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April 18, 2004
REVIEWS: Beholden for ever
The most enduring element in global politics in the past 50 years has been the unqualified and unreserved (to some, undeserved) American support to Israel. To many a critic of US foreign relations, especially in the context of the Middle East, what the US has vis-a-vis Israel is nothing short of a mental fixation that has no rationale.
It makes little sense to laymen and scholars alike that a superpower — and in the current context the only superpower of this era — should virtually pawn away its foreign policy in the most sensitive, and geostrategically the most vital, part of the world to a tiny speck of dust like Israel with just six million people. This has cost the US the amity and understanding of a large swathe of the globe known as the Arab world, with at least 200 million people, and a virtual monopoly of this earth’s proven oil reserves.
The evolution of US-Israel camaraderie is, in the perspective of history, a strange and unprecedented phenomenon, to say the very least. History has been witness to major military powers carving out niches and footholds for themselves in remote parts of the world as launching pads for expansionism. Europe’s colonial lust was the most illustrative, and worst, example of it.
To give the benefit of doubt to the US and the Europeans who ‘mothered’ the birth of Israel in 1948, there was no ulterior (colonial) motive involved in the exercise. It was all ‘kosher’ and altruistic. Arguably, Israel was carved out of the Arab Palestine to compensate the European Jews for the ‘Holocaust’.
But what we see today is the strangest paradox of history in a mind-boggling display, defying all logic and commonsense; in fact conventional perception of history as well.
Israel is hostile to most European countries because it regards them as sympathetic to the Arabs. And it is in a macabre relationship with US where it has been calling the shots in American foreign policy, with regard to all of the Arab world and much of the Islamic world too, with great authority and impunity. Ariel Sharon is on record for having hectored his cabinet colleagues not to worry about the Americans because they were ‘in his pocket’. The imperial outpost, in this weird aberration of history it seems, has become the fickle finger dictating the fate of the ‘empire’.
This, more or less, is the moral of a brilliantly researched and thoughtfully written book by Vaughn P. Shannon, a professor at Miami University in the US. He has painstakingly traced the spiral of events and emergence of personalities on the firmament of America’s foreign policy in relation to the Arab world and Israel to arrive at the conclusion that the US is still far from scaling the treacherous heights of a balance between the Arab world on one hand, and Israel on the other.
A balancing exercise it might well be to US policy makers trying to find their feet between two very opposite and hostile camps. But Shannon’s scholarship into the issue doesn’t spawn any surprises in the sense that for well over 50 years the scales of US policy have consistently tilted in favour of Israel, thus proving his undertaking to be moot and academic. The only conclusion one is forced to affix on the facade of America’s Middle East policy is that it is a palpably imbalanced act in every sense of the word.
There is no disputing the crux of Shannon’s thesis that since the end of the Second World War, US policy vis-a-vis the Middle East has rested on a tripod: ensure access to its oil; an overriding concern with domestic politics; and prejudices and predilections of the man in the White House and his coterie of advisers bending over backwards for Israel.
But even concern for free flow of oil from the region, a cardinal pillar since the days of FDR, never dulled the primordial fetish to shield Israel against anything even remotely perceived as hostile to its interests. The US archives recently made public under the ‘freedom of information act’ revealed that the US and Britain — allies even today — had conjured up plans for the military takeover of the oil fields of Arabia during the first oil embargo of 1973. With the occupation of Iraq under George W. Bush that blueprint has become a living reality.
Shannon argues with convincing evidence that the other two pillars have become so much enamoured of Israel that it no longer matters whether it is a Republican in the White House or a Democrat. The Republicans were, in the early years of US-Israeli romance, thought to be reluctant suitors, as compared to the exuberant Democrats. However, it was a Republican, Richard Nixon, who lent the biggest fillip to American assistance to Israel, and established a virtual ‘air-bridge’ between Azores and Israel to refurbish the battered Israeli arsenal in the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. No American president since then has dared to be found wanting in his courting of Israel.
The magic lamp of Aladin that lights up every corridor of power in Washington in Israel’s favour is the power of the well-heeled and extraordinarily influential Jewish lobby made up of myriad Jewish pressure groups. Such is the reach and iron grip of these groups that an American politician can afford to rub them on the wrong side only at his own peril. The road to Washington is littered with the scalps of many who dared and paid the price of their bravado.
The irony of the lobby’s game is that while it purchases unflinching loyalty and fealty of the denizens of Congress to Israel’s cause, it is in the truest sense of the term a most lucrative investment on Israel’s behalf. As Shannon shows in a table at the end of the book, in 52 years, between 1949 and 2001, Israel was given more than 89 billion dollars in official US military and economic assistance; averaging 30 per cent of US global assistance.
But the 52-year index is, in fact, misleading because in its first half, the total assistance was less than $10 billion. It became an avalanche only from 1976. So in the next quarter century, till 2001, this generosity registered a quantum jump and totalled almost 80 billion dollars — an average of more than three billion dollars per annum. This is not counting the billions raised in private donations for Israel every year.
Shannon judiciously concludes that every American president has “had a recurring tendency to adopt the Israeli view on many situations”. And yet, being an American, he insists that US policy “is not, as some suggest, ‘dictated’ by the Zionist lobby”. But that is an apocryphal statement. Shannon does, subsequently, contradict (correct) himself by stating the plain truth and admitting: “This does not mean that US policy in fact was or is even-handed (between the Arabs and Israel), only that policy makers believe that it is.”
Balancing Act: US Foreign Policy and the Arab-Israeli Conflict
By Vaughn P. Shannon
Ashgate Publishing Limited, Gower House, Croft Road, Aldershot, Hampshire, GU11 3HR, England
Website: www.ashgate.com
ISBN 0 7546 3591 0
148pp. Price not listed
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