American Zionism (2)
By Edward Said
Posted: 13 Sha'ban 1421, 10 November 2000
A small, potentially embarrassing episode has occurred since I wrote my last article on
this subject two weeks ago. Martin Indyk, US ambassador (for the second time during the
Clinton administration) to Israel, has abruptly been stripped of his diplomatic security
clearance by the State Department. The story put about is that he used his laptop computer
without using proper security measures, and therefore may have disclosed information or
released it to unauthorized persons. As a result, he now cannot enter or leave the State
Department without an escort, cannot remain in Israel, and must now submit to a full
investigation.
...the traffic between Israeli lobbying and US
Middle East policy is extremely regular, and yes, regulated. |
We may never find out what really happened. But what is public knowledge and has
nevertheless not been discussed in the media is the scandal of Indyk's appointment in the
first place. On the very eve of Clinton's inauguration in January 1993, it was announced
that Martin Indyk, born in London, and an Australian citizen, had been sworn in as an
American citizen at the president-elect's express wishes. Proper procedures were not
followed: it was an act of peremptory executive privilege, so that, after having gained US
citizenship, Indyk could immediately thereafter become a member of the National Security
Council staff responsible for the Middle East. All this, I believe, was the real scandal,
not Indyk's subsequent carelessness or indiscretion or even his complicity in ignoring
official codes of conduct. For before he came to the very heart of the US government in a
top and largely secretly run position, Indyk was the head of the Washington Institute for
Near East Policy, a quasi-intellectual thinktank that engaged in active advocacy on the
part of Israel, and coordinated its work with that of AIPAC (the American Israel Public
Affairs Committee), the most powerful and feared lobby in Washington. It is worth noting
that before he came to the Bush administration Dennis Ross, the State Department
consultant who has been leading the American peace process, was also the head of the
Washington Institute, so the traffic between Israeli lobbying and US Middle East policy is
extremely regular, and yes, regulated.
AIPAC has for years been so powerful not only because it draws on a well-organized,
well-connected, highly visible, successful, and wealthy Jewish population but because for
the most part there has been very little resistance to it. There is a healthy fear and
respect for AIPAC all over the country, but especially in Washington, where in a matter of
hours almost the entire Senate can be marshaled into signing a letter to the president on
Israel's behalf. Who is going to oppose AIPAC and continue to have a career in Congress,
or to stand up to it on behalf of, say, the Palestinian cause when nothing concrete can be
offered by that cause to anyone who stands up to AIPAC? In the past one or two members of
Congress have resisted AIPAC openly but soon after their re-election was blocked by the
many political action committees controlled by AIPAC, and that was that. The only senator
who had anything remotely like an oppositional stand to AIPAC was James AbuRezk, but he
did not want to be re-elected and, for his own reasons, resigned after his single six-year
term ended.
In a recent article, the former State
Department official Henry Pracht has noted the staggering unanimity of opinion in all
sectors of the American media, from film, to television, radio, newspapers, weeklies,
monthlies, quarterlies and dailies: everyone more or less toes the official Israeli line,
which has also become the official American line. |
There is now no political commentator who is absolutely clear and open in his/her
resistance to Israel in the US. A few liberal columnists like Anthony Lewis of the New
York Times do occasionally write in criticism of Israeli occupation practices, but nothing
is ever said about 1948 and the whole issue of the original Palestinian dispossession that
is at the root of Israel's existence and subsequent behavior. In a recent article, the
former State Department official Henry Pracht has noted the staggering unanimity of
opinion in all sectors of the American media, from film, to television, radio, newspapers,
weeklies, monthlies, quarterlies and dailies: everyone more or less toes the official
Israeli line, which has also become the official American line. This is the coincidence
American Zionism has achieved in the years since 1967, and which it has exploited in most
public discourse about the Middle East. Thus US policy equals Israeli policy, except on
the very rare occasions (ie, the Pollard case) where Israel oversteps the limit and
assumes that it has a right to help itself to what it wishes.
Criticism of Israel's practices is therefore strictly limited to occasional sorties
that are so infrequent as to be almost literally invisible. The overall consensus is
virtually impregnable and is so powerful as to be enforceable everywhere within the
accepted mainstream. This consensus is made up of unassailable truths concerning Israel as
a democracy, its basic virtue, the modernity and reasonableness of its people and its
decisions. Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, a respected American liberal cleric, once said that
Zionism was the secular religion of the American Jewish community. This is supported
visibly by various American organizations whose role it is to police the public realm for
infractions, even as many other Jewish organizations run hospitals, museums, research
institutes for the good of the whole country. This duality is like an unresolved paradox
in which noble public enterprises coexist with the meanest and most inhumane ones. Thus,
to take a recent example, the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), a small but very
vociferous group of zealots, paid for an advertisement in the New York Times on 10
September that addressed Ehud Barak as if he was an employee of American Jews, reminding
him that six million of them outnumber the five million Israelis who had decided to
negotiate on Jerusalem. The language of the advertisement was not only admonitory, it was
almost threatening, saying that Israel's prime minister had undemocratically decided to
undertake what was anathema to American Jews, who were displeased with his behavior. It's
not at all clear who mandated this small and pugnacious group of zealots to lecture the
Israeli prime minister in these tones, but ZOA feels it has the right to intervene in
everybody's business. They routinely write or telephone the president of my university to
ask him to dismiss or censure me for something I said, as if universities were like
kindergartens and professors to be treated as under-age delinquents. Last year they
mounted a campaign to get me fired from my elected post as president of the Modern
Language Association, whose 30,000 members were lectured by ZOA as so many morons. This is
the worst sort of Stalinist bullying, but is typical of organized American Zionism at its
worst and most zealous.
Similarly for the past few months various right-wing Jewish writers and editors (for
example, Norman Podhoretz, Charles Krauthammer and William Kristol, to mention only a few
of the more strident propagandists) have been critical of Israel for essentially
displeasing them, as if they had more title to it than anyone else. Their tone in these
and other articles is dreadful, an unappetizing combination of brazen arrogance, moral
preachiness, and the ugliest form of hypocrisy, all of it done with an air of complete
confidence. They assume that because of the power of the Zionist organizations that back
and support their reprehensible rantings they can get away with their appalling verbal
excesses, but it is mostly because most Americans are either ignorant of what they are
saying or cowed into silence that they can get away with this sort of nonsense, very
little of it having much to do with the real political actualities of the Middle East.
Most sensible Israelis regard them with distaste.
American Zionism has now reached the level of almost pure fantasy in which what is good
for American Zionists in their fiefdom and their mostly fictional discourse is good for
America and Israel, and certainly for the Arabs, Muslims and Palestinians, who seem to be
little more than a collection of negligible nuisances. Anyone who defies or dares to
challenge them (especially if he/she is either an Arab or a Jew critical of Zionism) is
subject to the most awful abuse and vituperation, all of it personal, racist and
ideological. They are relentless, totally without generosity or genuine human
understanding. To say that their diatribes and analyses are Old Testament-like in manner
is to insult the Old Testament.
... an alliance with them [American Zionists],
such as the Arab states and the PLO have tried to forge since the Gulf War, is the
stupidest kind of ignorance. |
In other words, an alliance with them, such as the Arab states and the PLO have tried
to forge since the Gulf War, is the stupidest kind of ignorance. They are unalterably
opposed to everything the Arabs, Muslims and, most especially, Palestinians stand for and
would sooner blow things up than make peace with us. Yet it is also true that most
ordinary citizens are often puzzled by the vehemence of their tone, but unaware really of
what is behind it. Whenever you speak to Americans who are not Jewish or Arab, and who
have no expertise on the Middle East, there is routinely a sense of wonder and
exasperation at the relentlessly hectoring attitude, as if the whole Middle East was
theirs for the taking. Zionism in America, I have concluded, is not only a fantasy built
on very shaky foundations, it is impossible to make an alliance or to expect rational
exchange with it. But it can be outflanked and defeated.
Ever since the mid-1980s I had proposed to the PLO leadership and to every Palestinian
and Arab I met that the PLO quest for the president's ear was a total illusion since all
recent presidents have been devoted Zionists, and that the only way to change US policy
and achieve self-determination was through a mass campaign on behalf of Palestinian human
rights, which would have the effect of out-flanking Zionists and going straight to the
American people. Uninformed and yet open to appeals for justice as they are, Americans
would have reacted as they did to the ANC campaign against apartheid, which finally
changed the balance inside South Africa. In fairness here, I should mention that James
Zogby, then an energetic human rights activist (before he threw in his lot with Arafat,
the US government and the Democratic Party), was one of the originators of the idea. That
he abandoned it totally is a sign of how he changed, rather than a nullification of the
idea itself.
The Oslo accords were the unimaginative
acceptance by the Palestinians of Israeli-US supremacy rather than an attempt to change
it. |
But it also became very clear to me that the PLO would never do it for several reasons.
It would require work and dedication. Second, it would mean espousing a political
philosophy that was really based on democratic grass-roots organization. Third, it would
have to be a movement rather than a personal initiative on behalf of the present leaders.
And lastly, it required a real, as opposed to a superficial, knowledge of US society.
Besides, I felt that the conventional cast of mind that kept getting us in one bad
position after another was very difficult to change, and time proved me right. The Oslo
accords were the unimaginative acceptance by the Palestinians of Israeli-US supremacy
rather than an attempt to change it.
In any case, any alliance or compromise with Israel in the present circumstances, where
US policy is totally dominated by American Zionism, is doomed to roughly the same results
for Arabs generally and Palestinians in particular. Israel must dominate, Israel's
concerns are primary, and Israeli systemic injustice will be prolonged. Unless American
Zionism is taken on and made to change -- not a very difficult task, as I shall try to
show in my next article -- the results will be the same: dismal and discrediting for us as
Arabs.
[From Al-Ahram
Weekly Online (5 - 11 October 2000)]
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