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From International Socialism (1st series), No.65, Mid-December 1973, p.29.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
The Broken Sword of Justice – America, Israel and the Palestine tragedy
Margaret Arakie
Quartet, £1.50.
WHY THE American-Israeli alliance? According to Margaret Arakie the basic reason for the support given by Washington to Tel-Aviv since the founding of the state of Israel in 1948 is the presence in America of some six million Jews. Though only about 3 per cent of the population, they constitute a powerful Zionist lobby which American politicians ignore at their peril. This is particularly true as far as presidential candidates are concerned, for some 72 per cent of American Jews live in six large states which have between them 178 of the 226 electoral votes necessary to win a presidential election. Hence 1972 saw the spectacle of McGovern and Nixon attempting to outbid each other on the question of who was most pro-Israel.
But, as Arakie herself shows, in 1956 when Israel – in collusion with Britain and France – invaded Egypt, overrunning Gaza and capturing much of Sinai, Eisenhower intervened on Nasser’s side. The US voted against Israel in the United Nations, an American loan to Israel was stopped and hints were put about that West Germany might be pressurised into withholding reparations payments. And all this despite the Zionist lobby. Israel was forced to withdraw from captured territories.
Why did this occur? Clearly not because ‘above all the kind of gun-boat diplomacy contemplated by her allies was totally repugnant to the United States’ (Arakie p.123). The CIA had, after all, already engineered a coup in Iran in 1953, and American troops were sent to Lebanon in 1958. But because while Britain, France and Israel wanted Nasser overthrown, the United States believed at the time he might be persuaded to join the American anti-communist alliance.
The explanation for the pattern of American involvement in the Middle East is obviously more complex than Arakie’s.
Originally the State department saw the founding of Israel as a useful way of gaining a bridgehead in an area of extreme economic importance, traditionally controlled by Britain and France and potentially susceptible (or so it was believed) to Russian subversion. Happily, the establishment of Israel also pleased the Zionist lobby as well as solving the pressing problem of what to do with those central European Jews who had survived the Nazi holocaust and who not surprisingly wanted to get as far away from Germany as possible.
As Britain and France were forced out of the Middle East, America also tried to gain influence with Israel’s neighbours, attempting both to curb Arab nationalism which they believed (quite falsely) to be a Moscow plot and to get the various Arab countries to join anti-Russian military pacts. It was an uphill task. For not only did Arab nationalists overthrow traditional rulers in Egypt, Syria and Iraq, but they showed no interest in anti-communism being neither pro-east nor pro-west. They were however anti-Zionist, regarding Israel quite correctly as a settler state on Arab land.
In this situation, America was eventually forced to choose – either Israel or Arab nationalism. Given that Israel was anti-communist, while Egypt, Syria and Iraq were not, the choice was not surprising. Military aid to Tel Aviv was stepped up. As with Cuba, US hostility to mildly reforming and neutral governments drove the three countries to more extreme policies. American interests were nationalised, the Russians were called in to supply economic and military aid. This of course further hardened American support for Israel.
Despite the presence of Russians in Damascus and Cairo and the cost of aid to Israel, this situation was until recently fairly tolerable to the Americans. Not only did it seem that no military challenge to Israel was possible (a belief confirmed by the six-day war in 1967), but America was still on good terms with those arab states ruled by traditional rulers. And these included Kuwait, Qatar, and above all Saudi Arabia, where after all most of the oil was.
The recent war and its aftermath have changed this. Not only does it appear that Israel can be challenged militarily and that that challenge may threaten the American detente with Russia but through fear of being outflanked on the left, the oil sheikhs are backing the anti-Zionist cause. American troops can hardly be sent to Saudi Arabia: after all, who could be more anti-communist than King Feisal? Hence, Zionist lobby or no, American pressure on Israel to contract her frontiers.
It is a complicated story. A full elaboration of much of it can be found in Maxime Rodinson’s excellent Marxist account Israel and the Arabs (Penguin 1970, 30p) from which Margaret Arakie has obviously taken a lot for her rather scrappily written book.
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