informal world empire, conflict of this sort has been contained. Washington has absorbed its rivals into an economic order that regulates conflict among rival capitalisms according to rules the United States has established. The rules ultimately serve US interests. The Pentagon acts as the ultima ratio regnum of the “rules-based” system.
However, the conflict is regulated only so far as rivals remain within the system. When they step outside its bounds, the conflict becomes less restrained. This can be seen today in the rivalry between the United States, the system’s architect and superintendent, and China, which has reached a point in its economic development where the constraints of the system have become fetters on its further development. While Washington attributes its hostility to China to the East Asian giant’s “autocracy”, the origins of its animus lie, in point of fact, in the threat Chinese enterprises pose to the ability of US firms to dominate the industries of tomorrow: among them 5G, artificial intelligence, robotics, and quantum computing.
“President Biden portrays U.S. relations with China as a clash of values: democracy vs. autocracy. But his …goal is to stay ahead of China in semiconductors, artificial intelligence and other advances that are expected to define the economy and military of the future.”
The second kind of conflict arises when people who live on the territories in which profit making opportunities are present, say they want to set the terms of access to their labor, markets, and resources, or monopolize access, locking out or restricting foreign investment and trade.
Conflicts of this ilk have arisen, for example, when an oil industry, owned by foreign firms, has been nationalized, and the foreign firms’ government objects and takes measures to reverse the nationalization. This was done in Iran in the 1950s, by the United States and Britain, which organized a coup d’état against the elected government, in order to recover British oil assets. Also, in the 1950s, Britain and France sought to recover the Suez Canal, which had been nationalized by the Arab nationalist government of Egypt under the leadership of Gamal Abdel Nasser, by arranging for Israel to attack its neighbor.
Israel was envisaged by the secular Jews who undertook the project of building a Jewish state, that it would be a state that acted as an instrument of a sponsoring great power (or powers), which would be used to quell the resistance of Arabs to assaults on their sovereignty. Israel’s role would be to overcome the Arabs’ resistance to Western domination and the plunder of their markets, labor, and resources—a domination that would eventually be related to achieving the principal US aim of controlling Arab oil.
Arab oil was seen, in the words of a US State Department official, as a stupendous economic and strategic prize. It was regarded as an economic prize, because a lot of money could be made selling it. And it was viewed as a strategic prize, because whoever controlled it, effectively controlled the countries that were dependent on it.
Political Zionism as a Tool of Empire
Theodore Herzl, an Austrian journalist, pioneered political Zionism, the movement to enlist the help of a European power to build a Jewish state in Palestine. In return, Herzl proposed the Jewish state would look after the interests of its sponsor in the Arab world. Israel’s attack on Egypt in an effort to recover the Suez Canal for Britain and France, was precisely the kind of role Herzl envisaged for the Jewish state.
Acting as the West’s lieutenant in the Arab world would mean that, if the Arabs should seek to use their resources for their own development, on their own terms, that the Jewish state would see to it that they acquiesced to the use of their resources for the enrichment of investors represented by the Jewish state’s sponsors. The Zionist Jews would rent themselves out as an army to whichever European colonial power would back them, and the army would act as the guarantor of the colonial power’s economic interests against the interests of the Arabs.
Herzl said the Jewish state would be a “link in Europe’s rampart against Asia,” and “an outpost of civilization against barbarism” (barbarism being his word for the Arab world.) In this tradition, Moshe Dayan, who held several key posts in the Israeli government is reputed to have said that the “Jewish people has a mission, especially its Israeli branch. In this part of the world, it has to be a rock, an extension of the West, against which the waves of…Arab nationalism will be broken.” In this vein, Benjamin Netanyahu has written that Israel is the West’s outpost in the Middle East.
Arab nationalist leaders have seen the role of Israel in exactly the same light: as an instrument of the United States against the Arabs. Saddam Hussein called Israel a club the United States uses against the Arab world. Nasser, whose name became an eponym of Arab nationalism, described Israel as a poisoned dagger implanted in the heart of the Arab nation. Leila Khaled, the Palestinian revolutionary, called Israel “America and Europe combined in Palestine”, i.e., the face of the West in the Levant, or as Netanyahu wrote, a Western outpost in the Arab world.
The Empire of Liberty
Since 1967, the United States has been the Jewish settler state’s principal sponsor. It shares with Israel two important characteristics: both are European settler states, and both were founded on the belief that they had a mission from God to evict the natives and take their land.
The United States is also an informal or undeclared empire. Current US practice is to avoid the use of the word “empire” or “imperialist” to refer to the country. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, wrote a book, The Grand Chessboard, in which he drew from a deep well of synonyms for empire to describe the United States, but avoided the E word.
However, concealing the United States’ status as an empire hasn’t always been the norm. Thomas Jefferson referred to the United States as an empire of liberty, with a mission to spread freedom across the world, which turned out to mean, in practice, freedom for US business people to dominate the world’s profit-making opportunities wherever they existed—or for US investors to freely take whatever they wanted, aided by US soft and hard power. In the early twentieth century, US presidents openly and accurately referred to the Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, and Hawaii, as US colonies. That’s what they were, and some of these euphemistically named “territories” remain US colonies to this day.
From the moment of its birth, the empire of liberty continually pushed, if not its territorial frontiers, then its military and economic frontiers, outward, guided by various doctrines of empire: Manifest Destiny, the Monroe Doctrine, the Atlantic Charter, the Eisenhower Doctrine, the Carter Doctrine, and so on.
Always, US expansion was driven by an economic imperative: a quest, or a need, for: new land (for plantations to be worked by slaves and for the settlement of European immigrants); new markets; new investment opportunities; and territory that had strategic value, places like Hawaii, Guam, and the Philippines, that could be used to park a few battleships, to be used in the service of gunboat diplomacy to coerce other countries into opening their markets. The need was to keep US capitalism going, for without new markets, without new investment opportunities, and without access to vital raw materials that could only be obtained overseas, the US economy would sputter, stagnate, and contract. Magnates would lose their fortunes, and the lash of poverty and unemployment would turn the minds of common people to socialism and revolution, i.e., to political and economic arrangements that did’t depend on incessant expansion, with its inevitable foreign conflicts and concomitant possibility of war, to deliver a materially secure existence.
But incessant expansion means resistance. In the decades leading to WWII it meant the resistance of other expanding powers (Germany and Japan), driven by the same needs. And it also meant the resistance of local forces of independence (such as the Arab nationalist governments in Syria and Iraq, and in the 1950s and 1960s, Egypt)—local forces seeking to use their markets, resources, and investment opportunities on their own terms, for their own development.
Israel has proved helpful to the US project of overcoming the Arab nationalists. Equipped with a US-supplied armamentarium of the world’s most advanced weapons, the Jewish settler state has crushed the Arab nationalists, intimidated them, and weakened their ability to resist. The targets have included the Arabs inspired by the Arab nationalism of Nasser, the Syrians and Iraqis inspired by the Ba’ath Arab Socialist party, and, in the larger Muslim world, the resistance project of the Iranian Revolution and Hezbollah. Had these movements been allowed to pursue their nationalist agendas unopposed, corporate America’s ability to extract wealth from the Arab and Muslim worlds would have been severely compromised.
Overlapping Interests
The interests of Israel largely overlap those of the US state and this makes Israel an effective instrument of US empire. The two states, Israel and the USA, share a common enemy: the peoples of the Arab and Muslim worlds. These peoples oppose Washington, because it imposes its will on them, sometimes directly but typically indirectly, through satraps who govern at the pleasure of Washington (such as the Saud family in Arabia, other Arab monarchies, and Egypt’s military dictator); and they oppose Israel, because it has evicted Palestinians from their homes and from the Palestinians’ country, and is an ongoing threat of further expansion into Arab territory.
If the United States did not need Israel as a tool of its empire, Israel would soon meet its demise. It is a very small country, its Jewish population comprises only seven million, and it is surrounded by hundreds of millions of Arabs who disapprove of the existence of a racist Jewish settler state implanted on stolen Arab land. Without Washington providing Israel with the means to defend itself, the Zionist state would be toppled by the internal revolt of the Arabs and the invasion of Arab and Muslim nationalist armies and movements.
How does Washington guarantee the survival of a small Jewish settler state amidst a much larger population of injured, dispossessed, aggrieved, aggressed upon, Arabs and Muslims?
First, US legislation compels Washington to provide Israel with a qualitative military edge over its neighbors. The QME policy ensures that, militarily, Israel will always be at least one qualitative step ahead of its neighbors. The Jewish settler state won’t necessarily have more weapons, but it will have superior ones.
Superior weaponry has long been the means by which the Western world and its outposts, comprising one-tenth of humanity, has dominated the remaining nine-tenths. As Hilaire Beloc rhymed: “Whatever happens, we have got, the Maxim gun, and they have not.” Today, an Israeli might say: “Whatever happens, we have got, the F-35, and they have not.” Or: “Whatever happens, we have got, the atom bomb, and they have not.”
Second, the United States provides Israel with $3.8 billion in military aid annually, about equivalent to the cost of operating a carrier strike group. This aid travels from the pockets of US taxpayers to the US Treasury, onward to US arms manufacturers, and then to Israel in the form of weapons superior to those of the Jewish settler state’s neighbors.
In this relationship, there are two winners and two losers. The winners are the dividend collectors, bond holders, and stock market gamblers who have a pecuniary interest in the US arms industry and whose wealth is expanded by arms shipments to Israel. The second winner is the class of Jewish settlers in Palestine who are made more secure and better able to continue their expansion into Arab land. The losers are, first, US residents, whose pockets are picked to confer this largesse on both the US arms industry and Israel; and second, the Arabs whose land, livelihoods, future, and lives are thereby threatened. The immediate cause of the injuries Israel inflicts on the Arab and Muslim worlds is the Jewish settler state itself, but the ultimate cause is the United States, for without the support it provides Israel by delivering its qualitative military edge, Israel would not exist as a poisoned dagger aimed at the heart of the Arab and Muslim worlds.
Third, Washington runs diplomatic interference for Israel, protecting it from attempts by other members of the Security Council to issue punitive resolutions in connection with Israel’s violations of international law, of which there are many. The losers are international law and the Arabs. The winners are Israel, which can act as it will with impunity, as well as the United States, which benefits from the services Israel provides.
And finally, the Pentagon is prepared to intervene on Israel’s behalf on the slim chance that despite Israel being equipped with superior weaponry, that Israeli forces face a threat they cannot readily deter.
Israel is thus completely dependent on the good will of the United States for survival. This comports perfectly with US aims. As a dependency of the United States, Israel must do Washington’s bidding, or perish.
“Israel, a small country surrounded by adversaries and locked in conflict with the Palestinians, depends absolutely on American diplomatic and military support. By giving it, the United States safeguards Israel and wields significant leverage over its actions.”
Services to the Empire
What services are provided to the United States by Israel in return for the quid-pro-quo of US protection?
Israel has for years waged an undeclared war on Iran, the principal enemy of the US empire in the Muslim world. The New York Times calls the campaign a years-long shadow war on land, air and sea. It involves assassination, sabotage, cyberattacks, attacks on Iranian shipping, and air strikes on Iranian targets in Syria.
In Arab nationalist Syria, Israel has armed and supported anti-Syrian al-Qaeda elements that operated in the south of the country; provided air cover for ISIS’s war on the Syrian government; and conducted countless airstrikes on Syrian targets and those of Syria’s Iranian and Hezbollah allies.
In 2007, Israel deployed warplanes to destroy a nuclear reactor in the Syrian desert. The reactor was very likely intended to produce fissile material for a military nuclear program. The Israeli action was a reprise of the country’s earlier bombing of Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981. Had Israel not acted, and had these Arab nationalist states succeeded in developing nuclear deterrents against US and Israeli aggression, the Arab world would look very different today. The United States would not have invaded Iraq in 2003, and it would not have marched into Syria to set up an indefinite (and little recognized) occupation of one-third of the country.
Today there are, in Syria, three foreign occupations: A US occupation, which relies on the Kurds as the tip of the US spear; a Turk occupation; and an Israeli occupation. The Israeli occupation covers two-thirds of Syria’s smallest province. The Israelis conquered this territory in 1967, ethnically cleansed it, built Jewish settlements on it, and gave it a Jewish name: Golan. The conquest, ethnic cleansing, settlement, and imposition of a Jewish name on a part of Syrian territory, perfectly recapitulates Zionist practice in Palestine: Conquer territory by force; ethnically cleanse it; implant Jewish settlements on it; and rename it (from Palestine to Israel).
These actions are just the tip of the iceberg. For decades, Israel has either intimidated Arab nationalists into submission or inaction, or has weakened their ability to resist US domination. In return, the United States has appeared to overlook the ongoing dispossession of Palestinians and Syrians; in reality, it has welcomed it.
To be sure, the Israeli Judaization project does not benefit Washington directly, but it does aid the US imperial project by firmly binding Israel to the United States as a protégé. Israeli encroachments on Arab interests spark Arab enmity. This in turn induces Israel to look to the United States for protection, which Washington is happy to provide, in return for Israel performing services in the Arab world and beyond that benefit the United States directly, such as eliminating Iraq’s and Syria’s nuclear weapons programs. The process is self-reinforcing: The services Israel provides to Washington against Arab interests strengthen Arab animosity; growing Arab animosity strengthens Israel’s need for US protection; Israel’s growing need for US protection, strengthens its willingness to ingratiate itself with Washington by doing the empire’s bidding.
There is a solution to the problem of Palestine, that is, the problem of Jewish settlers claiming a right to the territory of the natives, and a right to evict them and to prevent their repatriation, in order to create a Jewish majority state as a haven for the world’s Jews against anti-Jewish racism. Indeed, the problem of Palestine is not the problem of Palestine at all, but the problem of political Zionism, and in a larger context, the problem of racism.
The problem of political Zionism is that its proposed solution to anti-Jewish racism is the practice of anti-Arab racism. Political Zionism is a hierarchical doctrine which elevates Jews to a position of primacy relative to all other groups, with the exception of its US sponsor; vis-à-vis the United States, political Zionism accepts a servile position for Jews. In practice, political Zionism prioritizes the welfare of the Jews over the welfare of the Arabs, while at the same time subordinating Jews to the foreign policy dictates of the United States. Political Zionism says that in defense of Jewish welfare, the welfare of Arabs can be sacrificed, but in defense of Jewish welfare, Jews must do the bidding of their American master as an expedient of maintaining US protection against Arab efforts to overcome the injuries of anti-Arab racism.
The solution to the problem of Palestine qua the problem of political Zionism is the solution to the problem of racism, both anti-Jewish and anti-Arab. The solution, which has existed at least in embryo since the French Revolution, is the solution of universal equality.
It 1947, before the UN promulgated its infamous resolution to expropriate Palestine from its rightful owners and partition it into Jewish and Arab states, R. Palme Dutt proposed a solution to the problem of racism in Palestine based on universal equality. Dutt called for “the creation of a single, free, independent and democratic state, which would guarantee equal rights of citizenship with full religious freedom and full opportunities to develop their culture to all its inhabitants, Arab and Jew.” This would be one democratic state, not two national states. While the proposal, or those like it, are occasionally acknowledged in the Western world as an idea with growing currency among Palestinians, and some Jews, it is rarely explored.
Gregory Shupak, who teaches media studies at the University of Guelph, has observed that mass media “coverage is written as though ethnic partition in Palestine [the two national states “solution”] were the only way to resolve the conflict—rejecting without consideration the possibility of a single, secular, democratic state, in which all people, Jews and Arabs, have the same rights.”
Why doesn’t Washington favor a single, unitary, democratic state in all of Palestine? After all, such a state would be liberal democratic. And Washington claims to be the world’s foremost champion of liberal democracy. Indeed, Joe Biden is said to be rallying the world’s democracies against Chinese authoritarianism in an effort to strengthen a global liberal democratic order.
The answer is that Washington’s support for liberal democracy is contingent—it’s contingent on whether, at a particular time and place, liberal democracy suits US interests. Liberal democracy doesn’t suit US interests in Palestine.
A racist Jewish settler state, which by its nature must arouse the animosity of the Arab world, and which therefore makes that state dependent on the United States for protection from Arab indignation, and which consequently must do the bidding of the United States as a condition of its survival, is what suits US business interests. An Israel organized to engender the hostility of the Arab and Muslim worlds, guarantees the settler state will act as an instrument of Washington to overcome the region’s resistance to its plunder by corporate America, since, if Israel doesn’t accept this role, Washington will withdraw its support and Israel’s existence will soon come to an end.
On the other hand, a unitary, democratic, state of Arabs and Jews, with equal rights for all, is one that would be more acceptable to its Arab citizens and its Arab neighbors than the current anti-Arab racist Zionist state, and therefore would no longer require the protection of Washington for survival. As a consequence, Washington would lose its leverage over the state as the guarantor of its existence, and could no longer use the state as a battering ram against the Arabs, a poisoned dagger aimed at the heart of the Arab nation, or a rock against which the waves of Arab nationalism are to be broken.
Another reason Washington favors a racist Jewish settler state, is that it facilitates the US project of doing what Zbigniew Brzezinski called preventing the barbarians from coming together.
In the US view, the barbarians are the people who live on territory whose abundant profit-making opportunities Washington covets. The territory stretching from the Atlantic to the Persian Gulf—the area in which Arabs predominate—contains a significant proportion of the world’s petroleum reserves. Were the inhabitants of this territory to come together as a single political unit, determined to use their resources and markets for their own benefit and for their own economic, scientific, and military development, they would significantly challenge US political and economic power and deny US investors substantial profit-making opportunities. Hence, an imperative of US foreign policy is to disrupt the potential for unity in this region, and to do all that is possible to aggravate its demographic fault lines. Accordingly, the United States promotes one ethnic group against another: the Kurds in Iraq and Syria against the Arabs; the Maronite Christians against the Muslims; and the Jews against the Muslim and Christian Arabs.
When Washington wrote Iraq’s post-conquest 2005 constitution, it politicized ethnic and religious divisions within the country, to prevent Iraqis from congealing into a coherent collectivity, in accordance with Brzezinski’s (and imperialists’ longstanding) divide and rule strategy. That is the precise opposite of what the previous Arab nationalist government of Saddam Hussein did. The Iraqi president tried to mute the ethnic and religious divisions within his country, to make them irrelevant to Iraq’s politics, so that for the purposes of politics people regarded themselves as Iraqis, not as Shiites or Sunnis, Arabs or Kurds.
However, Washington doesn’t always create demographic fault lines. Sometimes the barbarians create the fault lines themselves, and Washington simply works with the material it finds.
For example, Arab nationalism has a strength vis-à-vis imperialism in bringing large numbers of people together in a common anti-imperialist struggle on the basis of their Arab identity, but it also has a weakness—it leaves non-Arabs, such as Kurds, outside the struggle. The excluded become opportunities for imperialists; they can be turned against the majority, to act as US agents in return for various Washington-provided benefits. In the case of the Jews and Kurds, these benefits have included US backing for their political autonomy vis-à-vis the Arabs.
Once recruited as an ally, the ethnic minority’s role as US lieutenant is to pull the trigger of the US-supplied gun whenever Washington gives the order. As the immediate perpetrator of the injury to the majority, the ethnic minority absorbs the blame, while the puppeteer behind the curtain escapes culpability. In this way, Washington has been able to deceptively present itself as a neutral arbiter of a conflict between Arabs and Jews in Palestine, when in fact it is the principal instigator.
Another way Washington has contributed to disunity among the “barbarians” is to promote highly sectarian brands of political Islam. Since the early 1950s, acting both directly and through its proxies, especially Saudi Arabia, Washington has promoted sectarian political Islam as an alternative to secular Arab nationalism and atheistic communism. Both doctrines emphasize the unity of Arabs against outside domination, and therefore work against Brzezinski’s dictum of preventing the “barbarians” from coming together. Communism, however, goes one step further than Arab or Muslim nationalism, promoting the unity of all oppressed peoples, including those within Arab-majority countries who aren’t Arab, and those within Muslim-majority countries who aren’t Muslim.
Political Islam can also be a doctrine of unity. The political Islam of the Iranian revolution, for example, encourages Muslims to unite against foreign oppression across sectarian lines. But Washington has always promoted a sectarian brand of Sunni political Islam, in which fanatical Sunni fundamentalists seek to settle theological scores with Muslims they abominate as heretics. This explains why the United States is antagonistic to the political Islam of Iran, with its emphasis on Muslim unity, but covertly encourages all forms of political Islam which regard other interpretations of Islam (as well as secular Arab nationalists and communists) as enemies to be destroyed.
Unfortunately, political Islam, in either its sectarian or non-sectarian forms, is a barrier to any solution to the problem of Palestine which seeks to bring Jews and Arabs together in a secular, unitary, democratic state as equals. Political Islam’s solution to the problem of the eviction of Muslims by Jews from Palestine, is not the repatriation of the Muslims, and the assignment of equal rights to all people, but the repatriation of Muslims combined with either the eviction of the Jews or their relegation to a second class citizenship in a state in which Islam has primacy.
Washington has no real objection to political Islamists who, viewing themselves as modern-day Salah al-Dines, want to recover Palestine for Islam. The more political Islam presents the Israelis with a future that denies them a place in Palestine as equal citizens, the stronger the Israeli attachment to the United States as a protector against what is, from their perspective, an intolerable future. If Jews are to leave the political Zionist highway, they must have an exit ramp to a secure future. Political Islam offers no exit ramp.
Arab nationalism also stands as a barrier, so far as it defines Palestine as an Arab country. An Arab Palestine as a national state for Arabs, would be no less an apartheid state against Jews than a Jewish Palestine as a national state for Jews is an apartheid state against Arabs. Washington can have no real objection to Arab nationalists who want an Arab Palestine, for the same reason it can have no real objection to political Islamists who want a Muslim Palestine. Exclude Jews from a fair and just political settlement, and you guarantee that they will continue to identify with the United States as their protector and the surrounding population as their enemy—all to Washington’s benefit.
What is needed is a state of all its citizens.
A Just Solution
Returning to Dutt’s 1947 analysis, the British communist argued that the United States and Britain were using political Zionism in pursuit of a policy of divide and rule; that they were deliberately setting Jews against Arabs.
Dutt wrote:
“We warn all Jewish people that Zionism, which seeks to make Palestine a Jewish state as an ally of the United States and Britain and their base in the Middle East, diverts Jewish people from the real solution of the problem of anti-Semitism, which is along the lines of democratic development and full equality of rights within the countries in which they live. It is in the interests of Jews to oppose the Zionist conception which seeks to put them in the position of being an instrument of great powers in the Middle East.”
In Dutt’s view, Jews should unite with Arabs, in a unitary, secular, democratic state, a state for all its people, rather than what it is today: a state that elevates one ethnoreligious group above another, and whose existence depends on its acting on behalf of Washington to serve up the territory of the “barbarians” as a field of lucrative business opportunities for US dividend collectors, coupon clippers, and stock market gamblers. Instead, Palestine must be an end in itself, not a means to religious ends (whether Muslim or Jewish), nor a means to ethnic ends (whether Arab or Hebrew), nor a means to Wall Street’s ends, but a state in which all its citizens, individually, are ends in themselves.
I talk with Greg and Pat on their podcast Coming From Left Field about Israel, a US beachhead in the Middle East.
Pat Cummings grew up with middle-class privilege in a close and happy Irish-American military family. He came of age in the Vietnam era, beginning his activism in the antiwar movement. He spent his life in public education, where he saw first-hand the systemic inequalities that elevated some but suppressed many.
Greg Godels grew up in a working-class family and in a working-class neighborhood. His family’s strong labor ties lead him to anti-racist and anti-capitalist activism and to Marxism-Leninism. He identifies with the legacy of Communism in the US. His writings have appeared in a number of publications in the US and internationally.
Paul Graham: Stephen, the title of your latest book pretty much says it all. “Israel serves Western imperialism” would be a, a shorter title perhaps. Can we begin at the beginning? Where did the idea of Israel as a modern Jewish state originate?
Stephen Gowans: It originates in the thought of Theodore Hertzel or not only him, but he has probably the most consequential figure. He was a 19th century secular Austrian Jew who was searching for a solution to the problem of antisemitism. And his solution was for Jews to get out of Europe and establish a Jewish majority state elsewhere. I think it’s important to note that his solution contrasts with an alternative solution of building a world of universal equality where all would be equal and free from prejudice and discrimination, as well as free from oppression and exploitation. This latter view was the view proposed by socialists and more robustly, by communists. And it’s a very different view from, the view espoused by Herzl and the solution that he proposed.
Paul Graham: In reading your book, I was amazed to learn that Napoleon Bonaparte was an early proponent of some kind of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Who were some of the other early Zionists?
Stephen Gowans: Well, Zionism was not originally an idea of Jews as one might think today, but of Christians, and they took their Zionist views from their reading of the Old Testament. Indeed, Western statesmen who were the most ardent supporters of political Zionism were usually men who read their Bible regularly. So they believed and evangelical Christians believe today that Palestine was promised to the Jews by their gods, that is, the god of the Christians and the Jews and the Muslims, and that the return of the Jews to Palestine fulfills a biblical prophecy. So you know, evangelical Christians today, and previous decades, believed that anti Zionism or any political position at odds with wholehearted support for Israel is against biblical prophecy. So consequently, they are ardent supporters of a Jewish state in Palestine.
Mainstream Western newspapers would never brand Israel as a racist state, a reality which says more about the nature of Western newspapers than about the character of Israel. But occasionally newspapers in the West do make observations which reveal the racist character of Israel, if the observations are placed within the context of liberal democracy and are compared with what is formerly tolerable within such countries as the United States and Canada.
In a September 19 report on the Israeli election, The Wall Street Journal observed that “Mr. Netanyahu and other politicians have framed Arab-Israeli politicians as enemies who would undermine Israel’s…Jewish character.”
While the statement may clearly reveal Netanyahu’s narrow racism, the broader racism of the Israeli state may not be immediately apparent. But it becomes evident if it is placed within the framework of US or Canadian politics. Imagine the parallel of white US politicians framing black US politicians as enemies who would undermine the United States’ white character, or of a Roman Catholic Canadian politician framing a Muslim politician as an enemy who would undermine Canada’s ‘commitment to Western (i.e., Christian) values.’
Formally, the United States is a state of all its citizens, not a state of white people. Formally, Canada is a state of all its citizens, not a state of the English or of Christians. In contrast, Israel is not a state of all its citizens, but one in which Jews have priority. Netanyahu makes no apologies for this, and nor do most Jewish Israelis.
Netanhyahu’s equivalent in the United States, namely, US politicians who would identify their ‘whiteness’ as a significant political category, brand black politicians as enemies, and seek to defend the ‘white character’ of the United States, would quite rightly be denounced as racists. They would almost certainly be open or covert members of the KKK, or open or covert admirers.
Likewise, the notion that the ‘white character’ of the United States must be preserved would be clearly recognized as a white supremacist concept and anyone who spoke of, or even hinted at ‘the white character’ of the United States as a normative idea would be justifiably censured as an intolerable racist whose views must be immediately renounced and corrected. Why then would the parallel view of the Jewish character of Israel as a normative concept, when expressed by Israelis or their supporters, not be denounced as racist?
The New York Times has often dismissed as unthinkable the prospect of Palestinian refugees exercising their right, under international law, to return to the homes from which they were driven or fled on what is now Israeli-controlled territory. The “refugees number in the millions, and their return,” explained David M. Halbfinger in a 2018 article, “would probably spell the end of Israel as a Jewish state.” In other words, Palestinians cannot be repatriated otherwise the ethnic character of Israel as a Jewish state will be undermined.
This is not unlike justifying an immigration policy that bars the entry of non-whites into the United States on the grounds that the influx of millions of dark-skinned people would threaten the United States as a white state, or bars Muslims in order to preserve ‘the Christian character’ of the country. Such a policy would be recognized as racist in the US or Canadian contexts, so why would the parallel policy in the Israeli context not be branded as racist as well?
The case is made stronger, if we acknowledge that the parallel is imperfect. Unlike prospective immigrants to the United States, the Palestinians are natives of the territory to which they seek entry, not aliens. They have a right to be there, and many of them are not there, because the founders of the Jewish state organized a program of demographic engineering to create an artificial Jewish majority (that is, to create a state with a Jewish character) by ethnically cleansing a large part of the Palestinian homeland. The current caretakers of the state preserve the outcome of the founders’ demographic aggression by denying the Palestinians’ their UN-mandated and UN-enjoined right of repatriation.
Hence, the Israeli policy of denying natives repatriation to their own land in order to preserve the ethnic character of Israel as a Jewish state is indefensible on multiple grounds.
It defines the natives (Palestinians) as aliens and the aliens (Jewish immigrants who carried out the ethnic cleansing and their descendants) as the natives.
It violates international law.
It preserves the outcome of a program of ethnic cleansing.
It is racist.
Calling out Israel as a racist state is countered by Israel and its supporters by the levelling of accusations of anti-Semitism against anyone who dares to proclaim the obvious. Indeed, in some circles, defining as racist the notion that Israel ought to have a Jewish character is defined as anti-Semitic. This exercise in casuistry rests on the logical error of equating Zionism with Judaism, so that criticism of Zionism becomes construed as criticism of Judaism and Jews.
But by this logic anyone who decried the racism of apartheid South Africa or white supremacist Rhodesia, or decries the KKK as white supremacist, is anti-white. And by the logic that undergirds the Zionism equals Judaism formula, all whites are supporters of the KKK and apartheid South Africa, so that anyone who denounces the KKK or racist South Africa denounces whites as a category.
Imagine a definition of anti-white racism as denial of the Afrikaners’ right to a white settler state in southern Africa on the stolen land of the natives. If you can imagine this, then you’ve imagined the growing practice of formally defining anti-Zionism as an element of anti-Semitism. Denial of the Afrikaners’ right to a white settler state in southern Africa on the stolen land of the natives is also the denial of apartheid South Africa’s right to exist, and is equivalent to denying Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state on the stolen land of Palestinians. To deplore racism while at the same time proclaiming Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state is to deplore racism except when it is exercised by Zionists. By what logic is the racism of Zionism uniquely exempted as an instance of racism? By no logic at all, and instead by:
The illogic that holds that because Jews were the victims of a crime of great enormity perpetrated, not only by the Nazis, but by their European collaborators, that the actions of a state claiming to talk in the name of the Jews are beyond reproach.
The politics of power by which the United States defends Israel and allows it a free hand because it collaborates in the defense and promotion of US economic and strategic interests in the petroleum-rich Middle East.
Calumniating as an anti-Semite anyone who insists that Zionism is a form of racism.
Pointing out that Israel is a racist state that does not have a right to exist as an ethnic state for the Jews, nor as a settler colonial state whose Jewish majority is a product of demographic engineering, is not anti-Jewish racism; on the contrary, denunciation of any kind of ethnic privilege is not inherently hostile to the ethnic communities that seek it. It is, instead, inherently inimical to the assignment of rights, obligations, and privileges on the basis of ethnic hierarchies; that is, it supports universal equality and freedom from racist oppression.
Political Zionism, the ideological basis of the Israeli state, originated in an attempt to find a solution to anti-Jewish racism through separation. The trouble is that it did so by mimicking nineteenth century European nationalism, with all its racist underpinnings, and rejecting the growing movement for universal equality, which saw the solution to racism, including that of an anti-Jewish stripe, in the building of non-ethnic states of equality for all, regardless of one’s race, religion, language, and ethnicity, as well as one’s sex or possession of property. Jews were an important part of the movement for universal equality, and remain so today.
Indeed, Michael Oren, formerly an Israeli ambassador to the United States, identifies the Jewish community in the United States as belonging to the latter tradition of universal equality in contrast to Israeli Jews, who have embraced the former, Jewish nationalist solution to anti-Jewish racism. The Jewish nationalist solution is an anti-Arab racist solution to anti-Jewish racism of European origin, or of getting out from beneath one’s own oppression by oppressing someone else. The idea is inherently supremacist in defining the welfare of Jews as superior to that of Palestinians so that the welfare of Palestinians can be sacrificed in the service of the welfare of Jews. In this view, Jews and Palestinians are not equal; instead, Jewish rights trump Palestinian rights.
“The American Jewish idea is fundamentally different from the Jewish Zionist idea,” Oren told The Wall Street Journal. “The American Jewish idea is that Judaism is a universal religion, that we are not a nation or a people, that our duty is to all of humanity, and that America is the promised land, and that the Land of Israel is not the promised land,” he said.
“That fundamental gap, he added, has prompted many Israeli right-wing politicians to essentially give up on liberal American Jews and focus on friendlier constituencies such as evangelicals.” Significantly, US evangelicals, including US secretary of state Mike Pompeo, embrace Christian Zionism, the idea that the ingathering of Jews to Israel fulfills a biblical prophesy. In their view, by supporting Israel as a state with a Jewish character—that is, by colluding in racism—they’re abiding by their deity’s will.
Zionism is largely misunderstood as an exclusively Jewish ideology, when it has always also been strongly a Christian ideology, whose principal supporters have been officials of imperial states who read their bibles. This was as true in the early twentieth century when such statesmen as Arthur Balfour in England and Woodrow Wilson in the United States found support for the fledgling political Zionist movement in their reading of the bible, as it is today. Last year, Pompeo told a reporter for The New York Times Magazine that the Bible “informs everything I do.” The reporter noticed an open Bible in his office, with a Swiss Army knife marking his place at the end of the book of Queen Esther.” In the bible’s telling of the tale, Queen Esther saved Jews from being massacred by Persia (Iran’s forerunner.)
At the same time, historically, the movement for universal equality attracted Jews at a rate far in excess of their numbers in the population. As Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi wrote, Jews who fought alongside non-Jews in the struggle against racism and for universal equality “refused to limit their concerns to their own tribe. Theirs was a grander, purer dream. Salvation not just for Jews, but for the whole of humanity, and that would eliminate the ills of the Jewish condition once and for all.”
On the one hand, a pure and grand vision, dating from the French Revolution, of Liberté,Equalité, Fraternité, and the universalist idea of a state of all its citizens; on the other, the particularist idea of the ethnic state for Jews, made possible by the demographic engineering of a Jewish majority, obtained by the expulsion of the natives and denial of their repatriation, and the exercise of a racist regime over the natives who weren’t dispossessed; in short, the idea of universal equality versus the conservative tradition of hierarchy, racism, colonialism, and religious bigotry. To criticize Israel and Zionism is not to hate Jews, but to deplore the conservative tradition of ethnic privilege, racism, and colonialism from which Israel sprang and which it continues to exemplify.
Below is an excerpt from my new book, Israel, A Beachhead in the Middle East: From European Colony to US Power Projection Platform. The excerpt is from Chapter 3, titled Nakba. The book is available from Baraka Books.
May 14, 2019
By Stephen Gowans
On November 29, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly approved Resolution 181, calling for the partition of Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states, linked by an economic union, with Jerusalem set aside as an international territory outside the jurisdiction of either state. Palestine would be divided into eight parts. Three parts would constitute the Jewish state, while the Arab state would be comprised of three other parts, plus a fourth, Jaffa, which would be an Arab exclave within the territory of the Jewish state. Jerusalem—envisaged as a corpus separatum, or international city—was the eighth part.
The Jewish population had grown rapidly from World War I under the stewardship of the British colonial administration from approximately 10 percent of the population to about one-third. Yet, while Jewish settlers remained in the minority and were outnumbered two to one by the indigenous Arabs, the resolution granted the Jewish state 56 percent of the Palestinians’ country, while the Arabs, with two-thirds of the population, were given only 42 percent. The balance, two percent, represented Jerusalem.
Some people continue to see the partition resolution—and its descendant, the two-state solution—as fair and practical, but it was neither of these things. Laying aside the inequitable apportionment of a greater territory for a Jewish state to a smaller Jewish population, there are larger issues to confront.
The first is the denial of Palestinian sovereignty. There is no question that the indigenous population was adamantly opposed to the expropriation of its land. While it made up the majority of Palestine’s inhabitants, its wishes were completely ignored by the United Nations. This was predictable. At the time the world body was dominated by First World powers steeped in the colonial tradition. Many of the countries that voted for the resolution were settler colonial states themselves: Britain, France and Belgium, and the British settler offshoots, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. There was no chance that a similar resolution would have passed from the 1960s onwards, when the balance of power in the United Nations General Assembly shifted from the First World to the Third World. Countries with colonial pasts unwaveringly considered Zionism a legitimate political ideology, while countries victimized by colonialism regarded it as a form of colonialism.
The second issue, following from the first, is that the partition resolution called for the creation of an unacceptable institution: a colonial settler state. Colonial settler states have been overcome one by one by determined resistance—in Algeria, Rhodesia, South Africa, and elsewhere—to the deserved applause of the majority of humanity. The demise of each settler colonial state is a sign post in the progress of humanity. The question of whether the Jewish state envisioned by the partition resolution, or Israel today, is a colonial settler state isn’t even controversial. Neither Theodore Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, David Ben-Gurion, the father of the state of Israel, nor Le’ev Jabotinsky, founder of revisionist Zionism, were in any doubt that a Jewish state built by settlers on the land of another people was unequivocally settler colonialism.
As to the practicality of Resolution 181, it is as indefensible as the partition plan’s alleged equity. A practical settlement to the conflict would have been one that all sides accepted. But neither side accepted the resolution. The indigenous population rejected it for the obvious reason that it denied them sovereignty over 56 percent of their territory and handed it to a minority population of recent immigrants. No people on earth would have accepted this proposal for themselves; why the Palestinians were expected to accept it, boggles the mind. Ben-Gurion accepted the resolution in words, but only as a tactical manoeuvre, recognizing that an embryo Jewish state could be incubated into the Land of Israel through military conquest. The Revisionists rejected the planned partition, because it fell short of fulfilling Zionist aspirations for a Jewish state in all of south Syria (the name by which Palestine and Jordan were known by the indigenous population.)
For the settlers, the demographics of the partition plan were all wrong. The Jewish state would contain 500,000 Jews but almost as many Arabs. There would be 440,000 Arabs living in the territory Resolution 181 envisioned for the Jewish state. Jews, then, would constitute only a bare majority. A bare majority could quickly become a minority, depending on immigration, and on the birth rates of the two communities. Moreover, how could 500,000 Jews rule almost as many Arabs, considering that the Arabs rejected Jewish rule? The plan was completely unworkable. The only way to create a viable Jewish state would be to engineer a radical reduction in the number of Arabs living within its frontiers while at the same time expanding its borders to absorb as many of the 10,000 Jewish settlers the resolution had assigned to the Arab state.
The resolution’s proclamation immediately touched off fighting between the native Arabs and the immigrant Jewish settlers. The settlers were determined to drive as many natives as possible out of the territory assigned by the UN to a Jewish state, while capturing territory assigned by the UN to an Arab state. When the dust settled, a Jewish state, named Israel, was proclaimed, comprising 78 percent of Palestinian territory, not the 56 percent envisaged by the resolution. Meanwhile, 700,000 Arab natives had been exiled from their homes and the settlers refused their repatriation, keen to protect the outcome of their demographic engineering.
Today, Israelis insist their state grew out of a UN resolution that Arabs rejected and Jewish settlers accepted. While the Arab natives certainly rejected the resolution, the settlers rejected most of it as well, accepting only one small part of it—the call for the creation of a Jewish state. They rejected all the other parts, including the call for the creation of an Arab state within specified borders; the prohibition against expropriating Arab land within the Jewish state; the designation of Jaffa as an Arab exclave; the creation of an international Jerusalem; and the creation of an economic union between two states.
British rule of Palestine came to an end on May 15, 1948. On May 14, Ben-Gurion proclaimed the State of Israel, sparking what has become known as the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. It was the first in a series of settler-native wars—armed conflicts between the army of the Jewish colonial settler state and various Arab armies and Arab irregulars.
The Arab belligerents in 1948—Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria—dispatched some 20,000 troops to help their compatriots resist settler efforts to transform Palestine into the Land of Israel. Only three of these states— Egypt, Jordan, and Iraq—had armies of consequence, and only one, Jordan, had an army that was prepared for war. All three states were British clients, governed by kings who served at the pleasure of London. All were armed by John Bull, and Jordan’s army was under the direct command of 21 British officers who took their orders from London. This was significant, since Britain favored the settlers, and could—and did—restrict the flow of weapons and ammunition to their client states. It’s not by accident that the core Arab armies did not intervene in Palestine until after British forces exited Palestine, even though settler forces began operations to drive the Arab natives out of Palestine five months earlier. When the British-controlled Arab armies did finally intervene, the settlers had largely ethnically-cleansed Palestine, and their entry into the affray was a near farce.
The Arab forces had no central command and no coordination. It has been remarked that one of the reasons five Arab armies were defeated by one Israeli army was because there were five Arab armies.
Worse, there were inter-Arab rivalries that further weakened the combined Arab forces. Jordan and Iraq, led by British-installed kings, brothers of the Hashemite dynasty, were eager to see the defeat of the Egyptian army of King Farouk. Farouk was a rival for influence in the Arab world, and the Hashemites desired his defeat. Jordan and Iraq, then, had no intention of doing anything to help their rival’s military forces.
On top of these problems, was the general weakness of the Arab armies. The Egyptian forces were under equipped and poorly led. They had no maps, no tents, and insufficient logistical support. Their officers were generally incompetent, having attained their rank through political connections. When orders were issued to soldiers in the field, they were often contradictory. The Iraqi army was even worse; it was sent into battle without ammunition.
Finally, there was betrayal. Abdullah, the king of Jordan, had secretly worked out an arrangement with the settlers to annex the West Bank to his kingdom. Glubb Pasha, the British officer who commanded Abdullah’s army, deliberately restrained his forces, ordering them not to enter territory assigned by the UN to a Jewish state, though Israeli forces had seized territory assigned to an Arab state.
It would have been difficult enough for the Arab armies to prevail under these trying circumstances, but the fact that they were outnumbered made victory all but impossible. Under-manned, lacking coordination, incompetently-led, ill-equipped, largely untrained, betrayed from within by Abdullah, and sabotaged by their British masters, 20,000 Arab soldiers were no match for the 60,000 unified and determined settlers under arms, many of whom were highly trained soldiers, having served in the British Army during the Second World War.
The Israelis have misnamed the First Settler-Native War as The War of Independence, as if it were a national liberation struggle of an oppressed people against a colonial power, Britain. On the contrary, it was a colonial war fought by Jewish settlers whose victory was aided in the background by the British. It was a war of dispossession, not a war of restitution.
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