The Larger Meaning of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

By: Bernard Chazelle

Why the incessant focus on Israel? The question is usually rhetorical and designed to elicit defensiveness rather than, say, an answer. With so many worse conflicts raging around the world, the idea goes, a fixation on the Israeli treatment of Palestinians is suspicious.

The charge is not that anti-Semites obsess about Israel -- of course, they do: it's that a critical focus is symptomatic of that ancient brand of hatred. The Harvard legal scholar, Alan Dershowitz, won't hesitate to bring up David Duke's endorsement of the Walt-Mearsheimer thesis as proof. The logic is somewhat novel, since I don't recall anti-Apartheid activists having to justify Idi Amin Dada’s alignment on the matter. There are two distinct questions to answer: one is why Westerners fixate on the I/P conflict; the other is why they should.

Why they do is obvious. Quite simply, the topic is unavoidable. The argument might seem circular but it's not. The US media’s coverage of Israel, a tiny country the size of New Jersey, may well exceed that of China and India combined. A TPM Cafe poster was joking recently that what the site needs is more coverage of Israeli politics. The I/P conflict is the OJ Trial of international news: everywhere, all the time. Even if one tried, one would be hard pressed to ignore it. The fixation is fueled by 3 factors, none of them a symptom of bigotry. One is religion and culture. Half the planet and virtually the entire Western world worship a god that claims Jerusalem as her playground. If Darfurians and Sri Lankans wanted more of our attention, they should have had the foresight to write the bible first. As Le Monde Diplomatique's Alain Gresh reminded his readers recently, when Syria's Faisal was overthrown by French forces in 1920, General Gouraud went to Saladin's tomb and whispered snidely, "We're back. The cross beat the crescent!" A second reason for our focus is the Holocaust, which still carries enormous moral weight in the West. The third factor is geopolitical, and has much to do with the dark, oozy stuff that Jimmy Carter identified with our "vital interests."

Of course, those who bristle at the critical focus on Israel, a focus they themselves share, object only to the critical part. So let's examine that angle. Perhaps only an anti-Semite can resist the charms of Netanyahu, Barak, and the saintly Avigdor Lieberman, but many democrats (lower-case d) rightly wonder how it is that Michigan has only 2 US senators in Washington but Israel has 100 of them. Americans were evenly divided about the Gaza offensive, yet the US Congress passed a resolution of support for Israel by a vote of 390-5. (I trust AIPAC asked Kim-Jong-il what to do with the 5 renegades.) You'd never know, listening to our fearless leaders, that 74% of Americans don't want the US government to take Israel's side in the conflict. When the IDF mowed down hundreds of women and children in Gaza, US politicians of all stripes jumped over themselves to support Israeli action. That's not friendship: that's prostitution. The latest flap over Chas Freeman was so laughable one almost wonders if it was not orchestrated by Walt and Mearsheimer themselves to validate their thesis. (The hasbaraniks who whine about their own incompetence, as they're wont to do, may have a point after all.)

All true, but one must keep all of that in perspective. US support for Israel does not require AIPAC. With no comparable lobby, the vile government of Egypt receives comparable support. US imperial ambitions in the region have in Israel a natural ally. Since World War II, the US has supported nearly every non-Communist tyranny against the aspirations of the people. Are the Palestinians so different from the Chileans, the Nicaraguans, the Guatemalans, the Salvadorans, the Greeks, the Timorese, and the Vietnamese that the US should make an exception for them? AIPAC influences the modalities of US policy but not its foundation. Until the Palestinians find wisdom and give themselves a pro-American dictatorship, they'll always be the enemy. The failure of Taba in 2000 had nothing to do with the Israel lobby, and that's the closest the conflict came to a resolution in the last 40 years. AIPAC is the cherry on the cake of a notoriously paranoid bunch of Likudniks and Rapture-ready nut jobs. Would US policy be significantly different if they did not exist? No.

That we focus on the I/P conflict does not mean that we should. They are, indeed, more serious issues facing this world. Western attention is warranted because the conflict represents the last vestige of Western colonialism. After 1967, with US support, Israel turned into a full-fledged colonial project embedded in an imaginary existential narrative. A signature trait of colonization is that it is optional. Occupying the West Bank never served any purpose of survival. It's always been a choice, not a necessity. Israelis are entitled to a state. All of the residents, regardless of religion or ethnicity, are entitled to live where they are. They just may not do so as occupiers enforcing an apartheid regime. It's not exactly advanced political science.

For roughly two hundred years, most of the planet was a giant playground for the White Man. Niall Ferguson will tell you what a splendid idea that was. And, indeed, it was quite splendid for British white men like himself -- just a coincidence, of course, for that most objective of historians. World War II brought all of that fun to an end and catalyzed American imperial hegemony, which then grew under the cover of the Cold War. The last colonial bastion to fall was South Africa. Remember the good old days when these two icons of freedom, Reagan and Thatcher, were calling Nelson Mandela a terrorist while opposing sanctions against the most racist regime on earth. How one quickly forgets. Today, except for Syria, every Arab country is a "friend" of the US, and virtually every single one of them is a brutal, corrupt dictatorship. Plus ca change.

The I/P conflict represents the last battle of a declining West against the Global South. "Clash of Civilizations" is a self-flattering phrase meaning "Crash of Colonizations." Like South Africa (and the US), Israel is a European creation. It was not intended as a colony but as a refuge. But it all went wrong in the 60s and became a colony. That the "homeland" happens to be local is a distinction without a difference. Most of the French in Algeria had lived there for 5 generations -- far longer than most of the Jews in Israel. Technically, Algeria was not a colony but an integral part of France: again, a distinction without a difference. The two main colonial characteristics, racism and domination, were present. As they are today in Israel.

Westerners born after the 40s need not bear the guilt of their colonial past but they must bear its historical legacy. That's why the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should also be theirs.

— Bernard Chazelle



Posted at April 9, 2009 02:53 PM

