How Not to Win Friends and Influence People
In the UN vote demanding that Israel "desist from any act of deportation and cease any threat to
the safety of the elected president of the Palestinian Authority.", 133
nations supported the resolution. The
US and Israel could count only on their faithful allies, Micronesia and the
Marshall Islands. In other words, not
one NATO or EU country was on their side.
The same can be said of every Latin American country, every East Asian
country, and every African country.
The US stance is not one of principle; the US disapproves of Israel's
threats. It can hardly be one of
expediency. How does a nation get
itself into this position? More to the
point, what keeps it there? The
reasons for the alliance are historical, not practical, and its survival causes
nothing but trouble.
How Israel became an Ally
Jewish organizations and prominent Zionists have always exerted
an important pro-Israel influence in Washington: there is nothing unsurprising, unusual or even particularly
improper about this sort of lobbying.
But the US would never have allied itself with Israel merely to serve
Zionist interests. The alliance with
Israel was above all a child of the Cold War.
From before 1948 until the mid-1950s, both the US and the Soviet
Union attempted to extend their influence in the Middle East by helping both Zionists and
Arabs. Both sides hastened to recognize
Israel. But the US imposed an arms
embargo on Israel in 1948, and maintained it with minor exceptions until the
Hawk missile sale of 1962. (Even then,
according to some authorities, the sale was to be linked to the repatriation by
Israel of some 100,000 to 150,000 Palestinian refugees!) The US also signed a mutual defense pact
with Saudi Arabia in 1951, and initially endorsed the 1952 coup that brought a
nationalist government to Egypt. As
for the Soviets, as late as 1956 the Soviet Union was supplying Israel with
cheap oil to circumvent the Arab boycott, and Israel refused to supply NATO
with military bases to counter a Soviet threat. But starting in the early 1950s, Israeli-Soviet relations soured
and Arab-Soviet relations prospered.
What changed the face of Middle East politics was not Zionist lobbying,
but Egypt's Gamel Abdel Nasser.
Nasser, as much an Egyptian as an Arab nationalist, quite
naturally sought to improve his position by exploiting great power
rivalries. This alienated him from a
United States increasingly concerned about Soviet influence in the Middle
East. In March 1955, Nasser refused to
join the anti-communist Baghdad Pact. A
month later, at the Bandung Conference, he moved to form a neutral bloc of
exactly those nations the West was trying to recruit against the Soviet Union. Next he announced a sale of cotton to
Communist China, a country then embroiled in a frightening confrontation with
the US over Quemoy and Matsu. The
West's alarm compounded when he built on barter agreements with the Soviet bloc
to conclude, in September 1955, a major arms deal with Czechoslovakia. Its impact was felt throughout the Arab
world and beyond.
In May 1956, while the Quemoy-Matsu crisis was still smoldering,
Nasser recognized China. With his
modern weaponry and vigorous diplomacy, he was widely seen as the leader of the
entire Arab world. The West became
dismayed enough to withdraw financing for his most important development
project, the Aswan Dam. In response,
Nasser nationalized the Suez canal. In
the ensuing 1956 Suez invasion, America sided with Egypt against Israel,
Britain and France, but only to co-opt the Soviet Union, which had stated that
any further Franco-British advances into Egyptian
territory would be met by force.
For the superpowers, that marked the end of serious efforts to play both
sides of the street.
The 1956 war for the first time showed Israel as a militarily
capable power which could, on its own,
defeat Arab forces armed with Soviet weaponry.
And to the US, communist-backed Arab forces began to seem worth
defeating. Nasser maintained
increasingly close relations with the Soviet Union, and the launch of Sputnik
in October 1957 aggravated American anxieties about a worldwide Soviet
threat. Egypt's union with Syria in
February 1958 made its ties with the USSR all the more disturbing.
By October 1958, when the Soviet Union announced it would
provide financing for the Aswan Dam, the lines were clearly drawn. The Arabs, led by Egypt, were on the Soviet
side, and the Israelis became the very useful proxies of the West. (One of the first services Israel rendered to
the West was when, in July 1958, it allowed "a British and American
airlift of strategic materials through Israeli airspace to prop up the
embattled Jordanian monarchy that was being challenged by a radical nationalist
uprising fomented by Egypt's Nasser."(*))
This is the origin of the United States' deep commitment to Israel. Zionist influences certainly helped form
this commitment, but they were never decisive. In the end it was American
security concerns that cemented the US-Israel alliance.
With the fall of the Soviet Union, the rationale for the
alliance ceased, but the alliance itself rolls on, its inertia abetted by the
disinclination of Americans to put any obstacle in its course. Stale ideology has enshrined a
counterproductive alliance at the heart of American foreign policy.
The Alliance Today
Nowadays, the alliance with Israel is typically defended on
nebulous grounds: Israel is 'our
friend', 'shares our values', is 'a staunch ally in the war on terror'. These phrases disguise the fact that, in
contrast to most alliances, there is virtually no confluence of Israeli and
American interests.
That Israel is 'our friend' implies an affection for which there
is little evidence: even discounting
spy scandals and the Liberty incident, the relationship is certainly prickly
enough. So the only sense in which
Israel is truly 'our friend' is that Israel is our ally. This of course begs the question at hand. No one would dispute that Israel is our ally
in the sense that we have allied ourselves with her; at issue is whether this
alliance is to America's advantage.
As for 'sharing values', this is too nebulous to take
seriously. Alliances involve common
interests, not common mentalities.
Iran and the United States, at least in its post-Reagan incarnation,
share deeply felt family values. In
the Second World War, Italy and France probably shared more values than Italy
and Germany, or France and Russia; the alliances did not reflect these facts. And it must be said that, though Israel does
indeed believe in democracy, the American conception of democracy would not
permit territorial control of three million Palestinians for thirty-five years
without any role in the election of their ultimate rulers, the Israeli
government.
With communism no more a common enemy, the Israelis had to worry
about the appearance of a common cause.
In this respect, 9-11 was a godsend, because it enabled Israel to
present itself as a comrade in the war on terror. But to say the US and Israel both want to fight terror is a bit
like saying that the US and Iran both want to defend themselves against
external attacks. In this blatantly
insufficient sense the US and Iran do indeed have some basis for an alliance,
namely a common interest in weapons development. Even enemies can share an interest in certain military
technologies. An alliance requires a
deeper sort of common interest, objectives that involve more than the technical
means to further possibly opposing ends.
This is not the case when it comes to American and Israeli
efforts against terror. Terrorism
experts tell us that Al Qaeda is a semi-organization whose roots lie in Sunni
Wahabist fundamentalism. It has made
sympathetic noises but done nothing useful for the Palestinians, who are so
little inclined to fundamentalism that, in the l970s, the Israelis thought it
wise to encourage the Moslem Brotherhood as an alternative to Arafat.(**) The defeat of Al Qaeda would help Israel as
little as the defeat of Hamas will help the US. "The war on terror" does not name a common cause but
an abstraction so vague as to give the false impression that such a cause
exists. Even supposing that both
American and Israeli struggles against terror are entirely legitimate and productive,
there is simply no significant linkage between them.
On the other hand, the claim and pretense of linkage is itself
strategically damaging to the US.
Hizbollah and Hamas want to attack Israel, not America. But of course the more Israel induces the
Americans to strike directly at these terrorist organizations, the more they
will turn their attention to the United States. The false claim that America and Israel have these common enemies itself does much to make
Israel's enemies our own. This hardly
speaks for the alliance.
Even if the America's and Israel's wars on terror are quite
different struggles, Israel might still, through its expertise and technology,
be a valuable ally. But for this to be
true, the US-Israel alliance would have to have technical advantages
outweighing any political or strategic disadvantages. This is not the case.
For one thing, the technical advantages of doing business with
Israeli firms should not be confused with the technical advantages of the
US-Israel alliance. Israel of course
benefits at least as much as the US from technological cooperation. So, if only for defense and commercial
reasons, it would want such cooperation to continue whether or not the
political alliance with the US continued.
Countries need not be allies to do business with one another, which is
why the US, even as it was planning its attack on Saddam Hussein, continued to
buy his oil. Moreover Israel's
technical excellence is impressive but hardly indispensable. Other advanced Western countries, not to
mention American firms, could do the same work, and the latter alternative
would naturally have security advantages.
Israel's technological contributions to America's arsenal may benefit
the United States, but not moreso than readily available alternatives.
On the other hand, Israel does nothing but harm the strategic
and political position of the United States.
This is apparent whether you look at the purported advantages of the
alliance, or at its known disadvantages.
The purported advantages
It is often claimed that the US alliance with Israel is
motivated by oil politics. This is
implausible. Why would American
concerns about its oil supply prompt it to ally itself with the one power in
the world that drives its suppliers to distraction? Were it not for that alliance, the US would be able to apply much
more direct and finely tuned pressure on oil-rich governments. Israel is (a) best positioned to pressure
states which are not significant oil producers - Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt
- (b) utterly superfluous for pressuring the very feeble Gulf states, and (c)
politically unsuitable, as the Gulf Wars showed, for pressuring militarily
strong producers like Iraq and Iran.
And what is true of oil is true, mutatis mutandis, of other US economic
interests: Israel is more a hindrance than a help in
furthering them.
The portrayal of Israel as America's stationary aircraft carrier
is equally unconvincing in this
context. Again, this made a certain
paranoid sense when the enemy was communism, because the states bordering on
Israel were considered the most likely to go communist. But the US does not need or want Israel to
strike through Jordan and Syria to Gulf oil fields. This 'solution' would be much more of a problem than simply
occupying the oil fields with American troops.
The US today would have no more difficulty securing or controlling
Middle East oil supplies than the Allies did during World War I, long before
Israel existed. The one thing that
might conceivably come in handy - lots of expendable ground troops - only
friendly Arab governments, not Israel, could provide.
As for more immediate objectives, there is no common interest at
all. America has absolutely no desire
for Israeli settlers to dispossess the Palestinians of the little that remains
to them, no desire whatever to persecute the Palestinians in any way. Israel benefits from these activities;
America merely pays the price, in dollars and lives. This is an offense not only to morality but to common sense.
Why the alliance should end.
Despite the air of unshakeable piety that surrounds the
US-Israel alliance, it has never been, even at its height, the sacred bond that
we habitually suppose it to be. Even
after the Yom Kippur war, when the US replenished Israel's arsenal, US aid to
Egypt was very substantial and preceded the Camp David agreements of 1977. In 1974, for instance, Nixon signed a treaty providing Egypt with nuclear technology 'for peaceful
purposes'. Saudi Arabia, still at war
with Israel, is armed by the United States. And how soon we forget the amazing fact that, in 1990, the US and
Syria were military allies.
In fact, America would be far better off on the other side of
the Israel/Palestine conflict. It
would instantly gain the warm friendship of Arab oil producers and obtain far
more valuable allies in the war on terror:
not only the governments of the entire Muslim world, but a good portion
of the Muslim fundamentalist movement!
The war on terror, which seems so unwinnable, might well be won at
nominal cost, and quickly. All it
would take would be to make Israel, in the absence of withdrawal from the
occupied territories, the object of the kind of coalition forged against Iraq
in the first Gulf War. Of course,
against Israel the coalition would be far broader and stronger, including all
the countries of the former Soviet Union, Iran, Libya, Pakistan, and many
others. And though Israel is quite
strong enough to persist in its policies without US support, it could not stand
up to such a coalition.(***) Israel
would be forced to follow its own best interests and make peace.
Perhaps most important, switching sides would revitalize
America's foundering efforts at non-proliferation. The there are two main reasons why other countries resist these
efforts: fear of American attack, and
the outrageous exemption of Israel from non-proliferation initiatives. It is simply absurd to suppose that any
serious effort to stem the development of nuclear weapons can proceed in the absence
of any attempt to disarm Israel, which is estimated to possess between 200 and
500 nuclear warheads. Having launched
its own satellites, it clearly has the capacity to hit targets anywhere in the
world, and possesses cruise missiles that have hit targets 950 miles away. Until it is forced either to disarm or to
establish good relations with its neighbours, the pace of proliferation will
simply increase. On the other hand,
US efforts to neutralize the Israeli nuclear threat would win support for
proliferation efforts from Pakistan and Iran.
In these circumstances, in a radically different political environment,
the problem of North Korea would no longer seem intractable. Meanwhile the US contents itself with
hollow victories such as Libya’s recent gesture, the nuclear disarmament of a
country that never had nuclear weapons in the first place.
In short, one has only to conceive the end of the Israel-US
alliance to be overwhelmed with the benefits of such a move - very likely, even
to Israel itself. That once-beneficial
alliance, a legacy of the Cold War, has turned poisonous to America's security
and its future.
-----------------
(*) Michael Rubner,
review of Decade of Transition: Eisenhower, Kennedy, and the Origins of the
American-Israeli Alliance, by Abraham Ben-Zvi. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1998, Middle East Policy, Volume VI, Number 3, February 1999,
http://www.mepc.org/public_asp/journal_vol6/9902_rubner.asp
(**) This policy
prepared the ground for the emergence of Hamas in the 1980s. see http://www.pbs.org/newshour/booboo/middle_east/July-dec01/hamas_12-4.html
(***) According to Andrew Cordesman, a senior analyst at the
Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, that Israel could
fight for two years before needing US help. (http://www.nj.com/news/ledger/
index.ssf?/base/news-1/101834340582787.xml).