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July 27, 2003
Review: Power play and Israel
STEPHEN Zunes, the author of this book and a professor of politics at San Francisco, believes the US betrays its own principles and traditions in pursuing a policy in the Middle East, which supports corrupt regimes and exploitative American corporations, makes prejudiced use of the United Nations, backs and bankrolls a militaristic and expansionist Israel and practises military intervention in the region.
He wants America to instead enforce international law and promote democracy and justice there. But he does not tell us why America should do so. After all, the vocation of a great power is to exercise power and no great power has ever been held to a standard, its own or of those it dominates.
The reactions aroused by these policies, such as extremism and terrorism, are part of the dialectic of power. A great power will deal with them with the necessary ruthlessness. If it finds itself unable to do so, it would mean that it is losing its self-given mandate.
Zunes says that the Gulf region and its wealth and strategic location are the pivot of the US Middle Eastern policy. Israel is important only because it helps US dominate the Middle East. Here he makes the interesting point that Israel, no matter what image it has of itself, does not use the US. The US uses Israel for its own imperial interests. The tail has never in history wagged the dog. It is the dog that has always wagged it and Israel is no different. Today, it is over-armed in order to enforce pax Americana. But if US interests change, it can be sacrificed like countless local tigers in the course of history.
There is thus a contradiction between the basic interests of Israel and the US. It is in the former’s interest to integrate itself in the Middle Eastern state system. Moreover, its interests are closer objectively to those of the Afro-Asian world than to the West’s. The US policy, however, requires Israel to exist and act as its extension as well as a battering rod to bash in the rising forces of liberation and democracy in the region. This results in deepening the enmity between the Israelis and their neighbours.
This contradiction also pulls the US into Israel’s internal politics. In the beginning, Israel had a permanent socialist majority. They had created Israel and expelled the Palestinians from their homes. But their vision of an ultimate settlement had been that of the existence of two states in Palestine. The US thwarted all attempts to move towards it after 1967. Instead, the US leadership, both Democratic and Republican, grew closer to Likud. The latter’s intransigence towards the Arabs not only drew strength from the US connection but was actually encouraged by it.
The thesis that the US was interested in Israel primarily as its instrument of domination in the region, was proved, according to the author, by the fact that the US neither helped Israel much nor sold it any weapon until the resounding Israeli victory of 1967.
The regular and massive supply of the latest US weapons to Israel and the growth of organic links between the arms industries of the two countries go beyond the need to strengthen Israel militarily. They enable the Zionist entity to meet the needs of US policy. Its first function is, of course, to provide outlets for the US armaments industry and to provide the opportunity to test the new weapons in combat.
The second function is that each time Israel gets weapons, the Arabs want them too. Thus the sales escalate. This race has bankrupted the Arabs and made them more dependent upon the US.
Zunes explains the nature of the so-called Jewish influence over the US policy. He acknowledges that the American politicians cannot ignore the Jewish vote bank and specially the Zionist control of the news-media. But their influence is largely because they do what the US ruling class wants. If they went against it, they could be easily marginalized.
The US called both Iran and Iraq rogue states, which according to Zunes, can be defined as a state which has the population and the resources to play an independent role, maybe even challenge the US hegemony in the region. But he does not adequately explain why the US trapped Iraq into a war in 1991 after it had rendered valuable service to America by wounding the Iranian Revolution.
Anyway, it would appear now that apart from that the Iraqi army was the only one in the Arab East to be outside the striking range of the Israelis. So the US had to do the job of destroying it directly in 2003, (which was after the book had been published). Now the US not only controls the Gulf oil but can also deny it to any other great power if it so wishes.
The author devotes considerable attention to terrorism. He points out that nearly all Muslims are opposed to it. However, it cannot be considered sui generis. It arises when peaceful solutions to genuine grievances of the people are blocked, as, for example, by the US’s support to the corrupt regimes tyrannizing over the Arab countries or its backing of Israeli intransigence vis-a-vis the Palestinians.
This book is a thesis by a reasonable and humane American Jew, who believes that any people treated the way the Arabs are, would sooner or later resort to violence. Therefore, the solution of the terrorist problem does not lie in escalating dozes of counter-violence but in addressing its root causes.
It is a cri de coeur. But it ignores the objective factors impelling the great power to behave as they do. The capital’s capacity to process the raw materials and use up the fuels rises at a rate as to make the supplies of our planets’ resources insufficient. Hence the even more acute competition for them. Where the competition cannot be regulated peacefully, violence becomes necessary.
On the other hand, Zunes talks frankly of the weaknesses of those whom he recognizes as victims of injustice, for instance, corruption and ineptitude of Yasser Arafat and his administration, the reactionary Arab regimes. He also criticizes the blind and foolish arrogance of the Israeli Right, which has completely rejected the humane traditions of the European Left. True, Zunes does not question the morality of the Zionist project itself, of throwing a people out in order to make place for European Jews. But once the creation of the Israeli state is accomplished, he wants it to behave wisely so as to be accepted not just by the Arab rulers but also by the Arab people.
Tinderbox — US Foreign Policy and the Roots of Terrorism
By Stephen Zunes
Zed Books, London
Available at Vanguard Books, 45 The Mall, Lahore Tel: 042-7243783
Email: vbl@brain.net.pk
ISBN 1-84277-259-7
264pp. Price not listed
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