Two eecro responses are reproduced below regarding Professor John J. Mearsheimer, “The Future of Palestine: Righteous Jews vs. the New Afrikaners,” presented 29 April 2010 at The Palestine Center, Washington, DC, and posted on Information Clearing House 2 May 2010
[URL is: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25362.htm]
a)
Prof Mearsheimer, like millions of his countrymen, still has not learned the fundamental lessons of the so-called “Israeli-Palestinian” conflict. What appears to be “Israel” versus Palestine is in fact U.S. imperialism versus Palestine. Israel is the U.S. proxy.
The Palestinians are up against an American empire that has had the suppression of the Palestinian people’s rights in its gunsights from the moment that David Ben-Gurion’s faction of the Zionist movement came into predominance in the middle of the Second World War. In the notorious essay Profs Mearsheimer and Walt delivered to the world a few years back, they called this war criminal the Father of his Country.
The State of Israel was a creation of the American empire. The U.S. empire’s modern form emerged during 1945-47 as the national security state. This entity was not exactly coterminus any longer with the government of the day. On the contrary, it was designed to serve the permanent aims of a ruling elite that, in the millisecond following FDR’s last breath, seized control of the present and future of the U.S. government for what were eventually formulated as so-called Cold War purposes of “defence against the communist menace.”
The most important feature of the national security state was the elaboration of an entire layer of operations above, outside and beyond the control of the official constitutional order of the U.S., that is to say: beyond the control of any part of the judiciary, legislature or executive. That national security state shaped the arrangements that were coalesced in the so-called State of Israel as declared on 14-15 May 1948. It was an outlaw state not in conformity with the arrangements set forth in UN General Assembly Resolution 181, not abiding by the law of return for civilians displaced by conflict as already well-established for centuries in customary international law, and with their nonsensical formula of “Jewish state” given a free pass to pollute the international discourse with an outrageous distortion of the modern principle of nationhood based on citizenship as opposed to purely racial, religious or ethnic definitions divorced from the facts of who comprise the actual citizenry on the ground.
The infamous Israel lobby attacked so vociferously by Mearsheimer and Walt’s essay is not a straw man but it is not a tail that wags the U.S. dog, either. Its interference in the electoral and other duly constituted parts of the U.S. system of government ensures a permanent disconnect between the constitutional order and the mandates of the national security state. Those in charge of the national security state can do whatever they please and the constitutional order is powerless to stop them. The “pro-Israel” congressmen are agents of a process of keeping the U.S.-ian polity disinformed and incapable of playing any of their duly constituted roles when it comes to U.S. foreign policy and the Middle East. The main thing they do is RUBBER-STAMP what the national security state has already long since decided, without any messy unplanned eruptions “from below.”
For those who continue to insist that apartheid rule — a system of imposing civil death on a population to keep them enslaved as your workforce, without any rights but also without any of the security of a slave whose welfare is looked after by his master — is the sum-total of the State of Israel’s aims regarding the Palestinians, I must ask: exactly when and by which apartheid laws was the Black African majority’s right to be in and on their own land attacked and-or taken away by the nationalist Afrikaners and their mostly British financiers? From the outset at their First Congress in Switzerland in 1897, the modern Zionist movement’s aim regarding the Arab population indigenous to Palestine was to eliminate their people-hood. Herzl babbled in his diaries about shoving them across the borders “discreetly and circumspectly” but the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 finally called this sort of this what it really was: genocide.
Moreover, this definition was advanced quite properly, on the basis of the experience of the peoples across Europe resisting and finally defeating Nazi fascist occupation. The fact that the State of Israel keeps British Mandate military law on its books to deal with the Palestinians may look like “apartheid,” but the aim is extermination of the Palestinians as a people, not merely their submission to a foreign occupier’s regime of public law and private property.
Professor Weisenheimer and his lot should know better than to continue trying to pull the wool over the world’s eyes. As the late great Malcolm X put it (and my zowj just reminded me): “YOU BEEN BAM-BOOOOOZLED!”
b)
The issue is the United States as a global empire, not as a state pursuing so-called “national interests” as Mearsheimer, Walt and not a few others seem to make out.
The duly constituted government of the United States pursues national interests. The interests of empire are the province of the national security state which operates extra-constitutionally. The United States is an imperial hegemon, the biggest bully on the block who will have or permit no other empires before its own. It is operating in full empire-building mode right now.
That is what accounts for the crazed and frenetic activities of the Zionists. The principal benefit of an “Israel” for the U.S. empire is that a white European-type entity has its nose permanently and continually in the business of the Arab peoples, and operates according to the mandates of Euro-American colonialism, neocolonialism and imperialism.
The U.S. became the sole guarantor of the Israeli military machine in the wake of the 1956 Suez debacle. That was the swan song of Anglo-French imperialism in the Middle East, an imperial combination that the Israeli state cultivated as an alternative sugar-daddy during the 1950s. In Africa in the 1960s, as new states emerged, Israeli Zionists dared to go where no European colonial power could any longer safely go… but this was now a stalking horse of the interests of U.S. imperialism, to which the Belgian and other old European colonialists now submitted.
Yes, of course: the leaders of the Zionist state believed these things served “their” interest. But objective reality shows this was mainly the interests of maintaining a capability to reinsert colonial and imperial diktat anywhere anytime against the interests of the peoples.
The interest of the peoples of Africa were then and remain today national liberation and genuine independence. The central struggle is between the interests of peoples and the interests of empires and old colonial powers. There is also struggle between or among national governments, but what the peoples do is what’s decisive in our time.
In the chaos that overtook Europe and the Middle East at the end of WW2, the Zionists were very conscious of the need to dress their struggle in the mantle of something progressive-seeming and on the side of the peoples’ struggles, like overcoming centuries of “antisemitism,” etc., and of course there was the wonderful Holocaust victim card available to play. Without the backing of the Anglo-American imperialists and some of their key allies, however, the Zionists wouldn’t have made it to first base, much less accomplished the theft of the Palestinians’ homeland.
That conflict between the interests of peoples and empires is a globalised form of the basic class struggle that drives the entire historical process forward. The issue is the U.S. empire, which deploys Israel as its proxy. Even those so-called “Israeli” nukes are a strategic reserve of the U.S. empire. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t still be stored in Israel.
As far as the Ashkenazi origins of European Jewry are concerned, it is useful solely for demonstrating that there can be no such thing as a PEOPLE called “Jewish” and that the “Jewish” peoplehood claimed by the State of Israel — for those of its citizenry to whom some limited civil rights are granted — is utterly counterfeit. All that is unique to Zionism is the enthusiasm it musters to serve the most reactionary and most fascistic aims of the leading imperial powers.
Israel is against Iran because the U.S. needs to exterminate Iran; all the other positions of the State of Israel are similarly tied to serving a fundamentally U.S. interest. If anyone anywhere really wants to do something about Israel, let them do something about the power and influence of the United States in their own countries, including slugging it out with “their own” ruling elites who have likely been bought and sold many times over by U.S. imperialism. Reining in and-or eliminating US diktat everywhere and anywhere, including Israeli relations, is the single greatest act of solidarity one can manifest on the side of the Palestinians’ struggle today.
