Intellectual Resistance and the Struggle for Palestine

M. Abraham

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137031945
• eBook ISBN: 9781137031952
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Adult Education

By positioning the late Edward Said's political interventions as a public intellectual on behalf of Palestinian populations living under Israeli occupation as a form of intellectual resistance, Abraham moves to consider forms of physical resistance, seeking to better understand the motivations of those who choose to turn their bodies into weapons.

Chapter 1

From Resistance to Accommodation

The Origins of the Policy Intellectual’s Alignment with the State

Introduction

The US invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and the disastrous results of the ensuing occupation placed American Jewry in a difficult and undeserving position. As the US occupation seemed to descend into increasingly more chaos, and as the original justifications for the war emerged as untenable, an unfortunate caricature emerged of American Jews’ political perspectives, which are presumably as diverse as those of any ethnoreligious group might be.1 Such caricaturing enabled reactionaries to resurrect, and to deploy with great effectiveness, the nasty “dual loyalty” charge against prominent American Jewish neoconservatives who served in the Bush administration, which unfairly suggested that—within the context of formulating Middle East policy as US officials—these figures will always place Israel’s interests ahead of those of the United States.2 While “Richard Perle,” “Paul Wolfowitz,” “Douglas Feith,” “Scooter Libby,” “Eliot Abrams,” “Dov Zakheim,” and “Eliot Cohen” are the names offered up as examples of high-standing American Jewish neoconservatives in the Bush administration who were eager to see the United States invade Iraq, they very well may have believed that US and Israeli interests coincided with respect to toppling Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. These neoconservatives believed in and hoped for a domino effect in the Middle East after Hussein’s ouster—one in which corrupt Arab regimes would fall one by one. Some figures, including Israel’s top military commanders, have identified Israel’s key role in hyping the intelligence used to justify the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003, suggesting that Israel’s long-term security needs were the main motivation for the US invasion.3 Given the prominence of so many American Jews in key foreign policy positions who dealt with shaping US Middle East policy within the Bush administration, a facile assumption has emerged: namely, that individuals such as Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Elliot Abrams, and Paul Wolfowitz have really acted as agents of the state of Israel in their capacity as American officials.

With a great deal of blame for the invasion being lodged against the neoconservative movement, and with many of that movement’s leading figures being of Jewish origin, a tacit—and, I would argue, unfortunate—assumption has disseminated that the philosophical foundations for concepts such as preemptive war against nations in Bush’s Axis of Evil, the denouncement of international bodies such as the United Nations that uphold international law and diplomatic negotiations, and the demonization of much of the Arab world for its inability or reluctance to create free markets and sustainable democracies were in fact generated with the interests of Israel in mind. Surely, one could evaluate Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and Paul Wolfowitz as one-time Bush administration officials—who happened to be Jewish—working for the best interests of the United States and not as agents of the Israeli government seeking to craft US Middle East policy for the sole benefit of Israel as some have argued.4 What made it difficult to believe, however—prior to the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003—that figures such as Perle, Feith, and Wurmser were working within their administrative positions solely with the best interests of the United States in mind was their endorsement of a policy report called “A Clean Break: A Strategy for Securing the Realm,” written in July 1996 for then-Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It argued that Israel could take care of its security needs by pursuing an aggressive military strategy in dealing with its Arab neighbors, as had long been advocated by right-wing Zionism.5 This report pushed for preemptive military action against Syria, Iran, and Hezbollah. Five years earlier, this report, titled the “Defense Policy Report,” was presented to George H. Bush as he neared the completion of his one and only term. At that time, the report was the object of ridicule because the United States, rather than Israel, was being forwarded as the regional hegemon capable of fighting Israel’s supposed enemies.

The authors of the “Clean Break” and “Defense Policy Report” were—as a matter of coincidence—American Jews with close connections to key officials in the Israeli government. It is dubious whether, from this observation, one can make any empirically verifiable inferences that American Jewish officials with Zionist sympathies were able to exert undue influence within the Bush administration in formulating US Middle East policy, but, nonetheless, it has a polemical edge that has obtained some salience within the public sphere. It is important either to dispel, once and for all, this polemical charge or to find a more intellectually satisfying basis for its articulation. In his Deadly Dogma: How Neoconservatives Broke the Law to Deceive America, Grant Smith contends that “one of the last significant colonial questions, that of the state of Israel, has enjoyed absolute US weight on the side of the Israelis, thanks in part to neocon thought, leadership, and lobbying, which is partisan to Israeli retention of occupied territories, nuclear weapons, and subsidies from the U.S.” (21). On what grounds, if any, does Smith’s condemnation of the neoconservative movement—as it has sought to advance the US-Israel special relationship—stand? What relationship, if any, exists between neoconservatism and Zionism? Has the neoconservative movement’s forwarding of an aggressive US Middle East policy merely allowed for an all-too-easy conflation of American Jewish interests and Zionist interests by critics, or are there, in fact—as many suggest—deeper ties between these two ideological tendencies? It is these questions, as broad as they are, to which we must turn.

The Intellectual Stakes

William King and Alan Wald responded to the allegation, which was first made by Michael Lind in the New Statesman, that there is a direct line of descent from Trotsky’s “Permanent Revolution” to the neoconservative dream of Perle, Feith, and Wolfowitz to remake the Middle East through preemptive military intervention.6 As I argue, it is not the Trotskyist wing of the New York intellectual movement to which one must turn, but instead attention must be paid to the radical shift that ensued among leading American intellectuals after Israel’s impressive military victory in the Six-Day War in 1967. Prior to 1967, Israel did not merit much attention among either the New York intellectuals or other elite intellectuals in the United States. It is this shift one must address to better understand why modern-day neoconservatism fully supports Israel’s aggressive militarism in the Middle East. Before doing so, however, we must consider the configuration of the current historical moment, particularly with respect to American Jewry and Israel.

While it is undoubtedly true that the majority of American Jews opposed the Iraq invasion, the majority of American Jewish organizations supported it. How does one explain this disparity? According to Eric Alterman, “major Jewish groups respond to the demands of their top funders and best-organized constituencies,” while “most American Jews, however, have little or nothing to do with these groups.” As people struggle to find answers to the question “Why did the United States really invade Iraq?” the interests of another country—Israel—repeatedly surface as possibly providing the “real” motivation behind the press to invade Iraq in March 2003.7 But how could Israel, as a “junior” partner in its alliance with the United States, influence the world’s remaining military superpower to invade another country? Certainly such a suggestion presumes that the United States went to war in March 2003 to remove even the remote possibility that Iraq’s large Sunni population could ever pose a security threat to Israel’s quest for regional supremacy—a central tenet of Labor Zionist thinking.8 If this thesis is plausible, then, what does it mean that an analysis of a possible central reason for the US invasion of Iraq has been placed beyond the bounds of political discussion in the United States, as, for instance, Virginia Congressman James Moran quickly discovered when he tried to raise the issue?9

Similar concerns about Israel’s attempts to push the United States toward military engagement with Iran—to disarm Iran’s supposed military capability—have been expressed by figures such as General Wesley Clark, who, when asked why the United States favored war with Iran, said, “you just have to read what’s in the Israeli press. The Jewish community is divided but there is so much pressure being channeled from the New York money people to the office seekers.”10 Clark was immediately denounced as an anti-Semite for these remarks and was asked to apologize by the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee, with both organizations taking out full-page ads in the New York Times condemning Clark for trafficking in unsavory stereotypes that have historically been deployed against Jews. As American Prospect journalist Matthew Yglesias noted, however, “everything Clark said is true. What’s more, everyone knows it’s true” (emphasis in original).11 Of course, Yglesias is being hyperbolic with this statement, since not everyone knows—or believes—what Clark said is true. Nonetheless, the notion that wealthy Jewish Americans in New York somehow placed pressure on the Bush administration to go forward with the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 repeats an anti-Semitic stereotype that has been deployed against Jews throughout history.

Given the discursive contours shaping the extremely sensitive debates around the specific roles Israel and the Israel Lobby play in shaping US Middle East policy—and the location of American Jews and Israel’s Christian Zionist supporters in contributing to efforts to tilt US foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction—it is understandable why it is so difficult to have frank discussions about the US-Israel special relationship; the rhetorically loaded charge of anti-Semitism is strewn about widely, in effect, allowing for comparisons to be drawn between justifiable criticisms of Israel and its US supporters (Jewish and non-Jewish) and the anti-Semitic rhetoric of Hitler’s Third Reich. Many individuals and organizations seem intent on making it impossible to think about or discuss difficult issues such as the new anti-Semitism, Israel, and the extent to which American Jews (Zionist and non-Zionist) either support or speak out against Israeli militarism. Unless one resists the tendency to invoke the evil specters associated with Germany in 1933, there is little or no chance of understanding the predicament animating the present historical moment.12 To claim, however, that Hamas, Hezbollah, and Ahmadinejad are the “new Hitlers” is neither helpful nor responsible; indeed, to traffic in such comparisons is to do violence to history and to the present context. To conduct a productive discussion about the US-Israel special relationship and the key function neoconservatives have played in promoting it, one must make key distinctions between vastly different historical moments. As the late Israeli dissident Israel Shahak, a survivor of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, once wrote,

true, any knowledge, no matter how approximate, of the extent of Jewish influence upon the US policies is hard to obtain. The topic is taboo in the US (although not in Israel), with all major American Jewish organizations exerting themselves to maintain the taboo, often with the help of philosemitic Christians, who delude themselves by gagging discussion of Jewish affairs, and in particular about Jewish chauvinism and exclusivism, they ‘atone’ for the Holocaust. Reliable knowledge about Israeli influence, as about any other taboo subject, can be arrived at only after the interdict is lifted and the subject is freely discussed. (141)

If free discussion about the possible interrelationship between Israel and the US invasion of Iraq is to take place, it seems necessary then to openly explore the possible connection between neoconservatism, Zionism, and US Middle East policy—allowing, at the same time, for analytical errors to be made, as is often the case when dealing with any subject, taboo or not—without any error being flagged in advance as evidence of “anti-Semitism.”

US Support for Israel: The Background

As the United States’ vital ally in the Middle East and as arguably the fourth strongest military power in the world, Israel is a regional and international player in the game of geostrategic dominance and power politics. A popular and persistent illusion—that Israel has long sought peace with its Arab neighbors but has been unable to find a genuine “peace-partner”—persists, however, despite diplomatic and historical evidence to the contrary.13 The following facts are uncontroversial: since 1976, the Arab states have (1) recognized Israel’s “right to exist” within its pre-June 1967 borders and (2) not been committed to Israel’s destruction. This version of history, of course, does not sit well with the widely disseminated propaganda version, which requires that Israel’s “very existence” be continually presented as being in jeopardy. As Livia Rokach documents in Israel’s Sacred Terrorism, in which she draws on Moshe Sharett’s diaries for supporting evidence, Israel has sought—since its founding—to follow a program of perpetual war with its Arab neighbors.14 In fact, Israel has not sought to live in peace with its Arab neighbors, as is popularly believed. Instead it has sought to exert its quest for regional dominance whenever possible. Israel frequently creates pretexts for supposedly defensive wars—as it did in June 1982 prior to its invasion of Lebanon—for furtherance of its strategic aims.15 While pressuring its patron, the United States, with promises of cataclysmic violence in the region if its demands for unprecedented military support and diplomatic aid are not met, Israel has made it difficult—if not impossible—for the Israel-Palestine conflict to actually be resolved.16 Indeed, preventing an actual resolution to the conflict is a goal that a number of dedicated individuals and organizations pursue with great energy.17 Although popularly portrayed within the mainstream media as a “neutral broker” in the Israel-Palestine conflict, the United States has unequivocally sided with the Israeli government in its continual efforts to dispossess the Palestinian population of crucial pieces of territory in the West Bank, giving Israel full access to the United States’ top-shelf military armaments such as F-16s and Apache and Blackhawk Longbow attack helicopters, knowing full well that Israel will use this weaponry against Palestinian civilians.18 In addition, the United States has used its considerable standing in the world community to shield Israel from having to comply with international law, frequently vetoing near-unanimous UN security resolutions that call upon Israel to cease hostilities with its Arab neighbors, dismantle illegal settlements in the West Bank, and reveal the extent of its own nuclear facilities to the international community.

The United States and Israel have chosen to ignore United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, which requires Israel to pull back to the 1967 Green Line and immediately remove its population from the West Bank in accordance with international law, demonstrating that Israel does not have to comply with international law as long as the balance of military might is on its side. Since the United States is the most powerful member of the United Nations, whose veto can obstruct the will of nearly 190 other countries, Israel can act as an outlaw state with relative impunity. Given Israel’s human rights record in suppressing any base for the expression of Palestinian nationalism, along with Israel’s extensive nuclear arsenal and the United States’ seeming support and shielding of both, it is hardly surprising that calls for Iran to terminate its uranium enrichment program are greeted with ridicule and contempt within the Arab world and much of Europe.19

When this factual record is compared with what the average American knows about the US-Israel special relationship, it becomes clear that several discourses have grown up, and taken root, around these specific topics, surveilling and controlling what can be articulated—and even known—about the subject of Israel’s influence over US Middle East policy. Understanding how these discourses have grown and taken root requires one to inventory the intellectual precursors of neoconservatism. Jewish intellectuals, as intellectuals of legitimation, have played a key role in this movement. And ironically, American welfare liberalism has functioned as the midwife of this Israelist-neoconservative linkage. Jewish liberal intellectuals’ work in helping to expand state protections for vulnerable minorities during the civil rights movement, for instance, later became a key aspect in explaining how and why American Jews, sympathetic to Zionism’s aims, became key players in the American welfare state and supporters of the aggressive, interventionist neoconservative state in later years.20

Jewish Intellectuals and Neoconservatism

Tracing the rise of Jewish intellectuals as they have become associated with legitimizing the state and its agencies is an important part of understanding the rise of the neoconservative movement.21 To borrow a phrase from Benjamin Ginsberg, the Jews’ “fatal embrace” of the state has been both a godsend and a curse.22 It has been a godsend in that the state has provided vital corrections to the perfidy of societal and institutional anti-Semitism. It has been a curse in that the figure of the Jew once again has been unjustly associated with capitalism, mercantilism, wage exploitation, usury, and the legitimizing functions of the state. In The Utopian Dilemma: American Judaism and Public Policy, Murray Friedman writes, “At least until recent years, political liberalism has been the secular religion of American Jews” (6). In America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order, Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke write, “Intellectuals such as [Norman] Podhoretz argued that the American commitment to Israel derived from Israel’s democratic rather than religious nature. He emphasized that the profound neo-conservative commitment to Isra...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Intellectual Resistance and the Struggle for Palestine
• 1. From Resistance to Accommodation: The Origins of the Policy Intellectual’s Alignment with the State
• 2. Edward Said and Intellectual Resistance: Refusing the Politics of Accommodation
• 3. Edward Said, the Question of Palestine, and the Continual Quest for Intellectual Freedom
• 4. Biopolitical Resistance in Palestine: Suicide Bombing and the Fanonian Specter
• 5. Obama’s Cairo Speech: The Failure of Resistance and Refusal
• Conclusion: Intellectual Resistance and the Struggle for Palestine
• Notes
• Selected Works Cited