The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy: A Realistic Marxist View vs. Mearsheimer’s Realist View

By Stephen Gowans

May 21, 2024

Recently, Laurence H. Shoup presented data in Monthly Review that shows that the key personnel of the organizations comprising the Israel lobby, as identified by political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in their book The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, are also the key personnel of the leading US foreign policy think-thank, the Wall Street-based Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). The key foreign policy members of the Biden cabinet, the secretaries of state, treasury, defense, along with the director of the CIA, national security advisor, and US ambassador to the UN, are all CFR members. Cabinets in previous administrations have also drawn heavily from the Wall Street-based organization to fill top cabinet posts.

Shoup has argued in two books and multiple articles that US foreign policy is shaped by a Wall Street power elite operating largely through the Council on Foreign Relations to serve the economic interests of the US economic elite, the country’s ruling class. This is a Marxist view.

The Marxist view contrasts with the view of John Mearsheimer who has recently argued that US foreign policy—not just that touching Israel, but all US foreign policy—is shaped by a powerful lobby of Jewish and Christian Zionist business people who have used their wealth and influence to pressure US decision-makers to put Zionist interests ahead of US interests.

These two views differ on the following questions:

Who decisively influences US foreign policy? Mearsheimer says wealthy and powerful Zionists, both Jewish and Christian. A Marxist view says that a Wall Street power elite holds decisive sway over US foreign policy, and Shoup shows that the group includes members of and overlaps the Israel lobby.

What is the aim of US foreign policy? Mearsheimer says the aim is to protect and advance the Zionist project, in contrast to a Marxist view which says it is to protect and advance Wall Street’s interests around the world.

Is Israel a foreign policy asset? Mearsheimer says that far from being an asset, Israel is a liability, because Zionism creates problems in the Middle East which demand incessant US attention, diverting Washington from devoting its full energies to containing China, its principal foreign policy threat. A Marxist view holds that defending and promoting the interests of its patrons has always been central to the Zionist project and that this makes Israel a valuable instrument to be used in defending Wall Street’s interests in the Middle East.

Mearsheimer recently presented an argument that supports the idea that the US foreign policy establishment subsumes the Israel lobby, as Shoup has shown, though it was hardly Mearsheimer’s intention to support a Marxist view. We might suppose that the Israel lobby focuses on US-Israel relations, while the ambit of the US foreign policy establishment is broader—the world as a whole. But Mearsheimer sees the lobby’s ambit as coterminous with that of the US foreign policy establishment; in his view, Israel is not the only matter that commands the Israel lobby’s attention; it is also concerned with US foreign policy as a whole. Even to Mearsheimer, then, the Israel lobby looks like the US foreign policy establishment in the breadth of the regions in which it takes an interest.

But here’s where Mearsheimer introduces a new element into his thinking. Not only does he believe that the Israel lobby has pressured the US foreign policy establishment into robustly backing Israel, he also makes an argument that can be construed to mean he believes the Israel lobby has pressured US decision-makers into adopting an interventionist foreign policy everywhere in the world. Asked whether the lobby is concerned with US-Israel relations alone, Mearsheimer replies (at 14:32):

“The fact is that the lobby is deeply interested in seeing the United States involved militarily all over the planet. The reason is, is that if the United States is intervening all over the planet, that means it will have a commitment to intervening in Israel. You don’t want a situation where the United States pulls back its forces, implements a policy, a foreign policy, of restraint, and is very reluctant to interfere in other places around the world, because if that’s the case it means that Israel may get into a conflict and the United States might not be willing to intervene on its behalf. So, the lobby has had an interest in seeing the United States pursue a very aggressive foreign policy all across the globe.”

One interpretation of the text above is that Mearsheimer believes the Israel lobby has caused US foreign policy to be globally interventionist. Another is that he sees the lobby as favoring a broadly interventionist policy, but doesn’t go so far as to suggest it has caused US decision-makers to adopt one. But if the Israel lobby is powerful enough to cause US decision-makers to support Israel unconditionally as Mearsheimer contends, we might expect it also to be powerful enough to cause decision-makers to support a globally interventionist foreign policy that supports the Jewish state. It seems likely that Mearsheimer is arguing that the Israel lobby not only causes US decision-makers to favor Israel unconditionally but that it also causes them to adopt a globally interventionist foreign policy. This extends the Mearsheimer-Walt thesis considerably, from: the Israel lobby causes US decision-makers to back Israel unconditionally to: the Israel lobby causes US foreign policy to be robustly interventionist around the world.

Mearsheimer defines the lobby as a group of wealthy and powerful people who are committed to Israel. We might ask what lies behind their commitment. Mearsheimer cites Zionist convictions. The Israel lobby comprises people who are either Zionist Jews or Christian Zionists, he argues. But is that the only reason to be committed to Israel? Could one not also be committed to a policy of the United States backing Israel owing to the role the Jewish state is able to play as an outpost of US elite interests in the Middle East? Pace Mearsheimer, could it be that US foreign policy is shaped by US decision-makers guided by a Wall Street-based power elite that perceives Israel as an asset able to defend US ruling class interests in the Middle East in return for helping it carry forward the Zionist project?

Political Zionism has always rested on the idea of a quid-pro-quo between settler Jews emigrating from the West and the governments of the Western states from which they emigrated. The former would represent the interests of the latter in West Asia and North Africa, serving as a bulwark against Arab and Muslim nationalist interests, in exchange for the latter’s support for the Jewish settler project in Palestine. That project would inevitably arouse the enmity of the natives, who would naturally bristle at their displacement and the negation of their national aspirations. A Western backer would be vital to the project’s success, and Israel would return the favor by countering forces that opposed its sponsor’s interests in the region.

Israel, of course, isn’t the West’s only choice as proxy in the Arab and Muslim worlds. Washington could look to Arab states to help police the Middle East and assert US profit-making and strategic interests in the region. Indeed, Washington has done this, establishing relations with a series of royal and military dictatorships, including Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Oman, Bahrain, Qatar, and Kuwait.

The trouble is that US support in the Middle East is largely limited to the autocrats Washington helps keep in power over the opposition of their populations. It would be difficult for US-backed Arab despots to mobilize their countries against other Arabs and Muslims, specifically Iran, Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Ansar Allah in Yemen—states and movements which reject US domination of the Middle East. US-backed autocrats command little support at home. Their populations are imbued with nationalist aspirations, and unlike Israeli Jews, reject the idea that the region ought to be subordinate to US leadership. Tel Aviv, in contrast, can mobilize Israeli Jews against Arabs and Muslims, who are viewed as hostile barbarians, embittered against Israel, and bent on eliminating the Jews as a people.

To put it another way, Israeli Jews, who largely see themselves as Westerners, identify with the Western world and its project of imposing US leadership on the globe, including on the energy-rich and therefore strategically important Middle East; Arabs and Iranians are far less likely to share this view. Native states are, thus, poor choices as effective proxies for US interests in the Middle East. Israel, which sees itself as the West’s outpost in West Asia and North Africa, is, in contrast, a superb choice, motivated to cooperate with the US agenda by its security concerns which can only be satisfied by the United States and its Western partners and a common Western culture and commitment to the ideas of manifest destiny, Western superiority, and the desirability of US global leadership.

Mearsheimer has been known to reply to challenges to his view by asking, “Then why does the lobby exist?” The fact of the existence of an organization with a specific aim is hardly evidence that the organization has achieved its aim. The Democratic Socialists of America exist as an organization to bring socialism to the United States. Is the United States socialist?

The reason the Israel lobby exists is to shape public opinion, media coverage, intellectual discourse, and the research agendas and curricula of the universities and schools, and where public opinion cannot be manipulated to Israel’s advantage, to discourage elected representatives from responding to public opinion by initiating legislation or government action that could interfere with Washington’s accustomed support of its Israeli client. The lobby, as Shoup points out, is largely focused on electoral contests, not on twisting the arms of the unelected Wall Street-connected personnel who occupy the consequential foreign policy roles in the state—the secretaries of state, defense, treasury, chief of the CIA, and UN ambassador, and their phalanx of deputies and undersecretaries—all of whom are largely removed from the influence of public opinion. The role of the Israel lobby is, in short, to persuade US society and its elected representatives to accept US support of a client in the Middle East whose conduct is likely to inflame public opinion against it.

The idea that the Israel lobby is able to shape all of US foreign policy, as Mearsheimer contends, is, to use one of his favorite locutions, just not a serious argument. The idea that the Israel lobby causes US decision-makers to put Israeli interests ahead of US interests, fails to grasp (i) the complementarity of the two country’s interests; (ii) the trouble that local forces of independence and national assertiveness in the Middle East can create for US ruling class interests in the region; and (iii) the role Israel plays as the “rock, an extension of the West, against which the waves of… Arab [and Muslim] nationalism will be broken,” as Moshe Dayan, an Israeli chief of defense staff, minister of defense, and minister of foreign affairs, once put it.

Mearsheimer’s view comes perilously close to the idea that a cabal of rich Jews and their Christian Zionist friends pull the strings in Washington, diverting the country’s government from pursuing US interests to pursuing Jewish Zionist interests in the Middle East. Some might say the Marxist view is hardly different; it too attributes US foreign policy to a cabal, except, in this case, a cabal of Wall Street financiers. While it might seem on the surface that this is so, the Marxist view sees US foreign policy as reflecting the character of US society—one devoted to capitalism, indeed, thoroughly dominated by it, where the idea that billionaires, wealthy investors, and top-level corporate executives exercise considerable sway over almost every aspect of US society, including public policy, is almost axiomatic. As a 2014 study of over 1,700 US policy issues by the political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page showed, “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial impacts on government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.” The Council on Foreign Relations is only one of many instruments the US ruling class uses to influence public policy. It also funds the political campaigns of candidates that will support pro-business policies; donates to universities to shape their research agendas and influence who they hire and fire; owing to its significant wealth, lobbies the legislative and executive branches of government to a degree which unions, working people, and grassroots groups, which command significantly less wealth, are unable to do; and owns and controls the mass media, allowing it to shape public opinion and set the public policy agenda. The US ruling class uses all of these mechanisms to influence US foreign policy and tilt it in favor of US ruling class interests. The Marxist view, thus, holds that a class, not a cabal, pulls the strings in Washington, using its ownership and control of the economy to fund political campaigns, lobby government, and shape the public discourse, in its interests.

In contrast, Mearsheimer’s view is hardly different from the idea that a cabal of wealthy Zionist Jews and Zionist Christians has hijacked the US state in order to use it to serve the interests of Jews in Israel at the expense and to the detriment of the citizens of the United States. This view shares similarities with reactionary views that date as far back as 1789 and continued into the late nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century–ideas about conspiracies of wealthy Jews operating in the background to pull strings and shape world politics to the benefit of Jews and at the expense of everyone else. If wealthy Jews were once thought by reactionaries to be behind everything they hated–the French Revolution, the Bolsheviks, international capitalism–they have become, in Mearsheimer’s hands, the reason why the United States supports Israel; in other words, they have been made to reprise their role as scapegoats.

Israel is a Class Issue

The Israel Lobby and the US Foreign Policy Establishment Are Largely the Same, Reflecting the Complementarity of US Elite and Israeli Colonial Settler Interests

Israel is a Class Issue

The Israel lobby is run by the same people who hold enormous sway over public policy, the universities, and the mass media: the corporate elite

May 16, 2024

Updated May 17, 2024

By Stephen Gowans

Political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt believe Israel is a US foreign policy liability, and that the only reason Washington strongly backs the Zionist state is because US decision-making has been hijacked by a powerful Israel lobby that is able to use its vast resources to severely punish politicians and decision-makers who fail to support Israel. US politicians and cabinet officials, in their view, recognize that support for Israel is inimical to US foreign policy interests but support Israel anyway for fear of running afoul of the powerful Israel lobby.

A recent study by Laurence H. Shoup in Monthly Review shows that the organizations Mearsheimer and Waltz identify as the Israel lobby are largely led by the same wealthy patrons who lead the United States’ premier foreign policy think-tank, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). The think-tank is directed by the colossi of Wall Street.

Wall Street, the Israel lobby, the CFR, the boards of universities and large mass media companies, are all interconnected as part of the same moneyed class.

The CFR regularly places its members in the top foreign policy cabinet positions. The current secretaries of state, defense, and treasury are members of the Wall Street-directed group, as well as Biden’s national security adviser, the director of the CIA, and the US ambassador to the UN.

Hence, the people who occupy the commanding heights of the US business world lead both the Israel lobby and the US foreign policy think-tank which supplies the personnel to staff the key foreign policy posts in the US government. Washington is unreservedly pro-Israel, because Wall Street is.

To illustrate the point, The New York Times reported on May 15 that “Wall Street’s big donors” are turning away from Biden owing to their “growing dissatisfaction with what [the donors] see as the White House’s hardening stance against Israel in its war on Gaza.” Biden’s pausing (not cancelling) a shipment of 2,000 lb. bombs in an effort to dissuade Israel from launching a major assault on Rafah (which was soon followed by Biden approving a major transfer of other arms to Israel), and the United States abstaining from a UN vote censuring Israel for its conduct in Gaza, hardly amount to much of a hardening stance against Israel. All the same, many “big donors are put off by [what they see as Biden’s] softening support for Israel,” the newspaper reports.

Today, the web site Responsible Statecraft posted an investigation, “Biden’s Gaza policy risks re-election but pleases his wealthiest donors“, which reveals that “over one third of the president’s top funders – those giving in excess of $900,000 to the Biden Victory Fund—appear to see little nuance in the conflict [between Israel and the Palestinians] and show overwhelming sympathy for Israel, at times verging into outright hostility to Palestinians and anti-Muslim bigotry.”

In contrast, a poll sponsored by The New York Times, Siena College and The Philadelphia Inquirer has found that young and non-white voters are also turning away from Biden, albeit for the opposite reason: Because they deplore his support for Israel.

On May 16, The Washington Post revealed that a group of approximately 100 “billionaires and business titans” was “formed shortly after the Oct. 7” revolt in order “to ‘change the narrative’ in favor of Israel, partly by conveying ‘the atrocities committed by Hamas … to all Americans.’” The group’s self-stated mission was to “’help win the war’ of U.S. public opinion by funding an information campaign against Hamas.”

The group was formed by “billionaire and real estate magnate Barry Sternlicht.” The Post cited a November report from the news site Semafor “that Sternlicht was launching a $50 million anti-Hamas media campaign with various Wall Street and Hollywood billionaires.”

The group includes “former CEO of Starbucks Howard Schultz, Dell founder and CEO Michael Dell, hedge fund manager Bill Ackman and Joshua Kushner, founder of Thrive Capital and brother to Jared Kushner, former president Donald Trump’s son-in-law.”

The business titans also include “Kind snack company founder Daniel Lubetzky, hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb, billionaire Len Blavatnik and real estate investor Joseph Sitt” who met with New York City mayor Eric Adams to pressure him to deploy the police to clear the anti-genocide encampment at Columbia University.

The obvious conclusion is that the US capitalist class—the country’s billionaires and top-level executives—are decidedly pro-Israel, while the rest of the population is either less so, or strongly opposed to Israel’s conduct in Gaza. To put it another way: Wall Street supports the genocide (and therefore so too does Washington) while many ordinary Americans are appalled.

Since the capitalist class holds enormous sway over public policy—through its funding of political campaigns; by underwriting think-tanks to recommend public policy; by placing its representatives in key positions in the state; by donating to universities to shape their research agendas and influence who they hire and fire; by means of its extensive lobbying of the legislative and executive branches of government; and by its control of the mass media—it is inevitable that public policy will reflect the corporate elite’s strong backing of Israel.

Saying, as Mearsheimer and Walt do, that the Israel lobby shapes US foreign policy conceals a more important truth. Economic elites and organized groups representing business interests both strongly support Israel and shape US foreign policy. The Israel lobby predisposes Washington to support Israel only so far as the lobby is part of, and directed by, a capitalist class that leans strongly toward the Zionist state and has the resources and connections to strongly influence US foreign policy positions.

A 2014 study of over 1,700 US policy issues by the political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page found that “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial impacts on government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.”

The Israel lobby has a substantial impact on government policy because it is run by economic elites and organized business interests and because these elites are strongly pro-Israel. Mearsheimer and Walt call the Israel lobby powerful, but don’t inquire into the source of its power. The lobby is powerful because it is handsomely funded. The only class in a position to handsomely fund a lobby to make it powerful enough to decisively shape public policy is the class of top-corporate executives, financiers, and billionaire investors.

So, why is the US capitalist class overwhelmingly supportive of Israel?

Among members of the US economic elite, support for Israel may derive in some cases from Zionist convictions (either Christian or Jewish), but Zionist beliefs are far less important as the basis for pro-Israel views among members of the US capitalist class than is elite consciousness of the reality that Israel serves their class interests in an economically rich and strategically significant part of the world. US control of Middle Eastern oil provides corporate America with a rich source of profits. It also gives the corporate elite leverage over its business rivals in Europe, Japan, and China, who depend critically on Middle Eastern petroleum resources for survival. Israel helps Washington control the Middle East in a way no other state in the region is able to do.

Arab nationalist leaders have always been clear about why the US capitalist class supports Israel unreservedly. Israel is a watchdog, a snarling beast, “a dagger pointed at the heart of the Arab world,” that Washington uses to hold Arab and Muslim nationalist forces in check, to ensure the vast economic and strategic prize of Middle Eastern oil remains under the control of corporate America’s political servants in Washington and their Arab satraps, the kings, emirs, sultans, and military dictators who, to a man, loath democracy, and collaborate with Wall Street-backed US power against the ordinary people of the Arab and Muslim worlds.

Middle Eastern oil is not a prize corporate America is willing to yield to local forces of independence and national assertiveness. In return for Washington supporting Israel in carrying the Zionist project forward, Israel helps look after corporate America’s interests in the Middle East. It’s a mutually beneficial pact of Jewish nationalist forces collaborating with US business interests to keep the Arabs and Iranians down, the Americans in charge, and the Israelis supplied with arms and diplomatic support to enforce their regime of Jewish supremacy in the Levant.

The Politics of Defining Antisemitism

May 2, 2024

By Stephen Gowans

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 has, from its inception, been a movement which has openly solicited the support of great powers in exchange for acting as their client and proxy in West Asia and North Africa against the interests of the Arab and Muslim worlds.

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.

Israeli election makes it difficult to deny the character of Israel as a racist state

September 20, 2019

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.

Israel, A Beachhead in the Middle East

From European Colony to US Power Projection Platform

Available June 1, 2019

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One US military leader has called Israel “the intelligence equivalent of five CIAs.” An Israeli cabinet minister likens his country to “the equivalent of a dozen US aircraft carriers,” while the Jerusalem Post defines Israel as the executive of a “superior Western military force that” protects “America’s interests in the region.” Arab leaders have called Israel “a club the United States uses against the Arabs,” and “a poisoned dagger implanted in the heart of the Arab nation.”

Israel’s first leaders proclaimed their new state in 1948 under a portrait of Theodore Herzl, who had defined the future Jewish state as “a settler colony for European Jews in the Middle East under the military umbrella of one of the Great Powers.” The first Great Power to sponsor Herzl’s dream was Great Britain in 1917 when foreign secretary Sir Arthur Balfour promised British support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

In 1967 Israel launched a successful war against the highly popular Arab nationalist movement of Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, the most popular Arab leader since the Prophet Mohammed. Nasser rallied the world’s oppressed to the project of throwing off the chains of colonialism and subordination to the West. He inspired leaders such as Nelson Mandela, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, and Muammar Gaddafi.

Viewing Israel as a potentially valuable asset in suppressing liberation movements, Washington poured billions into Israel’s economy and military. Since 1967, Israel has undertaken innumerable operations on Washington’s behalf, against states that reject US supremacy and economic domination. The self-appointed Jewish state has become what Zionists from Herzl to an editor of Haaretz, the liberal Israeli newspaper, have defined as a watch-dog capable of sufficiently punishing neighboring countries discourteous towards the West.

Stephen Gowans challenges the specious argument that Israel controls US foreign policy, tracing the development of the self-declared Jewish state, from its conception in the ideas of Theodore Herzl, to its birth as a European colony, through its efforts to suppress regional liberation movements, to its emergence as an extension of the Pentagon, integrated into the US empire as a pro-imperialist Sparta of the Middle East.

Stephen Gowans is an independent political analyst whose principal interest is in who influences formulation of foreign policy in the United States. His writings, which appear on his What’s Left blog, have been reproduced widely in online and print media in many languages and have been cited in academic journals and other scholarly works. He is the author of two acclaimed books Washington’s Long War on Syria (2017) and Patriots Traitors and Empires, The Story of Korea’s Struggle for Freedom (2018), both published by Baraka Books.

The Jewish Colonization of Palestine and the Recalcitrance of the Natives

July 4, 2016

“It is easy for us who have never been victims of foreign conquest and are still living in our homes to vehemently denounce the violence of evicted Palestinians.” [1]

“Palestine is an occupied land stolen from its native people and time does not make it a property of the thief.” [2]

By Stephen Gowans

In 1939, Hitler ordered Poland to be depopulated and colonized by Germans. Poland had a substantial Jewish population. Less than 10 years later, in 1947 and 1948, Zionists—who, like Hitler, believed that Jews were a national collectivity, in addition to being a religious one, and that Jews ought to establish a homeland outside of Europe—ethnically cleansed Palestine, a former Ottoman territory, of a large part of its indigenous Palestinian population. The goal was to establish a Jewish state in Palestine to be colonized by Jewish settlers, mainly from Europe. The Zionists used terrorist methods to induce the Palestinian population to flee, and refused to allow them to return, turning nearly a million of them into refugees. The property of Palestinians who took flight and were barred from returning was taken over—that is, expropriated without compensation—by Jewish settlers.

In May of 1948, Zionist forces proclaimed the formation of a Jewish state in the Palestinians’ country, a date Palestinians mark as the Nakba, or catastrophe. The Jewish state controlled 78 percent of Palestine. Many of the Palestinians whom Jewish terrorists had forced from their homes lived in refugee camps in the remaining 22 percent of their country. This was made up of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. In 1967, Zionist forces completed their military conquest of Palestine in toto, imposing military rule on parts of the Palestinians’ country they had failed to conquer in 1948. Since then, Israel has engaged in a process of creeping Judaization of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, building Jewish-only settlements, connecting them by Jewish-only roads, and denying building permits to Palestinians.

There has been much talk of a two-state solution. But what, exactly, are two states a solution to? The proffered answer is that they are a solution to the irreconcilable goals of Zionists, on the one hand, who seek Jewish colonization of all of Palestine, and Palestinians, on the other, who refuse to accept the colonization of their country. The proposed solution, which isn’t a solution at all, but for both parties an unacceptable compromise, is for the Zionists to accept that they can’t have all of Palestine and for the Palestinians to accept they can’t keep all of their country. If we cast this in terms of the German conquest of Poland, we can see that the compromise entailed in the two-state proposal is completely unacceptable. Imagine that in 1939 the international community had called for Germany and the Poles to accept a two-state “solution” by which Germany colonized part of Poland, and the Poles kept another part—a fraction—of their own country. No one would have accepted this, neither the Germans, who were bent on the military conquest of Poland to establish lebensraum—and had the military muscle to achieve their goal—nor the Poles who, quite rightly, would have rejected the proposal outright, as would anyone else in the same circumstances, except under extreme duress, or unless they shared the politics of the invader as, say Petain shared the Nazi’s virulent antipathy to communism and sympathy for the ancient regime, and so accepted a two-state solution for France.

The first two-state proposal was implied in the Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917, in which one country, Britain, pledged that another country, the Palestinians’, would provide the territory for a Jewish homeland. That declaration, which opened the doors to Jewish immigration to Palestine, sparked decades of conflict between Jewish immigrants to Palestine, the Palestinians and the British colonial authorities, culminating in a major Palestinian insurrection from 1936 to 1939.

The first formal explicit two-state proposal was UN General Assembly Resolution 181 of November 29, 1947, formulated by the United Nations after the British threw the mess they had created into the laps of the new world body. The resolution did nothing to sort out the mess. It called for a Jewish state to be carved out of 56 percent of the Palestinians’ country, and for the Palestinians to content themselves with the minority share of their territory. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who lived in the territory that would come under the jurisdiction of the Jewish state would be forced to live under Jewish rule in their own country. The Zionists were disappointed, because they wanted all of Palestine, but went along anyway because they were being offered more than they had. The Palestinians, not surprisingly, rejected the proposal outright, which, anyone else in their place also would have done. This was hardly an auspicious beginning for a proposal that has since been dubbed a “solution.” How could it be a solution, when a major party to the proposed arrangement rejected it from the very beginning, and for obvious, and entirely justifiable, reasons?

The two-state proposal, then, (not a solution—the term solution is a deception to suggest the scheme is workable) was a bad scheme from the very beginning, and has become significantly worse since. With Zionist forces conquering even more of the Palestinians’ country than Resolution 181 foresaw for a Jewish state, two-state exponents now envisioned a Jewish state in the 78 percent of Palestine that Israel controlled, following the armistice which brought the open hostilities of the Arab-Israeli war to a halt. In other words, the armistice line, rather than the frontiers envisioned by the UN, would now form the boundaries of a Jewish state. This, of course, was favorable to the Zionists, who would have a state even larger than the one they were to receive under Resolution 181. But if Palestinians thought that relinquishing 56 percent of their country to Jewish colonizers was unacceptable, how could they possibly be expected to think that ceding 78 percent was acceptable? Poles would hardly think that ceding one percent of their territory to Germany would have been tolerable, let alone 57 percent. The idea that anyone would think they would accept the loss of 78 percent of their country to a colonizing invader would be considered an insult.

It gets worse. Since its 1967 military conquest of the remainder of the Palestinians’ country, Israel has built Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, connecting them by a reticulation of Jewish-only roads. Under the two-state proposal, Israel is expected to insist on including these Jewish “facts on the ground” in any negotiated arrangement, so that whatever state the Palestinians would be allowed to have, would be located on territory making up only a small fraction of their country, and the territory would be non-contiguous, divided by Jewish settlements, and criss-crossed by Jewish-only roads. Can proponents of the two-state proposal sincerely believe their scheme has the merits of pragmatism and achievability? It wasn’t pragmatic and achievable in its implicit form in 1917 under the Balfour Declaration, nor in 1947 in its explicit form in Resolution 181. What, then, makes two-state proponents think that their proposal is more pragmatic and achievable today, now that it asks Palestinians to accept an even smaller minority share of their country than the UN proposal would have given them?

The Palestinians have refused to capitulate to the colonization of their country. They will not to live on their knees. They are, accordingly, unremittingly censured by people who have never been colonized, and, to the contrary, are citizens of countries with histories of colonization, which either promised Palestine to the Jews in the first place, which they had no right to do, or participated in dividing up the Middle East into Mandates (thinly disguised colonial possessions) without the slightest regard for the wishes of the natives, or which today furnish the colonizers with the arms and diplomatic backing they require to carry out their project.

The major advocate of the two-state proposal, the Diplomatic Quartet, consisting of the United Nations, the United States, the European Union, and Russia, recently issued a report which takes the Palestinians to task for using violence to resist the Jewish colonization of the remaining parts of their country which Israel hasn’t annexed de jure. The Quartet accepts the violence Israel uses and has used to fit its yoke on the Palestinians, but condemns the violence of the Palestinians to throw off the yoke. The political violence of Nazi Germany in conquering Poland in order to colonize it is considered deplorable, and the Polish resistance to German military occupation is seen as heroic and praiseworthy, but the political violence of Zionist forces in conquering Palestine in order to colonize it is accepted, while the Palestinian resistance to Israeli military occupation is labelled as terrorism.

On July 1, two Jewish settlers were shot and killed, presumably by Palestinians aggrieved at the creeping Judaization of the West Bank. The settlers were attacked near Al-Khalil (also known by its Hebrew name, Hebron.) [3] This is territory Israel conquered in 1967, and has occupied since. International law prohibits colonization of occupied territory, and the slain settlers lived on the territory illegally. Had Germany colonized Poland, the killing of the Jewish settlers near Al-Khalil would have been tantamount to Polish insurgents (who the Germans would label terrorists) killing German settlers in their country.

But we can go further. Jews who live on territory conquered from the Palestinians prior to 1967 have settled on land from which Palestinians have been displaced by violence. If it would have been legitimate for Polish resistance fighters to attack German settlers on Polish territory, and is legitimate for Palestinian resistance fighters to attack settlers on Palestinian territory conquered since 1967, it is also legitimate for Palestinian resistance fighters to attack settlers on Palestinian territory conquered prior to 1967. The division of the conquest of Palestine along the armistice line of the Arab-Israeli War, marking territory on one side as legitimately conquered, and territory on the other as illegitimately occupied, is completely arbitrary. Zionists have no legitimate claim to any part of the Palestinians’ country, not the territory conquered before 1967, and not the territory conquered after; not up to the armistice line, and not beyond it.

In retaliation for the killing of the settlers, the occupation has locked down Al-Khalil and its surrounding area, and has ordered more occupation troops into the West Bank. [4]

On the same day, the Quartet identified incorrectly that continued Palestinian violence (i.e., resistance) and Palestinian attacks on civilians (i.e., settlers, but not Israeli attacks on Palestinians) are among the major threats to achieving the Quartet’s favored two-state arrangement. [5] To the contrary, the major threat to achieving the two-state scheme is immanent in the scheme itself; the proposal is, for reasons already stated, completely impractical and unachievable, having arrived stillborn in the world in 1947, and has shown no signs of life in all the decades since despite simulated efforts to breathe life into the corpse.

Complaints were also made by the Quartet that Palestinians who use violence to resist occupation and colonization of their country are depicted as heroes in the Palestinian media and on social media, that streets, squares and schools have been named after them, and that Palestinian leaders have not condemned them. In other words, Palestinians must not recognize efforts to liberate their country as legitimate and praiseworthy, nor bestow the mantle of hero on fighters for national liberation. Instead, Palestinian insurgents are to be demonized as terrorists.

The report correctly identifies the causes of Palestinian political violence. These include the building of new Jewish settlements, the expansion of existing ones, the construction of Jewish-only roads and the denial of building permits to Palestinians; in other words, colonization. But it does not label colonization as the cause of Palestinian violence. Instead, it presents Jewish colonization and the recalcitrance of the natives as two independent phenomena, the “bad” behavior of both parties. We’re to believe that if only both parties would stop behaving badly, the “solution” of two states could be brought to fruition.

The boldness of the Zionist land grab in the West Bank would be staggering, were it not for the fact that Israel’s audacity in expanding its territory is well established. Area C comprises 60 percent of the West Bank. It is intended to make up the bulk of land for a future Palestinian state under the two-state proposal, yet Israel has seized over 70 percent of the area and has designated it as solely for Jewish use. The remaining 30 percent is effectively off-limits to Palestinians, since it requires building permits which Israeli military authorities almost never grant. [6]

There are 570,000 Jewish settlers living in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, 370,000 in the former and 200,000 in the latter. Over 80,000 settlers live in isolated settlements deep inside the West Bank. The number of settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem has doubled since 1993, when the process of building a Palestinian state in a very small part of the Palestinians’ country was supposed to have begun in earnest. [7]

The Quartet report notes that Israeli settlement activity in the West Bank “raises legitimate questions about Israel’s long-term intentions,” and that these questions are buttressed “by the statements of some government ministers to the effect that the establishment of a Palestinian state will never be allowed.” It also refers to the current situation as “a one-state reality of perpetual occupation and conflict.” [8]

It’s difficult to deny that the Quartet is colluding in the Zionist project of Judaizing all of Palestine.

First, its demand that Palestinians abandon all resistance amounts to a call for Palestinian capitulation. The only force which has ever successfully opposed colonialism is the recalcitrance of the natives, and people have the right to resist the colonization of their country and to fight for its liberation. To deny them that right would be to accept colonialism as legitimate.

Second, while the Quartet identifies settlement activity as the cause of Palestinian violence, it doesn’t label it as a cause, and treats the cause (colonization) and effect (Palestinian resistance) as equal. Hence, Israel is called upon to stop settlement activity and the Palestinians are called upon to abandon resistance to it. But if settlement activity is wrong, and should cease, how can resistance to it also be wrong? Saeb Erekat, the PLO secretary general, quite rightly complained that the report tries to “equalize the responsibilities between a people under occupation and a foreign military occupier.” [9] We might also ask, if settlement activity is wrong, shouldn’t it not only be brought to an end, but reversed and undone? The Quartet didn’t call upon Israel to dismantle its settlements or end its military occupation. And the key members of the Quartet haven’t issued a UN Security Council resolution ordering Israel to undertake these actions, though, in principle, a resolution to this effect could be easily arranged were officials in Washington, London, Paris and Brussels so motivated.

Third, on the very same day Israel began meting out collective punishment to Palestinian residents of Al-Khalil for the crime of resistance, the New York Times reminded us who Israel’s principal arms supplier and military patron is. According to the newspaper, Washington has signalled that it is prepared to “substantially sweeten” a 10-year military aid package for Israel, already valued at $30 billion. The new deal would include a pledge to fund missile defense systems in Israel. This would further weaken the pressure Palestinians can bring to bear on Israel through rocket attacks, ensuring that Israel has even less incentive to discontinue its creeping Judaization of the West Bank and East Jerusalem and colonization of the rest of the Palestinian’s country. [10]

The White House wants the Israelis to use the aid to buy exclusively from US weapons providers, rather than spending some of it on Israeli arms manufacturers. Since 1980, “Israel has been permitted to spend about a quarter of the military aid it receives outside the United States.” It has used this provision to subsidize the development of a domestic arms industry, which is now one of the top 10 arms exporters in the world, competing with US arms makers. No other recipient of US military aid is permitted to make arms purchases outside the United States. [11]

US military aid is a mechanism for the upward redistribution of wealth from ordinary US citizens, who generate the bulk of tax revenue, to the high-level executives and shareholders of major US weapons manufacturers. Israel uses this transfer of wealth from Joe and Jane Average American to buy US arms to enforce and expand its colonization of the Palestinians’ country.

Washington, then, is completely complicit in the Jewish colonization of Palestine. Its complicity is evidenced in its expropriating part of the emoluments of US citizens to furnish Israel with the means of enforcing its oppression of the Palestinians, in its unquestioning diplomatic support of Tel Aviv, and in its refusal to use its economic, diplomatic and political leverage to facilitate Palestinian efforts to liberate their country from the Zionist yoke. Washington’s formal commitment to the two-state proposal is a ruse, a delaying tactic under the cover of which Israel can carry its modern-day colonization scheme through to its logical conclusion, namely, the total Judaization of the Palestinians’ country.

As for the two-state solution, well, it is not a solution at all. It is, to the contrary, the very problem it deceptively promises to resolve. The problem—the root cause of decades of violence in Palestine since the Balfour Declaration was promulgated in 1917, is the idea that an alien state can be implanted in the Palestinians’ country, whether as a single state encompassing Palestine in its entirety from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, or alongside a separate Palestinian state constituted on only a fraction of the Palestinians’ land. The two-state “solution”, then, is only a particular form of the problem, namely a settler state enveloping some part—and in all cases, two-state proposals have called for it to envelop the major part—of the Palestinians’ country. The solution to the problem is not two states, but a single, secular, democratic state, in which all citizens, Jews, Muslims, and Christians, are equal, and to which all Palestinian refugees are free to return.

1. John Glubb. Forward to George Hajjar, Leila Khaled: The Autobiography of a Revolutionary. Hodder and Stoughton, 1973.

2. Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah. Quoted in “We are required to stay firm,” Syria Times, July 2, 2016.

3. Diaa Hadis and Somini Sengupta, “Israel imposes restrictions on Palestinians in West Bank after attacks,” The New York Times, July 1, 2016.

4. Hadis and Sengupta.

5. “Diplomatic Quarter release report on advancing two-state solution to Israel-Palestine conflict,” UN News Centre, July 1, 2016.

6. Barak Ravid, “Quartet releases report on impasse in Israeli-Palestinian peace: ‘Two-state solution in danger,” Haaretz, July 1, 2016.

7. Ravid.

8. Hadis and Sengupta.

9. Hadis and Sengupta.

10. Julie Hirschfeld Davis, “U.S. offers to increase military aid to Israel,” The New York Times, July 1, 2016.

11. Hirschfeld Davis.

Zionism, Genocide and the Colonial Tradition in Contemporary Syria

April 2, 2016

By Stephen Gowans

ISIS “is genocidal by self-proclamation, by ideology, and by actions.” – US Secretary of State, John Kerry. [1]

“If we had to choose between ISIS and Assad, we’ll take ISIS.” – Former Israeli ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, now a member of Israel’s Knesset. [2]

The International Association of Genocide Scholars has accused ISIS of carrying out a genocide against Shiite Muslims, as well as Yazidis and Kurds in the Middle East. The Knights of Columbus has expressed concern about the militant Sunni organization’s efforts to expunge Christians from its Caliphate in Syria and Iraq. And US Secretary of State John Kerry has denounced ISIS for its genocidal nature, expressed, he says, “in what it says, what it believes, and what it does.” [3] And yet, if given a choice between ISIS and Assad, Israel—a state which liberally invokes the Nazi anti-Jewish genocide to justify its existence—would take ISIS. At least, that’s what former Israeli ambassador to the United States and Knesset member, Michael Oren, says, and his view appears to be in the mainstream of Israeli strategic thought. Shimon Peres, when he was Israel’s president, anticipated Oren. He said he hoped the Syrian rebels—dominated by Al Qaeda and its progeny—would win. [4]

Al Qaeda’s official branch in Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra, controls the Syrian border with Israel [5], and along the Golan Heights, the Israeli military coordinates with the Qaeda militants. [6] Israeli military forces talk of having arrived at “an understanding” with a group Washington and its allies officially condemn as a terrorist organization, and of “familiarity” with Al Qaeda’s “forces on the ground.” The Israeli-Al Qaeda alliance is “extremely tactical,” Israeli military officials say. [7] This hasn’t escaped the attention of the government in Damascus. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad told Foreign Affairs that the Israelis “are supporting the rebels in Syria.”

It’s very clear. Because whenever we make advances in some place, they make an attack in order to undermine the army. It’s very clear. That’s why some in Syria joke, ‘How can you say that al Qaeda doesn’t have an air force? They have the Israeli air force.” [8]

“Sunni elements…control some two-thirds to 90 percent of the border on the Golan (and) aren’t attacking Israel,” says Amos Yadlin, a former head of Israel’s military intelligence, noting that the Qaeda militants “understand who is their real enemy” and it “isn’t Israel.” [9]

Israeli paramedics “patrol the border and provide treatment for casualties they encounter. Once (rebels) are evaluated, some are sewn up and treated on the ground. Others are taken to a makeshift field hospital for basic surgery and recovery. But patients who require extensive surgery are sent to a civilian hospital, Ziv Medical Center, in the Israeli town of Tsflat, about an hour away.” [10] From 2013 to 2015, 1,500 Sunni militants crossed into Israel to receive treatment. [11] Some, if not the bulk of the militants, were members of Al Qaeda’s Syrian branch.

So, if Israel isn’t Al Qaeda’s real enemy, as Yadlin says, who is? And why?

The Axis of Resistance

“There is no doubt that Hezbollah and Iran are the major threats to Israel, much more than the radical Sunni Islamists…” – Amos Yadlin. [12]

The philosopher Thomas Kapitan argues that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be posed in terms of a Western-Arab one, since Israel was created and has been sustained by Western intervention in the Middle East. At the same time, it can be posed as a Western-Islamic conflict, since it involves the implantation of a foreign Jewish state in the heart of the Islamic world. [13]

I would argue that Iran understands the conflict as a Western-Islamic one, Syria as a Western-Arab one, and Hezbollah, as both. The perspectives of these three parties, who make up what has been labelled the “Axis of Resistance,” are anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist, and anti-Zionist, though the parties have arrived at these positions from different starting points. The common thread of the alliance is political, not religious. As the New York Times’ Anne Barnard explains, “While President Bashar al-Assad and many security leaders belong to the Alawite sect, related to Shiism, they consider themselves secularists allied with Iran and Hezbollah for strategic and political, not religious, reasons.” [14]

The common political thread which unites the alliance is opposition to Zionism, which is to say, hostility to the idea that a Jewish state can be implanted on territory stolen from, and ethnically cleansed of, its indigenous Palestinian (and largely Muslim) population. Support for Palestinian self-determination is the central political theme of the Axis of Resistance.

In its constitution, Syria declares its enmity to an exclusivist Jewish state constructed on stolen Palestinian territory, and does so in the context of reference to Western colonial intervention in the Arab world. The constitution’s preamble declares that Syria is “the beating heart of Arabism, the forefront of confrontation with the Zionist enemy and the bedrock of resistance against colonial hegemony on the Arab world and its capabilities and wealth.” [15]

Iran’s opposition to Zionism is no less resolute, but has been misconstrued in the West as a military threat rooted in anti-Jewish xenophobia. But as the Washington Post’s Glen Kessler explains, Iran’s Supreme leader Ali Khamenei “has been consistent, stating repeatedly that the goal is not the military destruction of the Jewish state but the defeat of Zionist ideology and the dissolution of Israel through a popular referendum.” [16]

According to Khamenei,

The Islamic Republic’s proposal to help resolve the Palestinian issue and heal this old wound is a clear and logical initiative based on political concepts accepted by world public opinion…We do not suggest launching a classic war by armies of Muslim countries, or throwing immigrant Jews into the sea…We propose holding a referendum with the Palestinian nation. The Palestinian nation, like any other nation, has the right to determine their own identity and elect the governing system of the country. [17]

Hezbollah, formed to repel the 1982 Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon, to recover Lebanese territory still not returned by Israel (Shebaa Farms), and to safeguard Lebanon from future Israeli aggression, is also committed to the promotion of Palestinian self-determination. Its goal, as explained by its leader Sayyed Nasrallah, “is to topple the Zionist project,” by which he means dismantling the apparatus of the Zionist state established on stolen land and founded on the denial of Palestinian self-determination. [18] Achieving that goal, in Hezbollah’s view, means the return to the Palestinians, the rightful owners, of “all of Palestine…from the (Mediterranean) sea to the (Jordan) river”. [19]

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a Palestinian resistance organization, plays a small but important role in the Axis of Resistance. It sees the Arab-Zionist conflict as one that cannot be completed or ended through a two-state solution, but only with the establishment of a secular democracy on all of the land of historic Palestine, with equality for all its people. [20] The historical goal of the PFLP is to have a single democratic state in Palestine. [21] Ahmed Saadat, the group’s jailed leader, says the Middle East conflict can only be resolved through the creation of a state shared by Palestinians and Jews. [22] Significantly, the PFLP, a secular, Marxist, organization, is largely funded by Iran [23], belying the fiction that the Axis of Resistance is based on religious, rather than political, anti-Zionist, viz., anti-colonialist, ties.

The project of dismantling the Zionist state apparatus in Palestine is tantamount to the struggle against Apartheid in South Africa. The anti-Zionist project is no more anti-Jewish and aimed at the destruction of Jews than the anti-Apartheid struggle was anti-White and aimed at the destruction of South Africa’s European settler community. At the center of both is the fight against colonialism and for self-determination of indigenous peoples.

Saudi Arabia: Base of Arab Reaction

The perspective of Saudi Arabia, and that of its fellow Gulf tyrannies, is one of “loyalty to neo-colonial and Zionist forces,” a charge levelled by Arab parties in Israel’s Knesset, after the oil monarchs labelled Hezbollah a terrorist organization. [24] Hezbollah’s joining in the fight with Syria, Iran, and Russia against the sectarian depredations and terrorism of Al Qaeda and its offshoots is presumably the underlying reason for the reactionary Arab monarchies’ denunciation of the Lebanese resistance organization.

Hezbollah’s Nasrallah points out that “the only state or entity or existence that ‘Israel’ views as posing an existential threat is the Islamic Republic in Iran.” [25] But why not Saudi Arabia? An Arab and Muslim state–and therefore, if Israeli rhetoric is to be believed, one that ought to be adamantly hostile to Israel–Saudi Arabia has the world’s fourth largest military budget, exceeded only by the defense outlays of the United States, China and Russia. [26] Riyadh spends more per capita on the military than does any other country in the world, including Israel, which is second ranked, and the United States, ranked third. At $81 billion, the Saudi state’s annual military expenditures are over six times greater than Iran’s comparatively meager annual defense budget of $13 billion. Surely, given this significant imbalance, Israel should regard Saudi Arabia as a far larger threat than Iran. What’s more, the military outlays of the Saudi tyranny are five times greater than Israel’s military budget. And Israel spends more on its military than Iran does on its own. How, then, can Iran, but not the Saudi military colossus, be an existential threat to Israel? It doesn’t add up, unless we acknowledge that Saudi Arabia is, as the Arab parties in Israel’s Knesset observe, servants of “neo-colonial and Zionist forces.”

The Arab monarchies have, from their birth, been entangled with Western imperialism and have acted as their local agents in return for protection against their own people. Indeed, the states are creations of the West. The “artificial borders that demarcate their states, were designed by imperialists seeking to build fences around oil wells in the 1920s.” [27] Saudi Arabia is no exception. As Nasrallah observes, the Saud family dictatorship was “established with British support, British money, and British artillery, as part of the British colonial scheme to control” the Arabs. [28] British support for the Saud family tyranny remains as strong as ever. Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron had the Union Jack lowered last year to mark the death of the Saudi despot, King Abdullah, emblematic of the utter hypocrisy of the British elite, which ingratiates itself with the head-chopping, misogynistic, Islamist tyrants on the Arabian peninsula, while strutting around the globe at the heels of their US master posing absurdly as champions of democracy.

Today, Saudi Arabia, along with Israel, stands as one of the most important regional allies of the international dictatorship of the United States. And, as protégés of the dictatorship, the Saudi rulers long ago reconciled themselves to the existence of a Jewish state as an outpost of Western imperialism in the middle (literally) of the Arab nation, bisecting its African and Asian spheres. As much as Israel, Saudi Arabia is a satrapy of the United States. It sends vast sums of its oil wealth to US investment banks and spends lavishly on the purchase of US arms; hence, its improbable position as the world’s fourth largest military power despite having a population of only 30 million, less than one-tenth of the United States’.

The dictatorship on the Arabian Peninsula leads from within the region a war against anti-neo-colonial forces which reject the hegemony of the United States and Israel and implacably insist on Palestinian self-determination. It seeks to weaken and undermine these progressive forces by using religion to achieve the profane end of diverting resistance to the Western imperialist project into wars on “apostates” and “infidels.” The infidels and apostates turn out to be none other than the region’s anti-colonialists, either secular nationalists, socialists or communists, or Iranians and the Iranian-backed Hezbollah, all of which reject Western intervention in the Arab and Muslim worlds, whether the intervention is direct, or through the proxies of Israel and the Arab monarchies. To obscure these political differences, Saudi-inspired political Islam denounces as infidels the secularists for rejecting the organization of society on the basis of the Qur’an, while the Iranians and Hezbollah are excoriated for “apostasy” because they hold a different view of Islam. Religious questions of infidelity and apostasy are exploited in Machiavellian fashion as a smokescreen to obscure signal political differences and to mobilize the Sunni faithful against progressive forces.

The nature of the Saudi tyranny was acknowledged recently in The New York Times. Reporter Ben Hubbard wrote, “The country was founded on an alliance between the Saud family, whose members became the monarchs, and a cleric named Sheik Muhammad ibn Abdul-Wahhab, whose teachings were used to justify military conquest by labelling it jihad against those deemed to be infidels, most of whom were other Muslims.” [29] Nothing has changed. With Saudi Arabia ensconced in the US empire, Wahhabi-inspired ideologies, such as those adhered to by Al Qaeda and its offshoots, are used to justify military conquest of territories in which there exists strong opposition to US domination and Zionist colonialism, by labelling it jihad against secular infidels (the Syrian government) and apostates (Shiite Iran and Hezbollah.)

Nasrallah points out that Arab and Muslim resistance to Israel has been continually channeled into other projects, to the delight of the Israelis. He questions the priorities of fighters “from all over the word” who joined “the war in Afghanistan” in the 1980s against a Marxist-Leninist government and Soviet military that intervened to prop it up. It is not that he questions the legitimacy of the fight, but he challenges the priority, defining the defeat of Zionist ideology and the dismantling of an exclusivist Jewish state apparatus in the middle of the Arab nation and Muslim world as the single most pressing objective for his co-religionists.

Saudi Arabia took a lead role in propagating Islamism, and “at various times over the past century” Islamists have been “useful allies” of Western powers, Israel, and Arab monarchies.

As one of many examples, during the 1980s, the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza and the West Bank for years eagerly sent radical young Palestinian Muslims off to Afghanistan to combat the Soviet Army…It did so on the basis of the curious argument that the path of ‘true jihad’ could be found not in resisting the Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip, but rather far away in Central Asia. The covert agencies of numerous states were involved in sponsoring this ‘jihad’ not the least of them the CIA and the Saudi and Pakistani intelligence services. Needless to say, the Israeli military occupation authorities and their attentive intelligence services regarded this development with benevolent indulgence, encouraging any movement that fostered the departure of these young radicals and that weakened the unpalatable nationalism represented by the PLO. [30]

After Afghanistan, they “immediately manufactured a new priority for us,” Nasrallah recounts. The Saudis “manufactured a war and invented a new enemy called the Iranian expansion.” He continued: They “implanted the notion that Iran is the enemy in the minds of many Islamic groups, that the priority is confronting the Shia danger, Shia thought and Shia expansion, and that this Shia danger is a bigger threat to the (Muslim world) than Israel and the Zionist scheme.” And yet, the Saudis evinced no hostility to the Shah of Iran, a Shiite, who was “close to ‘Israel’” and one of Washington’s policemen on the beat. [31] Most adherents to Saudi-inspired ideology believe that that fighting apostates and opposing Shiism is more important than opposing Zionist colonialism. [32] This, of course, has pleasing implications for the colonialists and their Western sponsors.

In Nasrallah’s view, the Saudis have cloaked political questions in “sectarian garb.”

“In Egypt today there is a political conflict, a deep polarization. Is this conflict sectarian? It isn’t sectarian but political. In Libya there is a major conflict and deep polarization. Is it sectarian? In Tunisia there is a major political conflict and in Yemen too. Yes, when we come to countries which are marked by religious pluralism and diversity, like Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Bahrain, the issue becomes a sectarian one when it is, in fact, a political conflict. This conflict is political. Why are you turning it into a sectarian one? They do this intentionally, not out of ignorance. Today, this sectarianism is one of the most destructive weapons in the region.” [33]

“It is not a conflict between religions, but one between one force with a program of resistance” (Iran-Syria-Hezbollah) “and one that is pro-colonialist” (the Arab monarchies.) But they would like to make it seem like a religious conflict.” [34]

The Colonial Tradition

At the root of the conflict in the Middle East is the question of whether an exclusivist Jewish state settled on lands usurped from the Palestinians has the right to exist. The answer is clear: it has as much right to exist as did the Apartheid state of South Africa—which is none at all. This does not mean, however, that Jews should not be welcome in an equal, democratic, state in the territories of historic Palestine. On the contrary, it is unrealistic to expect that the eviction of Jewish settlers from Palestine is a workable solution to the conflict, anymore than it was reasonable to expect that by the 1990s the eviction of European settlers from South Africa was workable. But a single, democratic state, in which all citizens are equal, regardless of religion—given the resonance of this kind of arrangement with widely accepted political principles of equality and the precedent of the dismantling of a racist European settler regime in South Africa—appears to be not only desirable, but imaginable and able to command popular support throughout the world, if it doesn’t already. It’s not global public opinion that stands in the way of ending Zionist colonialism; it is the support Israel garners from Washington as an outpost of US imperialism in the Middle East that is the obstacle.

Finally, the recently WikiLeaks-disclosed e-mails of Hillary Clinton written while she was US secretary of state show that a goal of Washington’s Syria policy is to overthrow the pro-Palestinian Arab nationalist government in Damascus to weaken the Axis of Resistance, and its central cog, Iran. Nasrallah pointed this out publically almost three years ago. “Israel knows that the source or one of the most important sources of the strength of the resistance in Lebanon and Palestine is Syria and of course the Islamic Republic of Iran. For this reason it wants to take out Syria from the equation and corner the resistance in Palestine and Lebanon.” [35]

To accomplish the goal of “taking out” Syria, Israel, a state established in part as a refuge from anti-Jewish genocidal stirrings in Europe, is colluding with organizations pursuing their own genocidal agenda, as part of a larger neo-colonial project of fostering divisions in the Middle East to weaken forces committed to the project of the self-determination of the region’s indigenous people. Europe’s colonial project frequently relied on genocide to clear the way for the mastery of European settlers over indigenous populations. But it is not genocide itself that ought to agitate our minds, but a fortiori, it is its parent, the colonial tradition, of which Zionism itself is an expression, and of which genocide has been one of its accustomed practices, which deserves our resolute opposition.

The greatest holocaust of all was not the one carried out against Jews in Europe by Nazi Germany, though that genocide, accompanied by the systematic extermination of others, including Roma, communists and Slavs, was as obscene as any other. If we have to attach priority to genocide, as is done in capitalizing the anti-Jewish holocaust as the Holocaust, then a much larger genocide, of which there is little discussion if even acknowledgement, has a more compelling claim to this grim mantle—the holocaust of the indigenous people of the Americas. In terms of the number of human beings exterminated, the American Holocaust is perhaps the greatest crime of the European colonial tradition.

Hitler’s regime, it should be noted, represented European colonial ideology and practice in its highest form. Its methods were based on those pioneered by Britain, France and the United States to build vast empires, and Belgium and Portugal, to build smaller ones. What made Hitler reprehensible to the Western mind, was not the brutality of his methods and his racist ideology—for these came directly from the European colonial tradition—but his seeking to build a German empire to the East, thus bringing home to Europe the methods and racism the British had used in India, the French in Africa and Indo-China, and the young United States had used to build a continental empire. Hitler said Central and Eastern Europe, including Russia, would be to Germany what the American West was to the United States and India was to Britain. In Discourse on Colonialism, Aime Cesaire remarked that “What (Westerners) cannot forgive Hitler for is not the crime itself…it is the crime against the White man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonial procedures which had until then been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the ‘coolies’ of India and the ‘niggers’ of Africa.” [36] Nazism was colonialism let loose on Europeans. Viewed from the perspective of the Nazi’s colonial horrors brought to Europe, Westerners may begin to understand the tantamount colonial horrors and oppressions the West visited upon Arabs and Persians and continues through its Israeli outpost to visit upon the Palestinians, to say nothing of the political character of the practices and ideology which Western governments and their allies follow, even to this day, in the Middle East.

1. Matthew Rosenberg, “Citing atrocities, John Kerry calls ISIS actions genocide,” The New York Times, March 17, 2016.

2. Yarolsav Trofimov, “Israel’s main concern in Syria: Iran, not ISIS,” The Wall Street Journal, March 17, 2016.

3. Rosenberg, March 17, 2016.

4. Patrick Seale, “Only a ceasefire will end the nightmare in Syria,” Gulf News, July 26, 2012.

5. Yarolsav Trofimov, “Al Qaeda a lesser evil? Syria war pulls U.S., Israel apart,” The Wall Street Journal, March 12, 2015; Trofimov, March 17, 2016.

6. Isabel Kershner, “Scanning borders, Israel surveys new reality of tunnels and terror,” The New York Times, February 11, 2016.

7. Trofimov, March 12, 2015.

8. “Syria’s president speaks,” Foreign Affairs, January 25, 2015.

9. Trofimov, March 12, 2015.

10. Ashley Gallagher, “Some wounded Syrians seek treatment from Israeli hospitals,” Al Jazeera America, March 18, 2014.

11. Trofimov, March 12, 2015.

12. Trofimov, March 12, 2015.

13. Thomas Kapitan, “The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” in Thomas Kapitan ed., Philosophical Perspectives on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1997.)

14. Anne Barnard, “Muslim shrine stands at crossroads in Syria’s unrest,” The New York Times, April 8, 2014.

15. http://sana.sy/en/?page_id=1489

16. Glen Kessler, “Did Ahmadinejad really say Israel should be ‘wiped off the map’?” The Washington Post, October 6, 2011.

17. Kessler, October 6, 2011.

18. “Sayyed Nasrallah: Never to leave Palestine, ‘Israel’ scheme toppled in Lebanon,” http://www.english.alahednews.com.lb/essaydetails.php?eid=30020&cid=385#.Vv_xacv2bcs

19. “Sayyed Nasrallah’s full speech on Al-Quds day,” July 10, 2015. http://www.english.alahednews.com.lb/essaydetails.php?eid=29890&cid=564#.Vv_xm8v2bcs

20. “PFLP affirms that PLO membership does not mean acceptance of the ‘two-state solution’”, PFLP web site, retrieved March 2, 2009, http://www.pflp.ps/english/?q=pflp-affirms-plo-membership-does-not-mean-acceptan

21. Paula Schmitt, “Interview with Leila Khaled,” 972 blog, May 17, 2014.

22. “Jailed PFLP leader, “Only a one-state solution is possible,” Haaretz, May 5, 2010.

23. Creede Newton, “Paradise is in the life, not the next: the Marxists of Gaza are fighting for a secular state,” vice.com, February 25, 2016.

24. Trofimov, March 17, 2016.

25. “Sayyed Nasrallah’s full speech on Al-Quds day,” July 10, 2015.

26. Bank of America Merrill Lynch, “Transforming World Atlas,” August 4, 2015.

27. Robert Dreyfuss, The Devi Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, Holt, 2005, p. 99.

28. Full speech delivered by Hizbullah Secretary General Sayyed Nasrallah, on the commemoration ceremony held in honor of Sheikh Mohammad Khatoun, delivered on January 3, 2016. http://en.abna24.com/service/middle-east-west-asia/archive/2016/01/03/728497/story.html

29. Ben Hubbard, “ISIS turns Saudis against the Kingdom, and families against their own,” The New York Times, March 31, 2016.

30. Rashid Khalidi, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood, Beacon Press, 2006, xxx.

31. Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah’s speech on al-Quds Day, July 10, 2015. http://www.english.alahednews.com.lb/essaydetails.php?eid=29846&cid=385#.Vv_yjsv2bcs

32. Radwan Mortada, “Why isn’t the Islamic state fighting Israel?,” Al Akhbar English, August 2, 2014.

33. Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah’s live speech on al-Quds Day, 2013.

34. Workers World, June 1, 2008.

35. Sam Dagher, “Hezbollah says weapons coming from Damascus,” The Wall Street journal, May 9, 2013.

36. Aime Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism, Monthly Review Press, 2000, p. 36.

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