American geopolitics after WWII & Its relationship to the Middle East
By Tom Wheat
The belief in America
and what Americans believe in, -- is our democratic tradition. However,
as America
has expanded in Cultural and economic influence it has also had to rely
on its conventional military, including traditional allies, and allies of
necessity. This line has begun to blur as well. The last time the military
was part of a social movement was in WWII when we were battling the Nazi's
and Fascist absolutism. America
became the world leader due to its ability to mass-produce and through victory
by being the dominant player received the torch of empire from English colonialism.
Participatory Democracy was viewed as having triumphed over autarky. American
ideals were thought to be universal.
At
the end of WWII we inherited the mantle of European colonialism.
The country was transformed from a relatively free democratic republic
into a country that came to field an agenda of liberal economic
expansion at the expense of actual freedom and democracy in the
countries so affected by our imperialist expansion. Now as a world
super power we had to create a national security state and a central
intelligence agency to reinforce our dominance in world affairs.
This forced us to compromise many of our innate republican ideals
of freedom. We then proceeded
to support any fascist regime ready to be economic suzerain so long
as it wasn't socialist.
As World War II ended along with
traditional European colonialism there was a genuine belief among
these countries that self-determination and sovereignty would be
restored, and that key social reform would be implemented. Many
Third World power brokers and intellectual
elites looked to American models while the warlords of Asia,
Latin America and Africa,
the wealthy autocratic elite admired Russian-American weapons to
contain their populace and enact power plays against their rivals.
At
the height of our expansion after WWII we entered an era of unparalleled
economic prosperity. However, the democracy that created the power
of unlimited mass production became the military industrial complex
that guided US
foreign policy after the war.
In
reality the Cold War was a means in which the military industrial complex
created during WWII sought to maintain its function as a supplier of military
hardware. Only by perpetually existing in a state of emergency could we
continue to justify increased defense spending, while in the process we
were making more enemies in the third world with our reactionary philosophy
of propping up the dictator to safeguard democracy. In this process we came
to train assassins and later would be terrorists, such as Osama
Bin Laden, and Saddam Hussein, among countless others.
Cold
War military interventions were often based more on ideology and
trade expansion than out of real military necessity. With the Cold
War, Interventions in Korea
and Vietnam
were based on the Domino
theory, an ideology that there was a real threat to democracy
and capitalism posed by the emergence of soviet client states in
Asia. In this process the US
military supported regimes that did not adhere to true notions of
either capitalism or democracy.
For
example, the early pro US regimes of S. Korea and especially Vietnam
The Tandem of presidents' Diem, and Nguyen illustrated how corruption
could not only undermine a military campaign (through government
bureaucratic inefficiency and corruption) but also the value of
supporting a regime that ran anathema to every American's ideal
hurt citizen and troop morale and also mobilized the majority of
the local population into total opposition towards what they perceived
as an occupying alien imperial force.
Many individual soldiers on the other hand truly believed that intervention
in these Asian countries was justified, politically and ideologically.
Most GI's truly felt that their presence and the war that they were
fighting would eventually bring peace and freedom to a country under
the threat of the soviet expansionary menace. That with victory
the American way of life would come to the third world. The benefits
of capitalism at home would come to the peoples of the third world.
The
war on the other hand had an economic incentive to be fought. South
East Asia had originally been part of Imperial Japan's,
Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity
Sphere. A trade bloc whereby the Japanese would dominate East
Asia as its dominate sphere of influence and like the European colonial's
Japan wanted to establish client states with advantageous trade
terms facilitating the flow of tin and rubber along with other cash
commodities.
We
lost the Vietnam War because we lost the collective will of our
people and also because we failed to implement an effective land
reform program that could have aligned the interests of the 80%
Buddhist population of Vietnam,
in stern consternation is the writer’s dismay as to the sheer idiocy
of Kennedy’s acceptance of Diem’s 100% Catholic policy.
The war also bankrupted the American Dollar. Hence Vietnam
became ideologically open to the USSR
and we lost the will and the mandate to lead the host country we
were supposedly defending against the alleged evil of communism.
So while our government preached the ideology of the Soviet evil
empire the reality was that US
mid-western grain farmers engaged in active trade with Russia.
Nixon Détente policies were formulated as a means to litigate and
mitigate declining American unilateral hegemony.
Hence Vietnam and
Nixon’s Peace with honor, became a convenient piece of propaganda
that would later articulate a normalization of relations
between the two super powers, as well as lay the foundations for
modern day globalization.This is only
just one illustration of the economic power plays that have lead
men into the battlefield. War is good business for some people.
Please
See Author and Historian H
W Brands.
H. W.
BRANDS is a professor of history at Texas
A&M University
and the author of more than a dozen books on U.S.
history and foreign relations, including T.R.: The Last Romantic
and What America Owes the World: The Struggle for the Soul of Foreign
Policy.
Brands,
H. W. The Wages of Globalism:
Lyndon Johnson and the limits of American power. 1995 Also see
this link:
http://www.tamu.edu/upress/books/1999/brands.htm
According
to George Kennan, the architect of American cold war containment
policy, the Cold War could be described as being based on a bipolar
system of mutual antagonism. With the rise of the Cold war it became
necessary to maintain massive defense spending for the ideology
of freedom, of which the direct application came to be support for
fascist regimes counter to the ideals of freedom. In
the 1960's we were still masters of the universe. However, we attempted
to fight three wars at a time when we had only the economic power
to wage two wars. The wars fought were the Cold War, Vietnam War,
and the War on Poverty. The end result of that was by 1968 we had
managed to acquire a huge deficit and European currency traders
made a run on the American dollar. The Nixon response was to de-link
the dollar from gold and float the currency.
At
this key turning point in our history Americans began to lose their economic and political
freedom. Soon we would have stagflation, inflation, oil
embargos, deficits and a host of other maladies that would become a burden to the American
empire and also would lead to the erosion of American freedom. After the 60's hangover subsided, along with
the rise of the corporate leveraged buyouts of the 1980’s the zeitgeist
of the Aquarian age was sacrificed on the altar of
Gordon Gecko’s postulate:
“Greed is Good.” American awareness for politics also began
to drift into the abyss of corporate relativism and consumerist
culture. The Burden of empire was exacting its toll like Rome
we also began to intellectually wither.
For
more info on the Cold War and détente in the middle east
please see this site:
http://www.utoronto.ca/serap/reviews.htm
The Middle East Conflict
The present state of the Middle
East crisis is a situation borne of political
and economic adversarial antagonisms and contradictions. On the one hand
US economic security is dependant upon Arab
oil and on the other hand our own military industrial complex is wedded
to Israel both ideologically and in terms of collective
political and economic security.
On the one hand we supply
Israel with
Arms and ask that they be our regional peacemakers and the fjord in the
path of Pan Arabism. In the course
Israel has become dependant entirely on the US for its own survival. While Israel
is an effective short-term wall that divides the Arab world from total military
consolidation its own institutional
intelligence agency structure also profits from threats to its own security.
It is a paradox of reason that nonetheless still exists
when a third of the Israeli economy is geared directly towards military
defense. Since
heavily militarized economies by nature are inflationary our foreign aid
package to Israel guarantees that that country will not have to bear the burden of that
inflation. Every year we supply Israel with a 3-5 billion dollar foreign aid/DOD
funding package. The reason for this adversarial relationship is the fact
that we use Israel as a regional power to leverage the Arabs
to supply oil at a rate consistent with our economic expansion.
Secondly our demand for oil forces
us into economic stagnancy whereby we will go to any lengths to sacrifice
technological innovation for trade practices that will guarantee that oil
will be the sole form of fuel through every cycle of boom and bust in the
economy until the economy collapses when the supply of oil runs out. So
goes the wealth of nations.
The mercantilist practices of OPEC also insure that the vast economic bounty of vibrant trade with
the West goes solely into the hands of sheiks and little left is doled out
to the populace, the masses of whom exist in utter poverty. It is in a state of poverty that the Arab youth of
the Middle East turn towards the solace of politicized religion,
an ephemeral god that can imbue their own hopeless economic plight with
a profound sense of purpose and destiny. So as they are starving it
is better for them blow themselves up for the reward of heaven then to face
a dismal existence of poverty and despotism on earth. Countries where the
prevailing system of rule is Autocracy can only breed poverty, in the countries
where such policies constitute the philosophy of the regime. This policy of rule by a few elites predicated
on strategic necessity, and collective arms pacts is in anachronism that
leads to terrorism.
Since we as a nation refuse to technologically
innovate to compensate for our increasing demand for energy as a result
of increasing global populations our own security doctrine along with the
American people will bear the brunt of such a monumental failure once oil
supply scarcity leads to inevitable war in the middle east. Hence, needless
intervention and conflict will be sustained
until we diversify our manufacturing base and implement any other
sustainable means, such as bio fuels, hydrogen fuel cell, and plasma fusion,
or even hemp fuel. Failure to do so will aid and abet the cycle of Arab
terrorism and Israeli aggression, and more so a passive acceptance of the
static conflict induced binomial of oil dependency, thereby assuring that
the ripple effects will be felt in our economy and our collective security
as well.
To some extent this containment policy
system is a holdover from the Cold War when we waged an economic battle
with the Soviet Union in regards to which hegemon
would control the Middle East and how Arab oil producing
client states could be established. However, the binomial of supply and maintenance the demand for arms to safeguard
that supply forces us to contend with autocracy in the place of freedom.
It is unfortunate that the Palestinians
are caught up in the geopolitics of oil and the arms trade. A situation
we largely help to manufacture historically,
visa via England’s
Lord Balfour, i.e., the Balfour Declaration which created the present boundaries of the middle
east, along with that, an inheritance by the US
to maintain that system of Western colonial hegemonic ideology, of divide
and conquer. The US
geostrategic doctrine in the middle east is contradictory
to its own security aims, via our dependence on Arab oil and Israel’s
overwhelming dependence on a militarized economy for both economic and political
survival.
Arab countries find it convenient to politically manipulate the Palestinian
plight to further their own aims in regards to their own desire to leverage
the US since their economies are solely geared towards oil exportation.
Seldom have they held to the Palestinian cause for long when it became evident
that we would give into their demands to buy more oil.
So
long as our economy is dependant on oil and arms to safeguard that
oil we will have Middle Eastern terrorism to contend with both at
home and abroad.
In
the Middle East the scenario was the same
as well. The Palestinian
-Israeli situation could be summed up aass an ageless monotheist blood honor clan feud locked into
a system of global transnational political and economic policies
surrounding arms sales and oil production.
There
are those in the Israeli and Arab camps that clearly profit from
the violence in the Middle East. Every true attempt at peace
has either been derailed by assassination (Rabin) or empty assurances
of further extensions of autonomy (Oslo accords) to the Palestinians. Before
and during British occupation the majority of the inhabitants of
Palestine/Israel were Palestinian. To some degree they had their
country taken from them in 1948
before they ever saw independence.
Political
Zionisim
The
Nazi’s had their pure race theories and the majority of conservative
Ashkenazi’s and their Christian coalitional supporters are no different
in either rhetoric or ideological praxis.
The
state of Israel
once an image of Zion
reborn was transformed into a nuclear power. The Saudis were allowed
to continue their medieval dictatorship despite being number one
supporters of terrorism all because they have the world's largest
oil reserves. The Israeli's became our regional means of leverage
against the Arabs. The Arabs supply us with oil which makes a few
Sheiks rich enough to leverage American Israeli leverage through
arms sales and support to terrorist organizations. The Israelis
respond with demands for more foreign and military aid.
The end result is that more military hardware is either supplied
directly or indirectly all throughout the Middle East
by the United States.
Such a system demands that you add fuel to the fire and yet bemoan
the blaze when the intention was to put out the fire.
Israel's
politicians have used the instability and violence in the Middle
East to work out advantageous military contracts with
our own military industrial complex. Further escalation of the conflict
means that the 30% of the Israeli economy that is tied directly
to the military budget can receive military hardware from the US
at bargain basement prices in the name of collective security. Since most militarized economies suffer from
inflation, Israel has an advantageous arrangement with the US whereby our military foreign aid package
offsets that inflation.
For
more information on the recent state of Israel's flagging overly militarized US dependant economy please see this article from
the Guardian.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,816587,00.html
So it is not surprising that
a good portion of the ruling class in the Middle East
sleeps in the same bed as the US
oil lobby. The military industrial complex also profits from the mid east
malaise. Continuous conflict insures
that US can continually justify an annual 15 billion dollar military aid
package to Israel.
30% of the Israeli economy is directly tied toward national defense. Israel
has access to the latest weapons systems from the US.
They also have nuclear weapons. Dependence on Arab oil forces us to support
undemocratic regimes in the farcical name of democracy and free trade. Arab leaders see our dependence on oil as
leverage by means to expand their own regional economic autonomy visa via
the threat of embargo. The system
of fair trade has been reduced to the power politics of majority oligopolies
and minority cartels.
All the political rhetoric about
democracy and human rights is only used as justification for military intervention
in countries not in the US
economic sphere of friends. For those inside the circle the rules need not
apply. Hence, the principle became propaganda used to increase foreign aid
budgets on capital hill. In fact the practice constitutes outright hypocrisy.
For example, we supported Saddam Hussein in the 80's in
his war with Iran despite the fact that he used chemical weapons against Iran and also against his Kurdish minority. Through
the vehicle of free trade American Chemical chemicals were the first to
develop his chemical weapons arsenal. Iraq's neighbor, Turkey is our ally, and yet it has used poison gas
against the same Kurdish minority in its own borders. Nothing is said about
Turkey only about Iraq. Yet it is these same Kurds we laud as heroes
for opposing Saddam's brutal regime. The
concept of Human rights then became only an ideological discourse applied
only to those countries that were not in the US political economic orbit as a psychological
justification for military intervention. If you are in the circle then the
moral standards need not apply. In truth US Democracy
and capitalism became dependant upon autocratic despots to safeguard its
geopolitical ambitions. The price for empire was the sacrifice of our democratic
principals.
After
Vietnam
we had the despot Shah of Iran to prop up. Also when we were beginning
to decry the autocrat Kadafi,
US oil interests
with some US
government support had long been pursuing economic ties to Libya
despite Libya
being named as a state sponsor of terrorism. With the fall of the
Shah of Iran and the rise of the Ayatollah, US policymakers saw
it necessary to arm Saddam. In
a classic divide and conquer strategy, it was hoped that the split
of the former Persian state would yield a malleable set of regional
interests politically weakened by tribal and religious conflict,
and eventually have the region transformed into an oil producing
client state for America.
Thus,
the unintended consequence of this was that in 1981 we set out to
supply Saddam with arms poison gas, for use against Kurds and the
Iranians, courtesy of American
Chemical companies. That
war went on until 1988. In
1989 the soviet Afghan war began, and so we began to supply afghan
tribal factions along with Osama Bin Laden's
own faction of mujahadin. Victorious indeed
we were against the Soviets; except that old allies became new enemies
and new enemies fast became old friends.
Democracy
in practice has only existed briefly before it was undone by oligarchy
just ask the ancient Athenians. The US
committed itself to supporting autocratic regimes based on vague
geopolitical principals, of collective security.
The
rhetoric of American foreign policy today touts the expansion of
democratic principles and yet its practice of doling out foreign
aid is based more on the horizontal integration of the world's economic
wealth into the hands of the power elite classes as opposed to actual
infra-structural investment in a third world country. Third
World countries are designed more on the lines
of a mercantile system in which all domestic production in those
countries is geared for export.
The poverty of these nations fans the flames of nationalism
and since dissent is not tolerated in these countries it will always
be the US who is viewed as the sole aggressor and infidel.
The more we retaliate and continue to prop up despotic regimes just
for the sake of extracting oil out of a country without real regard
as to the genuine welfare of the people whose natural resources
we exploit, the more we insure that the cycle of autocracy, poverty
and terrorism will come to be increasingly more visible in our own
country
Historically, one can look to past
empires for evidence of the same trends we are witnessing today. The rise
of imperial Rome saw to the
dissolution of the roman republic and the expansion of empire. The second
Punic wars transformed a relatively prosperous society into a society of
slaves and aristocrats. In the last 100 years prior to the reign of Augustus,
Rome was at civil war and by
the election of Augustus the roman senate the last bastion of republicanism
was divested of its power and existed in name only. Rome
continued to expand yet the price for that expansion was freedom and imperialism
was what ultimately did in the empire. The same could be said about the
fated insolvency of British Victorian colonialism.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Middle East summary of Peace agreements.
Gandhi
quote:
"Palestine belongs to the Arabs
in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France
to the French...What is going on in Palestine today cannot be justified
by any moral code of conduct...If they [the Jews] must look to the
Palestine of geography as their national home, it is wrong to enter
it under the shadow of the British gun. A religious act cannot be
performed with the aid of the bayonet or the bomb. They can settle
in Palestine only by
the goodwill of the Arabs... As it is, they are co-sharers with
the British in despoiling a people who have done no wrong to them.
I am not defending the Arab excesses. I wish they had chosen the
way of non-violence in resisting what they rightly regard as an
unacceptable encroachment upon their country. But according to the
accepted canons of right and wrong, nothing can be said against
the Arab resistance in the face of overwhelming odds." Mahatma
Gandhi, quoted in "A Land of Two Peoples" ed. Mendes-Flohr.
Avi Shlaim professor of International Relations at Oxford and the author of “The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World” (2000)
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0393321126/ref%3Dcm%5Fcustrec%5Fgl%5Facc/104-0961657-9656732
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/comment/0,10551,684161,00.html
Shimon
Peres argues for the validity and necessity for Palestinian
statehood as a means to ending the cycle of terrorism in the Middle East.
http://www.ariga.com/personpalstate.shtml
Pitfalls
to peace
Prime Minister of Israel
Yitzak Rabin was a peacemaker like Anwar Sadat and an
Israeli assassinated him soon after the 1994
Oslo accords. He was assassinated at a rally
advocating peace between Israel
and Palestinians in 1995. Soon after there was an election and the Likud party came into
power under Netanyahu. Likud party
ran on a platform of peace through security. Likud
party began to colonize/develop housing on Palestinian lands. The
response was terrorist attack on Israel
by Hezbollah. Israel
responds with an invasion of Lebanon.
Sharon's history of militancy in Lebanon
led to further escalation of terrorist activity in both Israel
and Palestine.
In 1998 the Wye
River Agreement was to return to the Palestinians 13% of their land still
occupied by Israeli troops. Both sides waffled on this one. Arafat did not
agree with the arms reduction clause and Israel
therefore reneged on the deal.
Failure
to implement the Wye
River agreement cost Netanyahu the election. In
comes the "liberal" labor party candidate, Ehud
Barak.
The
Wye-2 agreement in 1999 promised the Palestinians nominal control over the
West bank just like its original predecessor UN resolution 242. Never mind
that the 1967 UN resolution 242 had already stated that the Israeli's were
supposed to withdrawal "from territories conquered" from the 6-day
war. Although 30% of the west bank was to be ceded
to the PLO, the PLO would have had only control of only 5.4% of that 30%
and the other 94.6% would have been patrolled and figuratively controlled
by the Israeli defense forces. The corridor from the West Bank to the Gaza strip would be entirely controlled by the
Israelis.
Source: The Washington Post, 5 August 1999 and The
Washington Post, 13 August 1999
Barak Soon lost the election to Sharon.
In 2000
the dispute between the Israelis and Palestinians was about the fate of
the 100,000 Palestinian refugees who wanted to return to Israel.
Israel refused
to allow them to return. Israeli settlements on internationally decreed Palestinian lands were not removed. The situation
led to riots after the political appearance of the hawkish Ariel Sharon
at the Temple Mount a site considered holy by both
Muslims and Jews, in September.
Next
up was the Mitchell Plan. the Mitchell plan called for Israeli withdrawal
from settlements on occupied Palestinian lands. It also told the
Palestinians that cessation from terror was a priority for peace.
The fact is Israel never agreed to the Mitchell
Plan. Check out the AP story, "Israel:
Govt. Never OK'd Mitchell Plan"
By LAURIE COPANS Jan
31st 2002
The
present day problem is
but a repeat of the past.
The Bush administration wants to keep the current conflict
out of the jurisdiction of the United Nations despite prior Security
Council obligatory resolutions. Rather US policy makers seek to
triangulate the conflict and negotiate a separate uneven peace with Palestinian that favors Israel.
Palestine should have its own state by 2005.
Problem
is we are part of the problem . Essentially, the US obviously have a conflict
of interest when it comes to negotiating peace in the middle east if on
the one hand it supplies Israel with
10 billion dollars in military hardware and on the other it expects the
Palestinians to more or less accept the fact that international law is meaningless
and only Bilateral US Israeli terms of negotiation determines the outcome
of Palestinian sovereignty. So while the stage for peace is portrayed as
being on level ground, Western civilization’s rules only, abide justly,
in reality, the real expression of those rules
are hypocritical and without meaning to the Palestinian people and
all of those who have faced uneven political and economic development as
a result of deregulated globalization. They
are told that they have a state, The UN security Council agrees and yet the territory of that state, has still not been
officially recognized and is continually encroached upon occupied or resettled
by Israelis.
This
is that inherent Static tendency, a hold over symptom of the Cold War mentality
that favors the inevitable clash among civilizations, the zone of conflict
between the Orient and the Occident, and all of the ensuing constituent
ideologies, the hypocritical, moral, and amoral geostrategic
doctrines predicated upon the sole extracting force and means of imperialism
and oil dependency that favors the
destruction of global sustainability and human solidarity.
The Israeli's are using the US's
current global war on terror as a way to permanently end dialogue as to
who determines the Palestinian question other than Israel.
Fact is that there is a real civil
war going on in Israel/Palestine and instead of us being objective about
the situation we have acted as partisans of the Israeli's.
So
while terrorist attacks do
come from Palestinians, no one mentions how Israel's US supplied apache helicopter gun ships ring up double if not triple the number innocent
civilian casualties versus the nominal though not inconsequential numbers of Israelis killed
by Palestinian terrorists. Secondly,
any peace agreement between Israeli and Palestinian is negotiated
not on the basis of equal states rather on the basis of falsely
applied suzerainty. The Palestinian state is invested with sovereignty
in name only and in reality it is more like a reservation than a
state.
Since
Israel has a centralized state it has international
legitimacy and hence its actions are not deemed terrorist. However,
when Israel
was fighting British occupation in the 1930's and 40's their actions
were exactly the same as the Palestinian acts of terrorism today.
In
2000, the Palestinians rejected the Barak/Clinton Camp David
peace proposal because Israel
refused to cede territory required by Un Security council resolution
242, and offered only nominal concessions.
The spirit of Un Security 338, more or less reaffirmed a desire
for the necessity of implementation of 242. The only document issued
out of the talks was the Trilateral
Agreement in which both sides mutually agreed that UN Security
Council resolutions 242 and 338, the latter in spirit of
the establishment of de juore separate and equal states. A cycle of Hot air, more or less.
The
proposal was also never formerly written down and therefore never
constituted an actual agreement to a ceasefire and hence the idea
that binding contractual terms offered by the proposal is ostensibly
fallacious. The document
refused to also accord attention to the ongoing refugee problem. Overall, the 2000 Trilateral agreement
was just a high publicity photo opportunity.
Also
recent Israeli colonization of Palestinian lands by American Jew
émigrés has further compounded the problem. Israel
has not agreed to a withdrawal. Hence the Palestinian state and
its supporters do not see themselves as violating any peace agreement
because there was never any real peace agreement to date that has
been fully honored by both sides. Furthermore
the Israeli interpretation of UN 338 required that the Palestinian state
would have been sectioned off into 4 security zones, the corridors
in between would have been policed by Israel
and the Palestinian state would have been forced to rely on existing
Israeli economic and transportation infrastructure.
This scenario was something akin to the partition of Germany
after WWII.
Oddly
enough one can draw many parallels between the offer of farcical independence by Israel
to Palestine with the
apartheid regime in South Africa's
own Bantustan system.
---------------------------------------------------------------
An
eye for an eye makes the whole world blind yet until Israel relinquishes the majority of the occupied
territories, pursuant to international law,
Palestinian terrorism will continue. It's hardly a fair fight when
we start giving Israel, 10 billion dollars in military Aid every year and the Palestinians 50
million in food aid.
Recent proposals have suggested that
either a UN international peacekeeping force be dispatched
to the region or 20,000 US soldiers be sent to the region to police
the borders. Problem is that the
whole Middle East framework for peace in that area has come
down to semantics, i.e., Israel must withdraw "from all territories
conquered to "from territories conquered"(amended UN res. 242).
Hence Israel has created a legal stalemate hover how long
it can prolong the occupation of Palestinian territory on the basis of internal
security politics and its need for security buffer zones.
The state of Israel
is waging an ideological war that cannot be won, rather the current policies have resulted in proliferation of the conflict at
a global scale. Until Israel
addresses legitimate concerns in regards to actual Palestinian statehood,
terrorism will continue to be inflicted by both sides.
sources:
These United Nations Security
Council resolutions, UN 242, & UN 338, both stipulate
that Israel
must withdraw "from territories conquered" from the six
days war. This leaves no question as to the true and actual boundaries
of the Palestinian State.
So why is there a stalemate?
Also
see this: Trilateral Statement 2000
http://www.mfa.gov.il/mfa/go.asp?MFAH0hnl0
A terrorist one-day is the father
of a country the next day. War is a dirty business that makes a
few men rich. Nationalism and poverty go hand in hand. The nationalist response to imperialism and
or occupation is terrorism. The imperialist uses terror when he
bombs whole villages to the ground to punish one guilty terrorist.
Terrorism is both the weapon of the weak as it is the weapon of the powerful.
The legacy of terrorism in the Middle
East is predicated on the notion that Arabs see our support
for Israel
as part of overall US
acceptance of Israeli policies of agitation
and retaliation in the Middle East. Like Columbia, the militarized state of Israel is waging an ideological war that cannot
be won, rather the current policies
have resulted in proliferation of
the conflict at a global scale. Until Israel addresses legitimate concerns in regards
to actual Palestinian statehood, terrorism will continue to be inflicted
by both sides.
The
real question comes down to the fact that while the Palestinians, specifically
the PLO, Hamas, etc., have committed acts of terrorism, specifically
targeting non-combatants, their actions are a direct result of illegal Israeli
occupation. The current political
dogma of Israeli occupation relies on a extreme form of Zionism that has
always advocated either expulsion or segregation of the Palestinians.
"... it is the duty of the [Israeli] leadership
to explain to the public a number of truths. One truth is that there is
no Zionism, no settlement, and no Jewish state without evacuating Arabs,
and without expropriating lands and their fencing off." -- Yesha'ayahu
Ben-Porat, (Yedi'ot
Aharonot 07/14/1972) responding to public controversy regarding
the Israeli evictions of Palestinians in Rafah,
Gaza,
in 1972. (Cited in Nur Masalha's
"A Land Without A People" 1997, p.98)
see these links for more info:
1.
link:
http://www.iap.org/withoutland.htm
2.
http://www.smuc.ac.uk/trs/phdholyland.html
It seems Sharon
suffers from the same bias today. Hence terrorism will continue in the Middle
East until an acceptable re-addressment
of pre 1967 boundaries of Israel-Palestine is established as well as an
internationalization of the city of Jerusalem. Secondly,
Israeli troops can hardly be expected to keep peace when their natural interaction
with Arabs is one based on advesarialism. Un peacekeepers
should be deployed to the region, and assist the Palestinians in rebuilding
their infrastructure and at the same time establishing international zones
and Un security checkpoints going to and from the West Bank
and Gaza strip. With those steps
in place, along with the removal of Israeli troops would be the final make
or break moment for the Palestinians. An objective international presence should take away the ideological advocacy
of terrorism as a direct response to foreign occupation from the mindset
of Palestinians.
Terrorism will continue to be the
chief weapon of these countries until a multilateral UN peacekeeping force
can insure that clear boundaries between the two states can be established,
upheld and true infrastructural modernization can be brought to Palestine.
The most potent weapon against terrorism is the civil society. So long as regional politics and games of economic supply continually
dictate the Middle East agenda the problem will remain intractable.
Political
Zionism
The
Nazi holocaust and the subsequent liberation of the surviving Jews from
the concentration camps was the zeitgeist that propelled the world to finally
give the Jews a homeland. For many and not just Jews, it was the realization
of the dream of Zionism. Essentially, god could be seen
making good on his promise to redeem his vow to his chosen people.
Religion aside, from mundane truth, The specter of the horrors of the Nazi
holocaust did not eternally absolve the government of Israel of any future wrongdoing, especially in regards
to illegal occupation, targeting of civilians and ghettoization of their Palestinian brothers. Extremists on
both sides fan the flames of discontent and cunningly disguise their true
intentions under the guise of religious struggle and Jihad.
There
are many Jews who see Israel's current policy toward Palestinians as a stain on the religious institutional
mandate that founded their state. 60 years ago the politics were different. We really did
have a black and white US vs. them scenario with Germany. In this day and age it is different because
economics and politics have sidestepped morality, self determination sacrificed for regional and geopolitical security.
Until one can be distanced from ethnocentric
Calvinist world view that of which the modern day equivalent now also equates
Jew with whiteness and Palestinian with blackness, civilized and uncivilized,
the latter a pox on creation, unsuitable to the dominate theological discourse
that it is solely Judeo-Christian culture that constitutes modernity
than terrorism will continue to be waged by both sides. The Arabs
will view the US as
eternally biased culturally toward Arabs and hence we will be viewed as
the enemy infidel. Failure to establish multilateral negotiations on
equal terms for both parties will increase the cycle of violence out of
which the contents will soon manifest more terrorist attacks on American
soil.
Behind
the façade of religion the true economic and political reasons for
Israeli hegemony are:
Israel's
growing population needs housing and Israeli developers want to
build on Palestinian land. ex. Golan Heights. In
order for cessation of conflict to occur in Palestine will
ultimately require that these Jewish settlers be resettled elsewhere.
Further
escalation of conflict guarantees the constant need to reinforce
state security aims and maintains the US-Israeli, arms sales status
quo.
Quote
from Edward Said on the formation
of Israel
"In 1948, at the moment that
Israel declared itself a state, it legally owned a little more than 6 percent
of the land of Palestine...After 1940, when the mandatory authority restricted
Jewish land ownership to specific zones inside Palestine, there continued
to be illegal buying (and selling) within the 65 percent of the total area
restricted to Arabs.
Thus when the partition plan was
announced in 1947 it included land held illegally by Jews, which was incorporated
as a fait accompli inside the borders of the Jewish state. And after Israel
announced its statehood, an impressive series of laws legally assimilated
huge tracts of Arab land (whose proprietors had become refugees, and were
pronounced 'absentee landlords' in order to expropriate their lands and
prevent their return under any circumstances)." Edward
Said, "The Question of Palestine."
See
these url:s for more info:
http://sun3.lib.uci.edu/indiv/scctr/Wellek/said/book25.html
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679739882/palestinebook-20/104-0961657-9656732
Other
Books by Edward Said:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/index=books&field-author=Said%2C%20Edward%20W./104-0961657-9656732
Orientalism: a Brief Definition
http://65.107.211.206/post/poldiscourse/pol11.html
"Palestinian attempts to set
up a real state were blocked by Egypt
and Jordan.
When the fighting ended in 1949, Israel
held territories beyond the boundaries set by the UN plan - a total of 78%
of the area west of the Jordan River. The rest of
the area assigned to the Arab state was occupied by Egypt
and Jordan. Egypt
held the Gaza Strip and Jordan held the West Bank.
About 700,000 Arabs fled or were driven out of Israel
and became refugees in neighboring Arab countries. The Arab countries refused
to sign a permanent peace treaty with Israel.
Consequently, the borders of Israel
established by the armistice commission never received de jure
(legal) international recognition. "
other
source quotes
http://www.pacificnews.org/content/pns/2001/dec/1214unholy.html
http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/10/26/home/oz-slopes.html
http://www.jewsnotzionists.org/
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/world/DailyNews/mideast010802_hamas.html
Israeli-Likud-Labor Coalition
Collapses Thu, Oct 31 2002 5:19 AM AEDT
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2002/10/item20021031001814_1.htm
on
the Israeli settlements Haertz Monday,
October
28, 2002 Cheshvan 22, 5763 Israel Time: 23:58 (GMT+2)
The
settlers' persecution
http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=%20224145&subContrassID=3&sbSubContrassID=0&listSrc=Y&itemNo=224145
Meet
the new Zionists The members of the Christian Coalition of America are some of the most passionate defenders
of Israel in the United States. There's just one catch: they want
to convert all Jews to Christianity. Matthew Engel reports on an unholy
alliance Monday October 28, 2002 The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,820528,00.html
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