The Senselessness of Joining in a Sunni vs. Shiite War

GARY LEUPP

What sense does this make? The U.S. is abetting Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Jordan. Morocco and Sudan—all ruled by Sunni Muslims who despise Shiite Muslims—to attack and roll back advances by the Shiite Houthis of Yemen who are eager to fight al-Qaeda and ISIL in that impoverished, unstable nation.

Recall that shortly after 9/11, the George W. Bush administration declared that “he who is not for us is against us,” scaring the shit out of anyone hesitant to cooperate with U.S. war plans. Yemeni strongman Ali Abdullah Saleh, who had come to power in 1990, cooperated with the U.S. during the first Gulf War, arranged to get his nation removed from the U.S.’s “terror sponsor” list, purchased weapons from the U.S., and cooperated in the investigation of the al-Qaeda attack on the U.S.S. Cole in Yemeni waters in 2000, rushed to Washington in November 2001 to declare fealty.

This meeting was followed up by a meeting between Vice President Dick Cheney, de facto leader of the U.S. “War on Terror” and Saleh in Yemen’s capital Sana’a in March 2002. In the interim the U.S. announced that it would send hundreds of troops to Yemen and afterwards the Yemeni government confirmed that the U.S. would dispatch 200 “advisers” to train local troops against al-Qaeda terrorists (whom, by the way, were then small in number but have burgeoned steadily ever since).

In Yemen on March 14 Cheney stated that the U.S. was “being responsive to Yemen’s request for training its special forces in their counter-terrorism mission, [and also] planning to address essential military equipment needs and to increase assistance to Yemen’s Coast Guard and economy.” But on April 11 Saleh told al-Jazeera the real story: “As for the American anti-terror security experts and technical equipment, it is not we who requested them. It is the U.S. government that said ‘prove your genuineness and let the experts in’ so we let them in.”

Meanwhile Yemen’s ruling General People’s Congress (GPC) accused U.S. ambassador Edmond Hull of “interfering” in domestic affairs and threatened to expel him. “Since he was appointed (last September), ambassador Edmond Hull has behaved like a high commissioner, not like a diplomat in a country which is opposed to any form of interference” by a foreign state, reported a GPC-linked newspaper. “Edmund Hull adopts a very haughty behaviour, far-removed from his diplomatic duties, when he speaks to certain Yemeni officials,” adding that Hull should “respect Yemen in order not to become persona non grata.” From the very beginning of the U.S.-Yemen alliance, the relationship has been characterized by mutual antipathy.

Thirteen years and countless anti-U.S. demonstrations later—protesting U.S. political interference, the asinine anti-Islam Youtube video of 2012, and most importantly the drone strikes—radical Islamists are more numerous and active than ever in the Arab world’s poorest country, where 45% of the people live under the poverty line. Over 800 “al-Qaeda militants” have supposedly been killed by drone strikes, but it’s hard to know how much credibility to attach to the claim. The Obama administration considers any post-pubescent male in the wrong place at the wrong time a “combatant” suitable for slaughter.

In November 2011, the 40-year-old U.S.-born cleric Anwar Awlaki was killed by a drone strike. Few in this country mourned, although the legal precedent (target-killing a U.S. citizen that way without any trial or conviction of a crime) caused some unease in some quarters. Less attention was given to a separate strike the next day that apparently targeted and killed Awlaki’s 16-year-old son and a teenage cousin. Apparently their only crime was the family connection.

According to the Long War Journal, 35 civilians were killed in U.S. drone strikes in 2012, along with 193 considered “militants.” A 12-year-old boy was among the victims of a strike Feb. 9 this year, after which Slate Magazine asked, “What if drones are part of the problem?” What if they’re just generating more of what the CIA calls “blowback”?

Recall that during the “Arab Spring” of 2011, President Obama concluded at some point that Egypt’s President Mubarak, who had long been a “staunch ally” of the U.S. , had become so unpopular with his people that further U.S. support would damage the relationship with Egypt. So he gave Mubarak his marching orders. (You can do that if you’re the president of the United States.

The Egyptian dictator was succeeded by a democratically elected member of the Muslim Brotherhood, then toppled by the military with tacit U.S. approval. In Yemen, where the “spring” also brought massive protests against the regime in power, Obama ordered long-time U.S. ally Saleh to step down.  Saleh was obliged to comply in February 2012, while remaining active behind the scenes in his retirement.

Before that—in the early months of the “Arab Spring” in 2011—Glevum Associates conducted a poll in Yemen of 1005 adult men and women. Its results are telling. It found that 88% of Yemenis at the time thought their country was heading “in the wrong direction.” 98% had an unfavorable perception of the U.S. government (55% “very unfavorable,” 43% “somewhat unfavorable”). Only 40% approved strongly or somewhat with President Saleh’s cooperation with the U.S.

99% opposed the U.S.-led “War on Terrorism.” 99% had an unfavorable perception of U.S. relations with the Islamic world.
66% thought the U.S. had no or very little concern about Yemeni interests. The analysts concluded, “The overwhelming majority of Yemenis think that the economic, military and cultural influence of the U.S. in the world is bad and that the U.S. does not take into account the interests of countries like Yemen when it acts.”

52% of those surveyed thought that the Arab League was best able to help Yemen (only 1% thought this of the U.S.). Perhaps most shocking, Anwar Awlaki’s popularity exceeded that of President Saleh’s.

On September 12, 2012 demonstrators stormed the U.S. embassy in protest of the anti-Islam film posted on YouTube. They were mistaken in supposing that the U.S. government was behind it, or might have prevented it, but this was an indication of the profoundly anti-U.S. sentiments documented in the Gleuvum Associated study. In November there were more demonstrations in Sana’a, this time in support of the ousted Saleh, blaming the U.S. for his departure. They were largely Shiite-led demonstrations.

This is significant. It showed that Saleh (depicted in U.S. propaganda as a casualty of a popular uprising) actually retained his own social base in a complicated society, and that while he had fought the Houthis in the past, with Saudi and U.S. support, he was now aligning himself with Houthis and his fellow Shiites in general against the U.S.-orchestrated Hadi regime.

The U.S. political class and State Department-briefed mainstream press have shown themselves (again) to be totally clueless about intra-Muslim issues. It is as though they find these problems so arcane, requiring so much homework to figure out, that they can dispense with them all together and boil them all down to one allegation: Iran is the headquarters of global Shiism, and wherever Shiites are struggling to retain or acquire power, Iran must be held responsible for their actions.

Syria is led by Alewites, a branch or offshoot of Shiism. Ergo, Tehran supports the Assad regime. Hizbollah in Lebanon is a Shiite movement, so it must be a pawn of Iran. The demonstrators in Bahrain as mainly Shiites; thus the mullahs in Iran are instigating their protests. The Houthis are Shiites, so Iran must be driving their rebellion in a bid to dominate Yemen.

This interpretation is absurd. It is immediately refuted by the fact that Iran has not embraced the cause of Azerbaijan, and its claim to Nagoro-Karabach, in relation to the Republic of Armenia that supports the independence of the ethnically Armenian region surrounded by and claimed by Azerbaijan. (In 1923 the Soviet government made the decision to make Nagorno-Karabach an autonomous oblast within the Azerbaijan SSR. With the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, the new leaders in Azerbaijan sought to retain control over the region—rather like the new Georgian state tried to retain control over South Ossetia and Abhkazia. Armenia supported the secessionists in the subsequent Nagorno-Karabakh War of 1988 to 1992.)

Iran is the largest primarily Shiite nation in the world, with 81 million people, 90 to 95% of them Shiites. Iraq is number two; of its 32 million people, 60 to 65% are Shiites. Azerbaijan is the third most populous mainly Shiite nation in the world, with 8 million people, around 85% of them Shiites. The Azeris have a mixed Iranian-Turkish culture. And there are only four majority Shiite nations in the world, after all (the last being Bahrain). Shouldn’t Iran be best friends with them?

The answer is no. Tehran is more friendly with Christian Armenia than it is with Shiite Azerbaijan, for various geopolitical reasons that have little to do with the Shiite religion. But how often do you recall this matter being discussed in the U.S. press?

Still, Shiism is an important factor in political and military events in the region. U.S. policy in Iraq from 2003 produced the sort of civil conflict between the Shiite majority and Sunni minority that Baathist secularism had kept in check for decades. The fools in charge, arrogantly traipsing around Baghdad in cowboy boots, had no idea their policies would give rise to Iran-backed Shiite parties and militias rising to power on the one hand, and a Sunni resistance vulnerable to terrorist manipulation and even leadership on the other. The current confrontation between ISIL and combined Iraqi and Iranian forces, that has shaped up so dramatically and unexpectedly, is a lesson in what absolute stupidity and indifference to religious history can produce.

Look at a religious map of the Middle East. I recommend this one.

Notice how there are Shiite communities from Afghanistan to the Anatolian Peninsula and the Levant. (There are also millions in India and Pakistan.) Notice how the island country of Bahrain, located across the Persian Gulf from Iran, is mostly Shiite. Over 60%, in fact, but it is ruled by a Sunni monarch. Feeling themselves victims of discrimination, Shiites rose up in the “Arab Spring” in peaceful demonstrations. The king, Hamad ibn Isa Al Khaifa, cracked down severely, and in March 2011, Saudi Arabia and other member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council invaded to quell disturbances. “I saw them chasing Shiites,” one Sunni resident of the city of Sitra recalled, “like they were hunting.”

It might be worth noting in this connection that Prince Bandar bin Sultan, Saudi ambassador to Washington from 1983 to 2005 (and a dear friend of the Bush family) once told journalist Patrick Cockburn that, “The time is not far off in the Middle East, Richard, when it will literally be ‘God help the Shia.’ More than a billion Shia have simply had enough of them.” A chilling prediction?

The Saudi-led invasion of Bahrain came just after U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates had paid a call on the king to thank him for hosting the U.S. Fifth Fleet. The U.S. position on the suppression of this particular expression of the “Arab Spring” was to reiterate its support for the Bahraini and Saudi governments, both of whom blamed Iran for inciting the Bahrainis to rise up. Little evidence has ever been adduced for that.

Similarly, after Shiites in Lebanon responded to the Israeli invasion in 1982 by forming the resistance movement Hizbollah (now aligned with more secular Shiite-based Amal Movement), that movement has been dismissed by its foes as mere proxies and puppets of Iran. As though oppression and invasion do not in themselves invite resistance, but the latter has to be explained in terms of outside agitators’ nefarious interference!

There is in fact a close relationship between Iran and Hizbollah, due in part to deep religious affinities and the studies of its clerics in Iran’s holy city of Qom. But Hizbollah also enjoys close ties to Baathist Syria, which is a far different and more liberal society than Iran. (Women need not wear headscarves. Beer is brewed and sold legally. The state is officially secular, etc.) Those prone to deny the reality of oppressed people’s agency need to depict them as someone else’s surrogates.

And so we come to Yemen. It seems the Bahrain intervention was a mini-dress rehearsal for this, just without the bombs. The Saudis are amassing a huge force to invade, abetted by their allies and receiving logistical and intelligence support from the U.S. Why?

The Yemeni government has long faced multiple insurgencies, including a southern secessionist movement dating back the unification of North Yemen (the Republic of Yemen) and South Yemen (the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen) in 1990. That movement has Baathist and Nasserite elements and is a separate phenomenon from al-Qaeda and ISIL movements in the south. Neither is related to the Shiite movement led by the powerful Houthi tribe in the north. (The Shiite population of Yemen is estimated at 30-35% of the population, the great majority members of the Zaidi denomination of Shiism. This is quite distinct from the form of Shiism prevalent in Iran.)

For many years Houthis have campaigned for a more representative government in Sana’a, and for a greater Houthi voice in parliament (which they dissolved last month). Their primarily peaceful protests, which have never evolved into secessionist demands, met with violent repression in 2004, by the Saleh regime. This led to a six-year war ending in a ceasefire in 2010.

Ironically perhaps, President Saleh was and is a Zaidi Shiite himself, like the Houthis. But he is not overly religious and (according to the Gleuven report) was as well supported by the Sunnis as the Shiites in Yemen while in power. He resigned as noted above in February 2012. In the election for his successor, Vice President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, a Sunni, ran unopposed with U.S. blessing. The point was to appease the masses who had called for Saleh’s resignation (not that he lacked a certain social base which remains supportive), while insuring the continuation of the status quo particularly the U.S. alliance.

But Hadi was less adept at handling the situation(s) in the south, raising Houthi concerns of an al-Qaeda or ISIL takeover or division of the country. Having already obtained control over the governates of Sa’da and al-Jawf (where they have eradicated al-Qaeda), they pressed south to the capital of Sana’a, taking it virtually without bloodshed in January. Representing maybe 40% of the Yemeni population, they seem to enjoy considerable support. They indeed appear to have ex-president Saleh’s support at this point.

In a New York Times interview published February 10 the leader of the Houthi militia, Saleh Ali al-Sammad, said he wanted Yemen to have good relations with the U.S. and other countries, including Saudi Arabia, so long as national sovereignty was respected. He added that the Houthies would reach out to political rivals. Why is Saudi Arabia so determined to crush them—if not to strike terror into the hearts of Shiites everywhere, particularly the rulers of Iran?

The current round of Saudi bombing of the Houthis is by no means the first. In 2009 alone, the Saudi Air Force dropped U.S.-made cluster bombs on 164 locations in the northern province of Sa’ada from U.S.-supplied F-15S fighter jets and UK-supplied Tornado aircraft. On January 22, 2010 UPI reported that Saudi fighter jets had made bombing raids over Houthi rebel positions in northern Yemen, killing about a dozen people and destroying homes.

In late 2010, the director of Amnesty international UK, Kate Allen, reported that over the previous year “Saudi Arabia’s fighter bombers – very likely supplied by the UK – have taken part in the Yemeni government’s massive bombardments of entire villages in Yemen’s restive north, an operation targeting Shia rebels. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of civilians have been killed, with thousands more forced to flee their homes.” Such reports have drawn little attention, much less outrage, in this country wedded at the hip to the Saudi absolute monarchy that routinely beheads people found guilt of adultery, homosexuality or even “witchcraft.”

Some talking head on CNN or MSNBC was noting how odd it is for the U.S. to be supporting Shiite militias led by Iranian officers against (Sunni) ISIL fighters in Iraq, while supporting Sunnis against Shiites in Yemen. Of course there’s more to it than U.S. forces siding confusedly with this or that form of Islam in the Middle East, or tolerating the expansion of Iranian influence in one country while challenging it in another. It’s not that simple.

In Iraq, the U.S. cannot allow the regime it brought to power (however disappointing its performance has been, causing some to charge in exasperation that “We did all this for them, and then they blew it!”) to fall to forces even more hideous than al-Qaeda or Saddam Hussein. Even if it does mean making common cause with Iran and the al-Sadr Brigades. The alternative—ISIL in Baghdad, crucifying and beheading, blowing up monuments—would show the world all too clearly how utterly evil and inexcusable the invasion and occupation of Iraq (that directly produced these results) have been.

And on the Arabian Peninsula, al-Qaeda’s original breeding ground, it cannot alienate the Saudi leaders, whose cooperation is vital in containing al-Qaeda and ISIL, promoting peaceful resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict and most importantly supplying a steady flow of cheap oil to the world market. A Shiite-led Yemen engaged in ongoing conflict with its Wahhabi Sunni-ruled neighbor could lead to all-out war in the Middle East, pitting Iran, Iraq, Syria and Hizbollah against a coalition of Sunni tyrannies whose religious prejudices (that mean nothing to Washington) could draw this country into even more disaster.

The arrogant Americans who once thought they could call the shots in Yemen have been forced to flee the country with their tails between their legs. Obama, who as recently as last September proclaimed Yemen as a model of the “strategy of taking out terrorists who threaten us, while supporting partners on the front lines” has been embarrassed by the collapse of his partners.

In January Hadi resigned as president, citing an irresolvable political “stalemate.” Under house arrest, his home surrounded by Houthi forces, he was able to flee to Aden in February, pronouncing himself once again as “president of the republic” before fleeing the country for Somalia March 25 after Houthis seized the Aden airport.

Meanwhile on February 10 the U.S. embassy, which had evacuated non-essential staff in August 2013, closed down entirely, citing security issues in Sana’a. On February 12 al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula overran a government military base in southern Yemen. Five weeks later 100 U.S. troops evacuated a hitherto secret base near the city of al-Houta as al-Qaeda forces attacked. Not since the retreat of the last U.S. forces from South Vietnam in 1975, or the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979, has U.S. imperialism met with such abject humiliation.

Now Washington must rely on Saudi Arabia and its anti-Shia, anti-Iran coalition to re-impose an acceptable level of stability in Yemen. Meanwhile Obama seeks rapprochement with Iran in part to stabilize Iraq, the current catastrophic condition of which is basically the result of U.S. crimes.

Terrorism, Violence, and the Culture of Madness

Henry A. Giroux

The thought of security bears within it an essential risk. A state which has security as its sole task and source of legitimacy is a fragile organism; it can always be provoked by terrorism to become more terroristic.

— Giorgio Agamben

George Orwell’s nightmarish vision of a totalitarian society casts a dark shadow over the United States. The consequences can be seen clearly in the ongoing and ruthless assault on the social state, workers, unions, higher education, students, poor minorities and any vestige of the social contract. Free market policies, values, and practices with their emphasis on the privatization of public wealth, the elimination of social protections, and the deregulation of economic activity now shape practically every commanding political and economic institution in the United States. Public spheres that once offered at least the glimmer of progressive ideas, enlightened social policies, non-commodified values, and critical dialogue and exchange have been increasingly militarized—or replaced by private spaces and corporate settings whose ultimate fidelity is to increasing profit margins. Citizenship is now subsumed by the national security state and a cult of secrecy, organized and reinforced by the constant mobilization of fear and insecurity designed to produce a form of ethical tranquilization and a paralyzing level of social infantilism.

Chris Hedges crystalizes this premise in arguing that Americans now live in a society in which “violence is the habitual response by the state to every dilemma,” legitimizing war as a permanent feature of society and violence as the organizing principle of politics. Under such circumstances, malevolent modes of rationality now impose the values of a militarized neoliberal regime on everyone, shattering viable modes of agency, solidarity, and hope. Amid the bleakness and despair, the discourses of militarism, danger and war now fuel a war on terrorism “that represents the negation of politics—since all interaction is reduced to a test of military strength war brings death and destruction, not only to the adversary but also to one’s side, and without distinguishing between guilty and innocent.” Human barbarity is no longer invisible, hidden under the bureaucratic language of Orwellian doublespeak. Its conspicuousness, if not celebration, emerged in the new editions of American exceptionalism ushered in by the post 9/11 exacerbation of the war on terror.

In the aftermath of these monstrous acts of terrorism, there was a growing sense among politicians, the mainstream media, and conservative and liberal pundits that history as we knew it had been irrefutably ruptured. If politics seemed irrelevant before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, it now seemed both urgent and despairing. But history cannot be erased, and those traditional public spheres in which people could exchange ideas, debate, and shape the conditions that structured their everyday lives increasingly continued to appear to have little significance or political consequence. Already imperiled before the aftershocks of the terrorists’ attacks, democracy became even more fragile in the aftermath of 9/11. Almost fourteen years later, the historical rupture produced by the events of 9/11 has transformed a terrorist attack into a war on terror that mimics the very crimes it pledged to eliminate. The script is now familiar. Security trumped civil liberties as shared fears replaced any sense of shared responsibilities. Under Bush and Cheney, the government lied about the war in Iraq, created a torture state, violated civil liberties, and developed new anti-terrorist laws, such as the USA PATRIOT ACT. It imposed a state of emergency that

justified a range of terrorist practices, including extraordinary rendition and state torture, which made it easier to undermine those basic civil liberties that protect individuals against invasive and potentially repressive government actions.

Under the burgeoning of what James Risen has called the “homeland security-industrial complex,” state secrecy and organized corporate corruption filled the coffers of the defense industry along with the corporate owned security industries—especially those providing drones– who benefited the most from the war on terror. This is not to suggest that security is not an important consideration for the United States. Clearly, any democracy needs to be able to defend itself, but it cannot serve, as it has, as a pretext for abandoning civil liberties, democratic values, and any semblance of justice, morality, and political responsibility. Nor can it serve as a pretext for American exceptionalism and its imperialist expansionist goals. The philosopher Giorgio Agamben has suggested rightly warned that under the so war on terrorism, the political landscape is changing and that “we are no longer citizens but detainees, distinguishable from the inmates of Guantanamo not by an indifference in legal status, but only by the fact that we have not yet had the misfortune to be incarcerated—or unexpectedly executed by a missile from an unmanned aircraft.”

The war on terror morphed into a legitimation for state terrorism as was made clear under the willingness of the Obama administration to pardon the CIA torturers, create a “kill list”, expand the surveillance state, punish whistleblowers, and use drones to indiscriminately kill civilians—all in the name of fighting terrorists. Obama expanded the reach of the militarized state and along with Democratic and Republican Party extremists preached a notion of security rooted in personal fears rather than in a notion of social security that rallied against the deprivations and suffering produced by war, poverty, racism, and state terrorism. The war on terrorism extended the discourse, space, location, and time of war in ways that made it unbounded and ubiquitous making everyone a potential terrorists and the battlefield a domestic as well as foreign location, a foreign as well as a domestic policy issue. Obama has become the master of permanent war seeking to increase the bloated military budget—close to a trillion dollars–while “turning to lawless violence….translated into unrestrained violent interventions from Libya to Syria and back to Iraq,” including an attempt “to expand the war on ISIS in Syria and possibly send more heavy weapons to its client government in Ukraine.” Fear became total and the imposition of punitive standards included not only the bombing, abduction, and torture of enemy combatants, but also the use of the police and federal troops for drug interdictions, the enforcement of zero tolerance standards in public schools, and the increasing criminalization of a range of social behaviors that extended from homelessness to violating dress codes in school.

Under the regime of neoliberalism with its war-like view of competition, its celebration of self-interest, and its disdain for democratic values and shared compassion for others, any notion of unity has been contaminated by the fog of misguided patriotism, a hatred of the other now privileged as an enemy combatant, and an insular retreat into mindless consumerism and the faux safety of gated communities. With the merging of militarism, the culture of surveillance, and a neoliberal culture of cruelty, solidarity and public trust have morphed into an endless display of violence and the ongoing militarization of visual culture and public space.

The war on terror has come home as poor neighborhoods are transformed into war zones with the police resembling an occupying army. The most lethal expressions of racism have become commonplace as black men and boys such as Eric Garner and Tamir Rice are repeatedly beaten, and killed by the police. As Jeffrey St. Clair has pointed out, one index of how state terrorism and lawlessness have become normalized is evident not only by the fact that the majority of Americans support torture, even though they know “it is totally
ineffective as a means of intelligence gathering,” but also by the American public’s growing appetite for violence, whether it parades as entertainment or manifests itself in the growing demonization and incarceration of black and brown youth, adults, Muslims, immigrants, and others deemed as disposable. It should come as no surprise that the one issue the top 2016 GOP presidential contenders agree on is that guns are the ultimate symbol of freedom in America, a “bellwether of individual liberty, a symbol of what big wants and shouldn’t have.” Guns provide political theater for the new political extremists and are symptomatic less of some cockeyed defense of the second amendment than willingness to maximize the pleasure of violence and building a case for the use of deadly force both at home and abroad. As Rustom Bharacuha and Susan Sontag have argued in different contexts, “There is an echo of the pornographic in maximizing the pleasure of violence,” one “that dissolves politics into pathology.”

Notions of democracy increasingly appear to be giving way to the discourse of revenge, domestic security, stupidity, and war. The political reality that has emerged since the shattering crisis of 9/11 increasingly points to a set of narrow choices that are being largely set by the jingoistic right wing extremists, the defense department, conservative funded foundations, and fueled by the dominant media. War and violence now function as an aphrodisiac for a public inundated with commodities and awash in celebrity culture idiocy. This surrender to the pleasure of violence is made all the more easy by the civic illiteracy now sweeping the United States. Climate change deniers, anti-intellectuals, religious fundamentalists, and others who exhibit pride in displaying a kind of thoughtlessness exhibit a kind of political and theoretical helplessness, if not corruption, that opens the door to the wider public’s acceptance of foreign and domestic violence.

The current extremists dominating Congress are frothing at the mouth to go to war with Iran, bomb Syria into the twilight zone, and further extend the reach of the American empire through its over bloated war machine to any country that questions the use of American power. One glaring example can be found in the constant and under analyzed televised images and stories of homegrown terrorists threatening to blow up malls, schools, and any other conceivable space where the public gathers.

Other examples can be found in the militarized frothing and Islamophobia perpetrated by the Fox News Network, made concrete by the an almost fever pitched bellicosity that informs the majority of its commentaries and reactions to war on terror. Missing from the endless call for security, vengeance, and the use of state violence is the massive lawlessness produced by the United States government through targeted drone attacks on enemy combatants, the violation of civil liberties, and the almost unimaginable human suffering and hardship perpetrated through the American war machine in the Middle East, especially Iraq. Also missing is a history of lawlessness, imperialism, and torture that supported a host of authoritarian regimes propped up by the United States.

Capitalizing on the pent up emotions and needs of an angry and grieving public for revenge, fueled by an unchecked Islamophobia, almost any reportage of a terrorist attack throughout the globe, further amplifies the hyped-up language of war, patriotism, and retaliation.   Similarly, conservative talking-heads write numerous op-eds and appear on endless talk shows fanning the fires of “patriotism” by calling upon the United States to expand the war against any one of a number of Arab countries that are considered terrorist states. For example, John Bolton, writing an op-ed for the New York Times insists that all attempts by the Obama administration to negotiate an arms deal with Iran is a sign of weakness. For Bolton, the only way to deal with Iran is to launch an attack on their nuclear infrastructure. The title of his op-ed sums up the organizing idea of the article: “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran.”

In the current historical moment, the language of indiscriminate revenge and lawlessness seems to be winning the day. This is a discourse unconscious of its own dangerous refusal to acknowledge the important role that democratic values and social justice must play in a truly “unified” rationale response, so as to prevent the further killing of innocent people, regardless of their religion, culture, and place of occupancy in the world. Instead of viewing the current crisis as simply a new and more dangerous historical conjuncture that has nothing to learn from the past, it is crucial for the American public to begin to understand how the past might be useful in addressing what it means to live in a democracy at a time when democracy is not only viewed as an excess, but as a liability to the wishes and interests of the new extremists who now control the American government. The anti-democratic forces that define American history cannot be forgotten in the fog of political and cultural amnesia. State violence and terrorism have a long history in the United States, both in its foreign and domestic policies, and ignoring this dark period of history means that nothing will be learned from the legacy of a politics that has indulged authoritarian ideologies and embraced violence as a central measure of power, national identity, and patriotism.

At stake here is the need to establish a vision of society and a global order that safeguards its most basic civil liberties and notions of human rights. Any struggle against terrorism must begin with the pledge on the part of the United States that it will work in conjunction with international organizations, especially the United Nations, a refusal to engage in any military operations that might target civilians, and that it will rethink those aspects of its foreign policy that have allied it with repressive nations in which democratic liberties and civilian lives are under siege. Crimes overlooked will be repeated and intensified just as public memory is rendered a liability in the face of the discourse of revenge, demonization, and extreme violence.

Many news commentators and journalists in the dominant press have taken up the events of September 11 within the context of World War II, invoking daily the symbols of revenge, retaliation, and war. Nostalgia is now used to justify and fuel a politics of in-security, fear, precarity, and demonization. The dominant media no longer functions in the interests of a democracy. Mainstream media supported Bush’s fabrications to justify the invasion of Iraq and never apologized for such despicable actions. It has rarely supported the heroic actions of whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Thomas Drake, John Kiriakou, Jeffrey Sterling, and others.

Mainstream media has largely remained mute about the pardoning of those who tortured as a matter of state policy. Against an endless onslaught of images of jets bombing countries extending from Syria and Iraq to Afghanistan and Gaza, amply supplied by the Defense Department, the dominant media connects the war abroad with the domestic struggle at home by presenting numerous stories about the endless ways in which potential terrorists might use nuclear weapons, poison the food supply, or unleash biochemical agents on the American population. The increased fear and insecurity created by such stories simultaneously serve to legitimatize a host of anti-democratic practices at home-including “a concerted attack on civil liberties, freedom of expression, and freedom of the press,” and a growing sentiment on the part of the American public that people who suggest that terrorism is, in part, caused by American foreign policy should not be allowed “to teach in the public schools, work in the government, and even make a speech at a college.”

This legacy of suppression has a long history in the United States, and it has returned with a vengeance in academia, especially for those academics, such as Norman Finkelstein and Steven G. Salaita, who have condemned America’s policies in the Middle East and the government’s support of the Israeli government’s policies towards Palestinians. Language itself has become militarized fed by an onslaught of extreme violence that now floods Hollywood films and the violence that dominates American television. Hollywood blockbusters such as American Sniper glorify war crimes and produce demonizing views of Islam. Television programs such as Spartacus, The Following,Hannibal, True Detective, Justified, and Top of the Lake intensify the pleasure quotient for viewing extreme and graphic violence to an almost unimaginable degree. Graphic violence appears to provide one of the few outlets for Americans to express what has come to resemble what could be construed as a spiritual release. Extreme violence, including the sanctioning of state torture, may be one of the few practices left that allows the American people to feel alive, to mark what it means to be close to the register of death in a way that reminds them of the ability to feel within a culture that deadens every possibility of life. Under such circumstances, the reality of violence is infantilized, transformed into forms of entertainment that produce and legitimate a carnival of cruelty. The privatization of violence does more than maximize the pleasure quotient and heighten macho ebullience, it also gives violence a fascist edge by depoliticizing a culture in which the reality of violence takes on the form of state terrorism. Authoritarianism in this context becomes hysterical because it turns politics and neoliberalism “into a criminal system and keeps working towards the expansion of the realm of pure violence, where its advancement can proceed unhindered.”

The extreme visibility of violence in American culture represents a willful pedagogy of carnage and gore designed to normalize its presence in American society and to legitimate its practice and presence as a matter of common sense. Moreover, war making and the militarization of public discourse and public space also serve as an uncritical homage to a form of hyper-masculinity that operates from the assumption that violence is not only the most important practice for mediating most problems, but that it is also central to identity formation itself. Agency is now militarized and almost completely removed from any notion of civic values. We get a glimpse of this form of violent hyper-masculinity not only in the highly publicized brutality against women dished out by professional football players, but also in the endless stories of sexual abuse and violence now taking place in frat houses across America, many in some of the most prestigious colleges and universities. Violence has become the DNA of war making in the United States, escalating under Bush and Obama into a kind of war fever that embraces a death drive. As Robert J. Lifton points out,

Warmaking can quickly become associated with “war fever,” the mobilization of public excitement to the point of a collective experience with transcendence. War then becomes heroic, even mythic, a task that must be carried out for the defense of one’s nation, to sustain its special historical destiny and the immortality of its people. ..War fever tends always to be sporadic and subject to disillusionment. Its underside is death anxiety, in this case related less to combat than to fears of new terrorist attacks at home or against Americans abroad–and later to growing casualties in occupied Iraq.

The war on terror is the new normal. Its adoration and intensification of violence, militarization, and state terrorism reach into every aspect of American life. Americans complain over the economic deficit but say little about the democracy and moral deficit now providing the foundation for the new authoritarianism. A police presence in our major cities showcases the visible parameters of the authoritarian state. For example, with a police force of 34,000 New York City resembles an armed camp with a force that as Thom Hartman points out is “bigger—that the active militaries of Austria, Bulgaria, Chad, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Kenya,” and a number of other countries. At the same time, the Pentagon has given billions of dollars’ worth of military equipment to local police forces all over America. Is it any wonder, that minorities of color fear the police more than the gangs and criminals that haunt their neighborhoods? Militarism is one of the breeding grounds of violence in the United States and is visible in the ubiquitous gun culture, the modeling of schools after prisons, the exploding incarceration state, the paramilitarization of local police forces, the burgeoning military budget, and the ongoing attacks on protesters, dissidents, black and brown youth, and women.

Under the war on terrorism, moral panic and a culture of fear have not only redefined public space as the “sinister abode of danger, death and infection” and fueled the collective rush to “patriotism on the cheap”, it has also buttressed a “fear economy” and refigured the meaning of politics itself. Defined as “the complex of military and security firms rushing to exploit the national nervous breakdown,” the fear economy promises big financial gains for both the defense department, and the anti-terrorist-security sectors, primed to terror-proof everything from trash cans and water systems to shopping malls and public restrooms. The war on terrorism has been transformed into a new market, a consumer goods for the hysterical war mongers and their acolytes in the media while making politics and extension of war. Fear is no longer an attitude as much as it is a culture that functions as “the enemy of reason [while distorting] emotions and perceptions, and often leads to poor decisions.” But the culture of fear does more than undermine critical judgment and suppress dissent, as Don Hazen points out, it also: “breeds more violence, mental illness and trauma, social disintegration, job failure, loss of workers’ rights, and much more. Pervasive fear ultimately paves the way for an accelerating authoritarian society with increased police power, legally codified oppression, invasion of privacy, social controls, social anxiety and PTSD.”

Fear and repression reproduce rather than address the most fundamental anti-democratic elements of terrorism. Instead of mobilizing fear, people need to recognize that the threat of terrorism cannot be understood apart from the crisis of democracy itself. The greatest struggle faced by the American public is not terrorism, but a struggle on behalf of justice, freedom, and democracy for all of the citizens of the globe. This is not going to take place, as President Obama’s policies will tragically affirm, by shutting down democracy, eliminating its most cherished rights and freedoms, and deriding communities of dissent. Engaging terrorism demands more than rage and anger, revenge and retaliation. American society is broken, corrupted by the financial elite, and addicted to violence and a culture of permanent war.

The commanding institutions of American life have lost their sense of public mission, just as leadership at all levels of government is being stripped of any viable democratic vision. The United States is now governed by an economic and social orthodoxy informed by the dictates of religious and political extremists. Reform efforts that include the established political parties have resulted in nothing but regression, a form of accommodation that serves to normalized the new authoritarianism and its war on terrorism. Politics has to be thought anew and must be informed by powerful vision matched by durable organizations that include young people, unions, workers, diverse social movements, artists, and others. In part, this means reawakening the radical imagination so as to address the intensifying crisis of history and agency, and engage the ethical grammars of human suffering. To fight the neoliberal counter-revolution, workers, young people, unions, artists, intellectuals, and social movements need to create new public spaces along with a new language for enabling the American public to relate the self to public life, social responsibility, and the demands of global citizenship.

The left in the United States is too fractured and needs to develop a more comprehensive understanding of politics, oppression, and struggles as well as a discourse that arises to the level of ethical assessment and accountability. Against the new authoritarianism, progressives of all stripes need an inspiring and energizing politics that embraces coalition building, rejects the notion that capitalism equals democracy, and challenges the stolid vocabulary of embodied incapacity stripped of any sense of risk, hope, and possibility. If the struggle against the war on terrorism, militarization, and neoliberalization is to have any chance of success, it is crucial for a loyal and dedicated left to embrace a commitment to understanding the educative nature of politics, economic and social justice, and the need to build a sustainable political formation outside of the established parties.

The United States is in a new historical conjuncture and as difficult as it is to admit, it is a conjuncture that shares more with the legacies of totalitarianism than with America’s often misguided understanding of democracy. Under the merging of the surveillance state, warfare state, and the harsh regime of neoliberalism, we are witnessing the death of the old system of social welfare supports and the emergence of a new society marked by the heavy hand of the national security state, the depoliticization of the American public, extreme inequities in wealth, power, income, and a new politics and mode of governance now firmly controlled by the major corporations, banks, and financial elite. This is a politics in which there is no room for democracy, and no room for reformism. The time has come to name the current historical moment as representative of the “dark times” Hannah Arendt warned us against and to begin to rethink politics anew through social movements in which the promise of a radical democracy can be reimagined in the midst of determined and systemic collective struggles. The war on terrorism has morphed into a new form of authoritarianism and its real enemy is no longer limited to potential terrorists, but includes democracy itself.

Obama And The Palestinian-Israeli Conflict

William James Martin

Former President, Nobel Laureate, and founder of the Carter Center, Jimmy Carter, was conspicuously absent from the podium at the National Democratic Conventions in 2008 and 2012 in which Barak Obama was nominated by the Democratic Party for the US Presidency. Reasonable speculation for Carter’s absence is that Obama felt Carter’s presence might be harmful to Obama’s election, or re-election in the 2012, probably because of his very public views on the Israeli-Palestinian issue which is not popular with much of the most influential membership of the Democratic Party, nor of their most important contributors.

Whether the snubbing of Carter was a matter of pure political calculation, or whether Obama is genuinely hostile to Carter’s views is probably an open question.

What Obama’s views really are and what his perception of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is and his understanding of the history of the conflict we shall examine.

Speaking on June 4, 2008, before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the day after receiving the Democratic nomination for President, Obama stated the following:

Year after year, century after century, Jews carried on their traditions, and their dream of a homeland, in the face of impossible odds.

The story made a powerful impression on me. I had grown up without a sense of roots. My father was black; he was from Kenya, and he left us when I was 2. My mother was white; she was from Kansas, and I'd moved with her to Indonesia and then back to Hawaii. In many ways, I didn't know where I came from. So I was drawn to the belief that you could sustain a spiritual, emotional and cultural identity. And I deeply understood the Zionist idea — that there is always a homeland at the center of our story.

I also learned about the horror of the Holocaust, and the terrible urgency it brought to the journey home to Israel(Italics mine).

He then describes his great-uncle who had been a part of the 89th Infantry Division — the first Americans to reach a Nazi concentration camp. They liberated Ohrdruf, part of Buchenwald, on an April day in 1945.

When the Americans marched in, they discovered huge piles of dead bodies and starving survivors. …

I saw some of those very images at Yad Vashem, and they never leave you. …

It was just a few years after the liberation of the camps that David Ben-Gurion declared the founding of the Jewish State of Israel. We know that the establishment of Israel was just and necessary, rooted in centuries of struggle and decades of patient work. But 60 years later, we know that we cannot relent, we cannot yield, and as president I will never compromise when it comes to Israel's security.

Not when there are still voices that deny the Holocaust. Not when there are terrorist groups and political leaders committed to Israel's destruction. Not when there are maps across the Middle East that don't even acknowledge Israel's existence, and government-funded textbooks filled with hatred toward Jews. Not when there are rockets raining down on Sderot, and Israeli children have to take a deep breath and summon uncommon courage every time they board a bus or walk to school.

I have long understood Israel's quest for peace and need for security. But never more so than during my travels there two years ago. Flying in an [Israeli Defense Forces] helicopter, I saw a narrow and beautiful strip of land nestled against the Mediterranean. On the ground, I met a family who saw their house destroyed by a Katyusha rocket. I spoke to Israeli troops who faced daily threats as they maintained security near the blue line. …

Hamas now controls Gaza. Hezbollah has tightened its grip on southern Lebanon, and is flexing its muscles in Beirut. Because of the war in Iraq, Iran — which always posed a greater threat to Israel than Iraq — is emboldened and poses the greatest strategic challenge to the United States and Israel in the Middle East in a generation. Iraq is unstable, and al-Qaida has stepped up its recruitment. Israel's quest for peace with its neighbors has stalled, despite the heavy burdens borne by the Israeli people.
… Those who threaten Israel threaten us. Israel has always faced these threats on the front lines. And I will bring to the White House an unshakeable commitment to Israel's security.

That starts with ensuring Israel's qualitative military advantage. I will ensure that Israel can defend itself from any threat — from Gaza to Tehran. Defense cooperation between the United States and Israel is a model of success, and must be deepened. As president, I will implement a Memorandum of Understanding that provides $30 billion in assistance to Israel over the next decade — investments to Israel's security that will not be tied to any other nation. First, we must approve the foreign aid request for 2009. Going forward, we can enhance our cooperation on missile defense. We should export military equipment to our ally Israel under the same guidelines as NATO. And I will always stand up for Israel's right to defend itself in the United Nations and around the world.

We must isolate Hamas unless and until they renounce terrorism, recognize Israel's right to exist, and abide by past agreements. There is no room at the negotiating table for terrorist organizations. That is why I opposed holding elections in 2006 with Hamas on the ballot.

Let me be clear. Israel's security is sacrosanct. It is non-negotiable. … any agreement with the Palestinian people must preserve Israel's identity as a Jewish state, with secure, recognized and defensible borders. Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided. [Italics mine]

In this impassioned speech, Obama manages to hit all the talking points of Israel’s state propaganda, and could just as well have been written by Prime Minister Netanyahu’s speech writer. It includes: 1) the centuries long yearning of Jews to ‘return’ to a homelands, which, though a widespread belief and a persistent theme of Zionist ideology and propaganda, is nonetheless a complete myth, as will be discussed. 2) the horror of the Holocaust, which, though not at all a myth, is invoked constantly by the state of Israel to justify its existence. In fact, this repetitive invocation of a threat of another Holocaust evenbegan in 1948 in the midst of the ongoing ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people by the Jewish army, even though it was the Palestinians who were facing a Holocaust, not the Jews, 3) the insidious threat of the ‘terrorist group ‘ Hamas, which‘seeks Israel’s destruction’, along with Al Qaeda, Iran, and Hezbollah, the latter ‘is tightening its grip on Lebanon”.And 4), the rocketsfired from the Gaza Strip ‘raining down on Siderot’ with the danger to Israeli school children transiting to and from school. 5) government funded textbooks across the Middle East which teach ‘hatred toward Jews.

Of course, Obama announces that he will appropriate $30 billion in grants to Israel over the next ten years.

There is the suggestion in the speech that the reason he voted against the Iraq war, as a senator during the Bush administration, was because regime change in Baghdad would strengthen Iran. “Iran — which always posed a greater threat to Israel than Iraq — is emboldened and poses the greatest strategic challenge to the United States and Israel in the Middle East in a generation.”In other words, Obama opposed the Iraq war for the sake of Israel.

He refers to flying over Israel, as had George Bush before, and observing that ‘narrow strip of land’, with the implication that the strip of land istoonarrow.

And of course, “any agreement with the Palestinian people must preserve Israel's identity as a Jewish state, with secure, recognized and defensible borders.[Italics mine]

The requirement that any agreement with the Palestinians must recognize Israel as a Jewish state’ was enunciated 6 years prior to the injection of this requirement into the ‘peace talks’ by Mr Netanyahu. Possibly, Obama and Netanyahu mean two different things by, “a Jewish state’. However that may be, one wonders if Mr Netanyahu did not review Obama’s speech before introducing this new requirement for a settlement with the Palestinians in order to assess American receptivity before adding a requirement which most observers believe would be impossible for the Palestinians to accept, though apparently embraced by the American president.

And, Jerusalem must remain Israel’s undivided capital; very much in line with the persistent refrain of the Israeli Prime Minister, and another principle which the Palestinian leadership could not possibly accept. This claim that Jerusalem must be the undivided capital of Israel flies in the face of previous American policy as upheld by every American president since 1967, and is in direct contradiction to UN Security Council Resolution 242, the basis of the American position since the ’67 War, at least up until the Obama administration whose support for this principle is either weak or non-existent. It also runs in contradiction to UN General Assembly Resolution 184 upon which Israel claims international legitimacy. That resolution set aside Jerusalem as a UN administrated area neither a part of the Jewish or Arab states.

There is not much that the President-elect left out, if his purpose was to appease the Zionists and capture the Jewish vote in the upcoming general election.

Any Palestinian listening to this speech must have been horrified;Obama had taken the most extreme hardline Israeli positions.

Whether these words actually reflect his personal understanding of the Israel-Palestinian conflict and it’s just solution or whether he is acting politically with the primary goal of winning the election and capturing the Jewish vote is probably a distinction without a difference, especially considering that, having now won two elections, he has never contradicted this messageover the past seven years, and in fact, he has repeated it,.

Though the speech is from 2008, Obama has recycled the same themes repeatedly since, in particular in his 2011 speech to the United Nations General Assembly and in his March 2012 speech before AIPAC with almost word for word replication.

Obama regurgitates a central concept embodied in the Israeli Declaration of Independence of 1948:

“Exiled from the Land of Israel the Jewish people remained faithful to it in all the countries of their dispersion, never ceasing to pray and hope for their return and the restoration of their national freedom.

"Impelled by this historic association, Jews strove throughout the centuries to go back to the land of their fathers and regained their statehood. In recent decades they returned in their masses. …"

In fact, this is sheer mythology, one of Mr Ben Gurion’s many fabrications which he wrote into the Israeli Declaration of Independence, long a part of the Zionist mythos,and swallowed uncritically by a wide range of people including the American president.

Though Jerusalem, or at least central Palestine was the metropole of the development of monotheism and Judaism, the focus of Biblical narrative, and the phrase, “next year in Jerusalem” made its way into one of the Seder prayers, apparently dating from the middle ages, in fact no practical effort was ever made by any of the world’s Jews, up until the end of the nineteenth century, to settle in Palestine; and one searches in vain for any proposal of the creation of a state up to this period.

Nor was a longing for Palestine or Jerusalem a widespread culturally induced icon within the Jewish community as the lack of any significant movement toward reclaiming the Holy Land or migrations of Jews to the Holy Land, or even any significant amount of Jewish pilgrimages to the Holy Land, before about the 1880’s, by Jews attest.

The concept of a Jewish migration from Europe and elsewhere to the Holy Lands and the establishment of a Jewish state is a Christian, and not a Jewish, invention and was first embraced by the Jewish communities of the Russian Pale, and then only a small proportion of them, from about the 1880’s onward owing to a wave of anti-Jewish violence.During this period about 1.5 million Jews of western Russia migrated to the United States and only a few thousand to Palestine. Overwhelmingly, the preference of eastern European Jews during this period of emigration was the United States, not Palestine.

It was Christianity, not Judaism that introduced the ideas of ‘wandering Jews’ displaced from their original homeland and seeking to “return”. It was Christian Zionism that introduced the term return to describe a Jewish migration into Palestine implying a continuity, if not an identification, between the ancient Judeans and modern Jews, and that Jews are the “lawful” owners of the land of Palestine.

It is doubtful that anyone would invoke the term return to describe a contemporary conquest of Palestine by Egypt, or Persia or Macedonia for that matter, even though Egypt had ruled Palestine a millennium before there was a Jewish city state in Jerusalem, the latter occurring at the end of the first millennium BCE. And likewise both Persian and Macedonia, under Alexander and his sons, ruled Palestine before Jewish rule,the latter of which did not even encompass all of Palestine and was certainly did not bear a resemblance to a modern day nation state.

It is not exactly known when monotheism developed, but it was most probably in the middle of the first millennium BCE concurrent with the writing of the Bible which occurred most likely between the seventh and the fifth centuries of the first millennium BCE.

According to historian Shlomo Sand in his recent book, “The Invention of the Land of Israel”:

Jewish pilgrimages [to Jerusalem and the Holy Land] emerged as an afterthought to Christian pilgrimage. It never reached comparable dimensions and so perhaps cannot be considered an institutional practice. Few Jewish pilgrims set out to the Holy land between the twelfth century and the end of the eighteenth century CE, by comparison to the tens of thousands of Christian pilgrims who made the trip during the same period. … the degree to which the Land of Israel did not attract the "original children of Israel" is nonetheless astounding.

… it is evident that journeying to the Land of Israel was no more than a marginal practice in the life of the Jewish communities. All comparisons between the members of Christian and Jewish pilgrims reflect that Jewish trips to the Holy Land were a drop in the ocean. We know of approximately thirty texts that provide accounts of Jewish pilgrimages during the seventeen hundred years between333 CE and 1878, we have some 3,500 reports of Christian pilgrimages to the Holy Land.

It was English Christians, and not eastern European Jews who began the campaign to promote Jewish immigration to the Holy Lands.
The British Library contains the oldest document, written in English on Christian Zionism entitled Apocalypsis Apocalypseos (‘A Revelation of the Revelation), a 50 page monograph, written in 1585 by the Anglican priest, Thomas Brightman, often described as the ‘father of the Restoration of the Jews’.

Brightman argued that the ‘rebirth of a Christian Israelite nation’ would become the ‘center of the Christian world’, and further that a ‘restoration’ of Jews to Palestine was necessary if England was to be blessed by God when history enters its last days and the prophesies of the book of Daniel are to be fulfilled. 

However the campaign began, in earnest, with the ascendancy of the Puritans in England in the early seventeenth centurywho engendered a refocus and a reemphasis on the Old Testament and on thechildren of Israel with whom the Puritans identified.

Barbara Tuchman states:

"The period … up to 1600 let us say, Palestine had been to the English a land of purely Christian association, though lost to the Christian world through the unfortunate intrusion of Islam. Now it came to be remembered as the homeland of the Jews, the land carrying the Scriptural promise of Israel’s return. Interest now centered on fulfilling the Scripture. Starting with the Puritans ascendency, the movement among English for the return of the Jews to Palestine began."

In the year 1649, the very peak and midpoint of Puritan rule in England, two English Puritans of Amsterdam, Joanna and Ebenezer Cartwright, petitioned the government “That this Nation of England, with the inhabitants of the Netherlands, shall be the first and the readiest to transport Izraell’s sons and daughters in the ships to the Land promised to their forefathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob for an everlasting Inheritance.” …

To understand their motive one must realize the transformation wrought by the Bible acting through the Puritan movement. It was as if every influence on thought exerted today by the press, radio, movies, magazines were equaled by one book speaking with the voice of God, reinforced by the temporal authority of the Supreme Court. Particularly the Old Testament, with its narrative of a people unalterably convinced of having been chosen by the Lord to do His work on earth, governed the Puritan mind. They applied its narrative to themselves. They were the self-chosen inheritors of Abraham’s covenant with God, the re-embodied saints of Israel, the “battle-ax of the Lord”, in the words of Jeremiah. Their guide was the prophets, their inspiration were owed not to the Heavenly father of Jesus, but to Jehovah, the Lord God of Hosts. Scripture, the word of god revealed to His chosen people, was their command, on the hearth as on the battlefield, in Parliament as in church. 

Shlomo Sand tells us:

Woven through not only the Cartwrights’ petition but also the stance taken by the foreign secretary Lord Palmerston in the 1840’s and Lord Balfour’s well known letter to Lord Rothschild in 1917is a common thread or, to use another metaphor, a critical artery pulsating within the English (and subsequently British) body politic. Lacking this artery and the unique ideological elements it carried, it is doubtful whether the State of Israel could have ever been established. 

Impelling the promotion of a Jewish migration into Palestine was a program, not essentially for the sake of Jews, but as it was read from the Scripture, or rather read into the Scripture, that such an re-assemblage of Jews in the Land of the Children of Israel and then their conversion to Christianitywas necessary for the return of Christ and a millennium of peace. Such ideas persist among Christian Zionist in our time.

The Puritans believed that since their own doctrines were closer to Judaism, and that the Jews, once in close contact with them, would find conversion to Christianity relatively smooth.

The idea of a Jewish migration into and assemblage in Palestine was very much in the air by the beginning of the nineteenth century.

During the Syrian campaign of Napoleon’s Oriental expedition in which he had sought to defeat the Ottoman rulers, cut off Britain from its empire, and recreate the empire of Alexander from France to India, he become (sic) the first political leader to propose a sovereign Jewish State in Palestine:

‘Bonaparte, Commander-in-Chief of the Armies of the French Republic in Africa and Asia, to the Rightful Heirs of Palestine. Israelites, unique nation, whom, in thousands of years, lust of conquest and tyranny were able to deprive of the ancestral lands only, but not of name and national existence …She [France] offers to your at this very time, and contrary to all expectations, Israel’s patrimony … Rightful heirs of Palestine … hasten! Now is the moment which may not return for thousands of years, to claim the restoration of your rights among the population of the universe which had shamefully withheld from you for thousands of years, your political existence as a nation among the nations, and the unlimited natural right to worship Yehovah in accordance with your faith, publicly and in likelihood for ever.’ 

Observe that Napoleon is here attempting to initiate a program or a movement among Jews which , in his understanding, did not exists at that time. Napoleon is not trying to tap into a recognizable “2000 year old yearning of Jews to return to Zion” but is trying to create one from scratch.

A similar conclusion can be reached from this letter, written a half century later, 1841, from Colonel Charles Henry Churchill, antecedent to Winston Churchill, to Moses Montefiore:

I cannot conceal from you my anxious desire to see your countrymen endeavor once more to resume their existence as a people. I consider the object to be perfectly obtainable. But two things are indispensably necessary: Firstly that the Jews themselves will take up the matter, universally and unanimously. Secondly that the European powers will aid them in their views. 

Lord Shaftesbury - Anthony Ashley-Cooper, SeventhEarl of Shaftesbury, nobleman, philanthropist with the ear of Prime Ministers, Lords, and others who held power in mid nineteenth century, in particular, that of Henry John Temple, Lord Palmerston, foreign secretary and prime minister from 1855 to 1865,was a deeply religious man who based his life on the Bible, “God’s written word”. “I accept it, believe it, bless it, as announced in the Holy Writ.”Ashley became president of the Palestinian Exploration Fund whose mission was to explore every inch of Palestine and to “prepare it for the return of its ancient possessors …” Ashley presided for 40 years over the London Society for the Promotion of Jewish Conversion to Christianity whose signal achievement was the establishment by the Church of England of an Anglican bishopric in Jerusalem with a converted Jew as its first bishop.Shaftesbury invented the phrase, “A country without a nation for a nation without a country’ which later transmogrifiedinto the Zionist slogan, “A land without a people for a people without a land’.

Tuchman writes:

On August 17, 1840 the Times published a letter on a plan to “plant the Jewish people in the land of their fathers” which it said was now under “serious consideration.” It commended the efforts of Lord Ashley (later Lord Shaftesbury), author of the plan, as “practical and statesmanlike” and quoted a canvass he was making of Jewish opinion designed to find out how they felt about a return to the Holy Land, how soon they would be ready to go back, and whether Jews “of station and property” would join in the return and invest their capital in the land if the Porte could be induced to assure them law and justice and safety to person and estate and if their rights and privileges were “secure to them under the protection of a European power.” [Italics mine] 

By the late nineteenth century most all of England was primed for the promotion of Jews to be assembled, “reassemble” as they put it, in Palestine. The literature- novels and poetry from Milton to Sir Walter Scott, Lord Byron to George Eliot and to Benjamin Disraeli, politician/novelist, promoted the assemblage of Jews in Palestine. The newspapers, the Manchester Guardian, in particular, the political actors of the day, with few dissenters, were all aligned driven by religious fervor combined with a vision of imperial by proxy.

Speaking on the floor of the House of Lords in 1922, five years subsequent to the Balfour Declaration, Lord Balfour said:

… that he would be unfair to himself if he sat down without insisting “ to the upmost of my ability” that there was a great deal involved in Britain’s sponsorship of the Jews’ return to their homeland. “This is the ideal which chiefly moves me … that Christendom is not oblivious to their faith, is not unmindful of the service they have rendered to the great religions of the world, and that we desire to the best of our ability to give them the opportunity of developing in peace and quietness under British rule, those great gifts which hitherto they have been compelled to bring to fruition in countries which know not their language and belong not to their race. 

Balfour speaks to us again:

Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in the age-long tradition in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land … . The idea of planting a [European] minority of outsiders upon an indigenous majority population, without consulting it, was not calculated to horrify men who had worked with Cecil Rhodes or promote European settlement in Kenya. 

Of what was Balfour speaking? Jewish history, or the five centuries of English philo-semitism from the 50 page Christian Zionist monograph of Thomas Brightmanto the declaration that bears Balfour’s name. That is, is he speaking of Jewish history or of the English interpretation of that history and contribution of British conceptualization of that history, however Balfourmay have understood his own words? Was he not referring, not to Jewish endeavors, but to the long and deep tradition within British society and culture of Christian Zionism?

Mr Ben Gurion’s insertion into the Israeli Declaration of Independence of the claim of 2000 year of Jewish yearning and struggle to return to Palestine is a fraud and an effort to claim provenance of the creation of Zionism which was, in fact, a product of Christians, or of Christian society.It was Christian culture that developed and nurtured the concept of the return of Jews and the continuity of the ancient Judeans with modern Jews overlooking the possibility that modern Jews might well not be the descendants of the ancient Judeans, as it ever more looks like they are not. This created trait of continuity, and identification, of ancient Judeans with modern Jews has allowed Mr Netanyahu, as well as the Revisionist/Lukud strain of Zionism, to claim a right of proprietorship over Palestine which, in his view, and theirs, overrides the constraints of international law, in particular, international law’s injunction against ethnic cleansing.

Ever how much Mr Netanyahu and his Lukud party, and most Israelis for that matter, would be displeased to hear it, Jewish Zionism is an outgrowth of Christian Zionism which developed , incubated, and nurtured it and is not an auto-genetic, self-contained,or autochthonousproduct of Jewish energy.

President Obama’s pre-presidential background in foreign policy was modest consisting of his having taken some classes on foreign policy at Columbia University as an undergraduate and, as a member of the United States Senate, having served on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Notwithstanding his tenure on the foreign Relations Committee, and maybe with the exception of his vote against authorization for the Iraq invasion, he seems never to have attempted to influence American foreign policy in any significant way.

According to Fawaz Gerges (Obama and the Middle East, p 97), Obama had read a few popular books on foreign affairs – Fareed Zakaria’s Post American World and Thomas Freedman’s There World is Flat, and also Samantha Power’s Putlitzer Prize winning book, A Problem from Hell, a history of genocides. 

He certainly lacked the foreign policy experience of some whom he appointed to cabinet, or deputy cabinet posts such as John Kerry, or Richard Holbrook and some others.

One searches in vain for any detailed and highly competent writings or speeches on foreign policy, given by Obama, that go beyond idealistic platitudes, ever how souring the rhetoric.

Looking to the beginning of his presidency, his only foreign policy projections were to correct the overextended foreign policy and adventurism of his predecessor and affect a retraction of foreign involvement ending the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and retrenching American energy toward a domestic agenda.

Obama’s orientation is toward domestic policy as an academic program of constitutional law would dispose. Between Columbia and Harvard Law School, Obama worked, not in any capacity having to do with foreign policy but as a community organizer in Chicago’s south side.

The contrast with President Carter is instructive.

Coming into office, Carter clearly identified several areas of foreign policy in which he was determined to act. Those were: 1) To establish a working relation with the Soviet government on the issue of nuclear arms reductions. 2) To complete to diplomacy initiated Richard Nixon and establish full diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China. 3) To resolve the growing potential conflict with Panama over the Panama Canal and to complete a treaty that previous presidents had left dangling. 4) To resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. 5) To reduce American’s dependence on the importation of foreign oil and to end the possibility of a disruption of oil supplies as, for instance, caused by the Arab oil embargo of 1973. 6) To move southern Africa toward constructive change and away from apartheid. Carter was largely successful in in carrying out these initiatives.

By contrast with Carter, there were no positive foreign policy initiatives envisioned by the new incoming president other than the intention of ending the involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq. The so-called “pivot toward Asia”, which was also a pivot away from involvement in the Middle East only reflects the reaction against the Bush policies and is an effort at correction. It is a reaction against rather than a genuinely positive refocus.

There is, however, a fairly consistent foreign policy strategy, consistent with Obama’s disposition toward limited foreign involvement which is discernable if one ignores the idealistic words and speeches. In the historic tension between idealism and Realpolitic, Obama comes down on the side of Realpolitic. Thus, foreign involvement is only justified if American’s vital interests are threatened.
Thought of this way, the Palestinians are as peripheral to core American interests are the Bahrainian protestors in Pearl Square.
Though Obama has exhibited sympathies toward the peaceful protests as they began in Syria and later for the rebel fighters resisting the crush or the Syrian army, Obama rejected Secretary of State Clinton’s proposal to arm the Syrian rebels, and even now, American aid to the moderate Syrian rebels, such as can be found, is quite modest.

What is not modest, however, is the effort to defeat ISIS while the Assad regime in Damascus is largely ignored. Overthrowing or destabilizing the Assad regime would not make any more sense to Obama than the invasion of Iraq under President Bush.
In terms of Realpolitic, there is little contribution that the Palestinian or their liberation can do for US strategic interests, whereas there is considerable cooperation between the US and Israel on security matters.

One might argue, as many have, that the continuing Israeli-Palestinian conflict along with Israel’s continued occupation and land confiscation is harmful to American’s image in the Arab world and is possibly behind much of the unrest and overall hostility, harbored by some, toward the US.

But this involves long term interest, and further, a clear straight line cannot be drawn between a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian problem and a diminution of tensions and conflicts in the Middle East.

Arguably, the combined efforts of the US and Israel to develop the Stuxnet virus, or malware, which did considerable damage to the Iranian centrifuges at their Natanz nuclear facility, and the recently revealed combined US-Mossad intelligence cooperation which resulted in the assassination of Imad Mughniyah, Hezbollah’s international operations chief,along with the combined British, Israeli, and US espionage on Iranian government leaders recently revealed by Edward Snowden , indicate the close security cooperation between the US and Israel on matters of security and the fight against terrorists threats. It also reflects a shared interest in matters of security, an interest not shared between the US and the Palestinians.

Despite Obama’s pledge in in 2009 Cairo to do everything in his power to achieve a Palestinian state living peacefully beside a secure Israel, Obama is not going to discard, or risk the loss of, the potential intelligence asset of Israel’s technical capability or experience in the Middle East in order to achieve freedom for the Palestinian people. Nor has he shown the slightest interest in risking political capital in a public fight with Israel over basic issues.

As of the writing of this article, there is a test of wills occurring between the White House and the Israeli government led by Nr Netanyahu’s implacable hostility to any compromise in negotiations on Iranian nuclear program.

This is a battle Mr Obama did not choose. Rather it represented a challenge by the Israeli government to Obama’s determination to avoid further military involvement in the Middle East and, in particular, a war with Iran, as Mr Netanyahu has been trying to promote, or to avoid the US to be drawn into a war with Iran initiated by Israel.

Obama’s concentration of energy on the implementation of a policy based on Realpolitic allows Obama to avoid acquiring a very detailed knowledge of the history of Israel or of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or, for that matter, any other area of foreign policy.
The several paragraphs quoted at the beginning of this paper reveal that, at best, Obama has a superficial knowledge of the Israel-Palestinian conflict and its history and also reveals his embrace of the 60 year old Israeli propaganda largely discredited since the writing of the historians, mostly Israelis, since the 1990’s. I refer primarily to the writing of historians Ilan Pappe and Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim and others.

Obama could do no better at the beginning of this past summer’s Israel was against Gaza than repeat the Bush mantra we heard so often – “Israel has a right to defend itself.” As in the case of his predecessor, there is no consideration of the right of the Palestinian people to defend themselves. Nor was there a consideration of who was defending against whom. This often repeated platitude reflect a considerable shallowness and an indication that Obama has given very little thought to what is the actual nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

It is difficult to imagine President Obama replicating Jimmy Carter’s 13 days long Camp David Summit which consisted of virtually non-stop debates between President Carter and Israel Prime Minister Menachem Begin, with Benjamin Netanyahu replacing Begin. Obama lacks the interest, the passion and the necessary knowledge or historical grasp to conduct such a session. But Obama would hardly be undertake such a summit in the first place

Israel can offer the US cooperation at the security level with Israeli intelligence which is highly capable and has extensive experience in the Middle East.

The Palestinians have little to offer Obama.

Do not expect any significant progress engendered by the Obama administration for the rest of his term.
If there is to be any change in the configuration between the Palestinians and the Israelis, it will emanated from the International Court of Justice.