Israel and the dangers of ethnic nationalism

An interview with Jonathan Cook, by Joseph Cotto

Jonathan Cook

Counterpunch – 4 November 2013

Cotto: What sort of general impact would you say Zionism has had on the Middle East?

Cook: Zionism was a reaction to the extreme ethnic nationalisms that dominated – and nearly destroyed – Europe last century. It is therefore hardly surprising that it mirrors their faults. In exporting to the Middle East this kind of nationalism, Zionism was always bound to play a negative role in the region.

Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism, developing the concept of a Jewish state in response to the rising tide of anti-Semitism in Europe in the late nineteenth century. One notorious incident that appears to have shaped his views was France’s Dreyfus affair, when a very assimilated Jewish army officer was unjustly accused of treason and then his innocence covered up by French elites.

The lesson drawn by Herzl was that assimilation was futile. To survive, Jews needed to hold firmly on to their ethnic identity and create an exclusivist state based on ethnic principles.

There is a huge historical irony to this, because Europe’s ethnic nationalisms would soon end up tearing apart much of the world, culminating in the expansionary German war machine, the Second World War and the Nazi death camps. International institutions such as the United Nations and international humanitarian law were developed precisely to stop the repeat of such a cataclysmic event.

Once in the Middle East, Zionism shifted the locus of its struggle, from finding a solution to European anti-semitism to building an exclusive Jewish homeland on someone else’s land, that of the Palestinians. If one wants to understand the impact of Zionism in the Middle East, then one needs to see how destabilising such a European ideological implant was.

The idea of ethnic-religious supremacism, which history suggests is latent in many ethnic nationalisms, quickly came to the fore in Zionism. Today, the dominant features of Zionist ideology in Israel are:

• a commitment to segregation at all levels – made concrete in the separation wall across the West Bank;
• a belief in ethnic exclusivism – Palestinian citizens inside Israel are even denied an Israeli nationality;
• a kind of national paranoia – walls are built to protect every border;
• an aversion, paradoxically given the above, to defining its borders – and with it a craving for expansion and greater “living room”.

All of this was predictable if one looked at the trajectory of ethnic nationalisms in Europe. Instead, we in the West see all this as a reaction to Islamism. The reality is we have everything back to front: Zionism, an aggressive ethnic nationalism, fed reactionary forces in the region like political Islam.

Cotto: If Israel adopted its pre-1967 borders, would this, in your opinion, contribute to the peace process?

Cook: Of course, it would. If nothing else, it would show for the first time two things: one, that Israel is prepared to exhibit good faith towards the Palestinians and respect international law; and two, that it has finally decided to define and fix its borders. Those are also two good reasons why I don’t think we will see Israel adopt such a position.

There is a further, implicit question underlying this one. Can a Palestinian state on 22 per cent of historic Palestine, separated into two prison-cantons with limited access to the sea, be a viable state?

No, I don’t think it can – at least not without remaining economically dependent on Israel and militarily vulnerable to it too. That, we should remember, also appears to have been the view of the international community when it tried to solve this problem more than 60 years ago. The United Nations Partition Plan of 1947 gave the Jewish minority 55 per cent of historic Palestine to create a Jewish state, while the Palestinians, the majority of the population, received 45 per cent for an Arab state.

One doesn’t have to believe the partition plan was fair – as most Palestinians do not – to understand that even the Western-centric UN of that time did not imagine that a viable state could be created on 22 per cent of Palestine, or half of the “Arab state” it envisioned.

That is why I have long maintained that ultimately a solution to the conflict will only be found when the international community helps the two sides to find common ground and shared interests and to create joint institutions. That might be vaguely termed the one-state solution, but in practice it could take many forms.

Cotto: It is often noted that Palestinians live in far more impoverished socioeconomic conditions than Israelis do. From your standpoint, can this be attributed to Israeli aggression?

Cook: In essence, it is difficult to imagine it could be attributed to much else, unless one makes the racist assumption that Palestinians or Arabs are naturally lazy or incompetent.

In terms of Israel’s greater economic success, there are several factors to take into account. It receives massive subsidies from the US taxpayer – billions of dollars in military aid and other benefits. It has developed very lucrative hi-tech and homeland security industries, often using the occupied territories as laboratories for it to test and showcase its weapons and surveillance systems. It also benefits from the financial connections it enjoys with worldwide Jewry. Just think of the property market in Israel, which is artificially boosted by wealthy US and European Jews who inject money into the economy by buying an Israeli condo.

But equally importantly – as a just-published report from the World Bank concludes – it has prospered by plundering and exploiting Palestinian resources. The World Bank argues that Israel’s de facto annexation of 62 per cent of the West Bank, known as Area C in the Oslo Accords, has stripped any nascent Palestinian state of almost all its resources: land for development, water for agriculture, quarries for stone, the Dead Sea for minerals and tourism, etc. Instead these resources are being stolen by more than 200 settlements Israel has been sowing over the West Bank.

Israel also exploits a captive, and therefore cheap, Palestinian labour force. That both benefits the Israeli economy and crushes the Palestinian economy.

Cotto: Some say that Israel’s settlement policies directly encourage violence from Palestinian militants. Do you believe this to be the case?

Cook: Yes, of course. If you came armed with a gun to my house and took it from me, and then forced me and my family to live in the shed at the end of the garden, you could hardly be surprised if I started making trouble for you. If I called the police and they said they couldn’t help, you could hardly be surprised if I eventually decided to get a gun myself to threaten you back. If, when you saw I had a gun too, you then built a wall around the shed to imprison me, you could hardly be surprised if I used the tools I had to make primitive grenades and started lobbing them towards the house. None of this would prove how unreasonable I was, or how inherently violent.

Cotto: Many claim that, if Israel were to shed its Jewish ethnocentrism, Muslims and others nearby would adopt a more favorable opinion of it. Do you agree with this idea?

Cook: Ethnocentrism for Israel means that the protection of its Jewishness is synonymous with the protection of its national security. That entails all sorts of things that would be considered very problematic if they were better understood.

Israel needed to ethnically cleanse Palestinians in 1948 to create a Jewish state. It needs separate citizenship and nationality laws, which distinguish between Jews and non-Jews, to sustain a Jewish state. It needs its own version of the “endless war on terror” – an aggressive policy of oppression and divide and rule faced by Palestinians under its rule – to prevent any future internal challenge to the legitimacy of its Jewishness. It needs to keep Palestinian refugees festering in camps in neighbouring Arab states to stop a reversal of its Jewishness. And it has had to become an armed and fortified garrison state, largely paid for by the US, to intimidate and bully its neighbours in case they dare to threaten its Jewishness.

Ending that ethnocentrism would therefore alter relations with its neighbours dramatically.

It was possible to end similar historic enmities in Northern Ireland and in South Africa. There is no reason to believe the same cannot happen in the Middle East.

Cotto: If Israel were to cease being an ethnocentrically Jewish state, do you think it would be able to survive?

Cook: Yes. Israel’s actions have produced an ocean of anger towards it in the region – and a great deal of resentment towards the US too. And that would not evaporate overnight. At a minimum there would be lingering distrust, and for good reason. But for Israel to stop being an ethnocratic state, it would require a serious international solution to the conflict. The international community would have to put into place mechanisms and institutions to resolve historic grievances and build trust, as it did in South Africa. Over time, the wounds would heal.

Cotto: In the event that Israel were to end its ethnocentrically Jewish policies, do you believe that Islamist militants would hold less of a grudge against the Western world?

Cook: The question looks at the problem in the wrong way in at least two respects. First, Israel’s ethnocentrism – its exclusivity and its aggressiveness, for example – is one of the reasons it is useful to Western, meaning US, imperialism. Reforming Israel would indicate a change in Western priorities in the region, but that does not necessarily mean the West would stop interfering negatively in the region. Reforming Israel is a necessary but not a sufficient cause for a change in attitudes that dominate in the region.

Second, many Islamists, certainly of the fanatical variety, are not suddenly going to have a Damascene conversion about the West because Israel is reformed. But that should not be the goal. Good intentions towards the region will be repaid in a change in attitude among the wider society – and that is what is really important. When George Bush and his ilk talk about “draining the swamps”, they are speaking only in military terms. But actually what we should be doing is draining the ideological swamp in which Islamic extremism flourishes. If the Islamists have no real support, if they do not address real issues faced by Arab societies, then they will wither away.

Cotto: What do you think the future of Israel holds insofar as Middle Eastern geopolitics are concerned?

Cook: That is crystal ball stuff. There are too many variables. What can be said with some certainty is that we are in a time of transition: at the moment, chiefly economic for the West and chiefly political for the Middle East. That means the global power systems we have known for decades are starting to break down. Where that will ultimately lead is very difficult to decipher.

Joseph Cotto writes for the Washington Times.

Tagged as: peace process, Zionism

- See more at: http://www.jonathan-cook.net/2013-11-04/israel-and-the-dangers-of-ethnic-nationalism/#sthash.hUVchNfo.dpuf

 

How Cell Phone Tech Resulted In The Spookiest Surveillance Camera On Earth

Everyone marveled when the iPhone 4S came equipped with a full high definition video camera. Little did they know that the race to miniaturize cell phone cameras led to quite possibly the spookiest surveillance camera on earth.

Autonomous Real-Time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance Imaging System, or ARGUS-IS, which we recently covered, is the result of a low budget and 368 cannibalized cell phone cameras, slammed together to create the largest, finest surveillance camera in the world.

Attached to a predator drone, the camera records approximately 1 trillion gigabytes of information in a single day. More

 

 

The ARGUS-IS, or the Autonomous Real-Time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance Imaging System, is a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) project contracted to BAE Systems. According to DARPA:^[1]

The mission of the Autonomous Real-time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance - Imaging System (ARGUS-IS) program is to provide military users a flexible and responsive capability to find, track and monitor events and activities of interest on a continuous basis in areas of interest. The overall objective is to increase situational awareness and understanding enabling an ability to find and fix critical events in a large area in enough time to influence events. ARGUS - IS provides military users an "eyes-on" persistent wide area surveillance capability to support tactical users in a dynamic battlespace or urban environment. More

Obama's Risky Middle East Fantasy by Ira Chernus

Had you searched for “Israel, nuclear weapons” at Google News in the wake of President Obama’s recent trip to the Middle East, you would have gotten a series of headlines like this: “Obama: Iran more than a year away from developing nuclear weapon” (CNN), “Obama vows to thwart Tehran's nuclear drive” (the Times of Israel), Obama: No nuclear weapons for Iran (the San Angelo Times), “US, Israel increasingly concerned about construction of Iran’s plutonium-producing reactor” (Associated Press), “Obama says ‘there is still time’ to find diplomatic solution to Iran nuke dispute; Netanyahu hints at impatience” (NBC), “Iran’s leader threatens to level cities if Israel attacks, criticizes US nuclear talks” (Fox).

By now, we’re so used to such a world of headlines -- about Iran’s threatening nuclear weapons and its urge to “wipe out” Israel -- that we simply don’t see how strange it is. At the moment, despite one aircraft carrier task force sidelined in Norfolk, Virginia (theoretically because of sequester budget cuts), the U.S. continues to maintain a massive military presence around Iran. That modest-sized regional power, run by theocrats, has been hobbled by ever-tightening sanctions, its skies filled with U.S. spy drones, its offshore waters with U.S. warships. Its nuclear scientists have been assassinated, assumedly by agents connected to Israel, and its nuclear program attacked by Washington and Tel Aviv in the first cyberwar in history. As early as 2007, the U.S. Congress was already ponying up hundreds of millions of dollars for a covert program of destabilization that evidently involved cross-border activities, assumedly using U.S. special operations forces -- and that's only what's known about the pressure being exerted on Iran. With this, and the near-apocalyptic language of nuclear fear that surrounds it, has gone a powerful, if not always acknowledged, urge for what earlier in the new century was called “regime change.” (Who can forget theneocon quip of the pre-Iraq-invasion moment: “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad, real men want to go to Tehran”?)

And all of this is due, so we're told, to what remains a fantasy nuclear weapon, one that endangers no one because it doesn’t exist, and most observers don’t think that Tehran is in the process of preparing to build one either. In other words, the scariest thing in our world, or at least in the Middle Eastern part of it -- if you believe Washington, Tel Aviv, and much reporting on the subject -- is a nuclear will-o'-the-wisp. In the meantime, curiously enough, months can pass without significant focus on or discussion of Pakistan’s expanding nuclear arsenal. And yet, in that shaky, increasingly destabilized country, such an existing arsenal has to qualify as a genuine and growing regional danger.

Similarly, you can read endlessly in the mainstream about President Obama’s recent triumphs in the Middle East and that Iranian nuclear program without ever stumbling upon anything of significance about the only genuine nuclear arsenal in the vicinity: Israel’s. On the rare occasions when it is even mentioned, it’s spoken of as if it might or might not exist. Israel, Fox News typically reports, “is believed to have the only nuclear weapons arsenal in the Mideast.” It is, of course, Israeli policy (and a carefully crafted fiction) never to acknowledge its nuclear arsenal. But the arsenal itself isn’t just “believed” to exist, it is known to exist -- 100-300 nuclear weapons' worth or enough destructive power to turn not just Iran but the Greater Middle East into an ash heap.

To sum up: we continue to obsess about fantasy weapons, base an ever more threatening and dangerous policy in the region on their possible future existence, might conceivably end up in a war over them, and yet pay remarkably little attention to the existing nuclear weapons in the region. If this were the approach of countries other than either the U.S. or Israel, you would know what to make of it and undoubtedly words like “paranoia” and “fantasy” would quickly creep into any discussion.

With that in mind, let Ira Chernus, TomDispatch regular and an expert on separating fantasy from reality, take on the tough task of putting aside the media hosannas about the president’s recent Middle Eastern travels and making sense of what actually happened. Tom

Obama Walks the High Wire, Eyes Closed

When It Comes to Israel, Palestine, and Iran, It Could All Come Crashing Down

By Ira Chernus

Barack Obama came to Israel and Palestine, saw what he wanted to see, and conquered the mainstream media with his eloquent words. U.S. and Israeli journalists called it a dream trip, the stuff that heroic myths are made of: a charismatic world leader taking charge of the Mideast peace process. But if the president doesn’t wake up and look at the hard realities he chose to ignore, his dream of being the great peacemaker will surely crumble, as it has before.

Like most myths, this one has elements of truth. Obama did say some important things. In a speech to young Israelis, he insisted that their nation’s occupation of the West Bank is not merely bad for their country, it is downright immoral, “not fair... not just ... not right.”

I’ve been decrying the immorality of the occupation for four decades, yet I must admit I never dreamed I would hear an American president, standing in Jerusalem, do the same.

Despite those words, however, Obama is no idealist. He’s a strategist. His Jerusalem speech was clearly meant to widen the gap between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the substantial center-left portion of Israeli Jews, who are open to a deal with the Palestinians and showed unexpected strength in recent elections. The growing political tensions in Israel and a weakened prime minister give the American president a potential opening to maneuver, manipulate, and perhaps even control the outcome of events.

How to do so, though? Obama himself probably has no clear idea. Whatever Washington’s Middle Eastern script, when it comes to Israel and the Palestinians, it will require an extraordinary balancing act.

The president will have to satisfy (or mollify) both the center-left and the right in Israel, strike an equally perfect balance between divergent Israeli and Palestinian demands, march with Netanyahu up to the edge of war with Iran yet keep Israel from plunging over that particular cliff, calibrate the ratcheting up of punishing sanctions and other acts in relation to Iran so finely that the Iranians will, in the end, yield to U.S. demands without triggering a war, and prevent the Syrian civil war from spilling into Israel, which means controlling Lebanese politics, too. Don’t forget that he will have do it all while maintaining his liberal base at home and fending off the inevitable assault from the right.

Oh, yes. Then there are all the as-yet-unforeseeable variables that will also have to be managed. To call it a tall order is an understatement.

The Fantasy of Perfect Control

In American political culture, we expect no less from any president. After all, he is “the most powerful man in the world” -- so he should be able to walk such a high wire adroitly, without fretting too much about the consequences, should he fall. More

 

The four guilty parties behind Israel’s attack

The inciting cause of the latest confrontation between Israel and Hamas has little to do with the firing of rockets, whether by Hamas or the other Palestinian factions. The conflict predates the rockets – and even the creation of Hamas – by decades. It is the legacy of Israel’s dispossession of Palestinians in 1948, forcing many of them from their homes in what is now Israel into the tiny Gaza Strip. That original injustice has been compounded by the occupation Israel has not only failed to end but has actually intensified in recent years with its relentless siege of the small strip of territory.

Why Gaza must suffer again 18 November 2012

The four guilty parties behind Israel’s attack

Israeli Occupation Archive – 18 November 2012

A short interview broadcast by CNN late last week featuring two participants – a Palestinian in Gaza and an Israeli within range of the rocket attacks – did not follow the usual script.

For once, a media outlet dropped its role as gatekeeper, there to mediate and therefore impair our understanding of what is taking place between Israel and the Palestinians, and inadvertently became a simple window on real events.

The usual aim of such “balance” interviews relating to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is twofold: to reassure the audience that both sides of the story are being presented fairly; and to dissipate potential outrage at the deaths of Palestinian civilians by giving equal time to the suffering of Israelis.

But the deeper function of such coverage in relation to Gaza, given the media’s assumption that Israeli bombs are simply a reaction to Hamas terror, is to redirect the audience’s anger exclusively towards Hamas. In this way, Hamas is made implicitly responsible for the suffering of both Israelis and Palestinians.

The dramatic conclusion to CNN’s interview appears, however, to have otherwise trumped normal journalistic considerations.

The pre-recorded interview via Skype opened with Mohammed Sulaiman in Gaza. From what looked like a cramped room, presumably serving as a bomb shelter, he spoke of how he was too afraid to step outside his home. Throughout the interview, we could hear the muffled sound of bombs exploding in the near-distance. Mohammed occasionally glanced nervously to his side.

The other interviewee, Nissim Nahoom, an Israeli official in Ashkelon, also spoke of his family’s terror, arguing that it was no different from that of Gazans. Except in one respect, he hastened to add: things were worse for Israelis because they had to live with the knowledge that Hamas rockets were intended to harm civilians, unlike the precision missiles and bombs Israel dropped on Gaza.

The interview returned to Mohammed. As he started to speak, the bombing grew much louder. He pressed on, saying he would not be silenced by what was taking place outside. The interviewer, Isha Sesay, interrupted – seemingly unsure of what she was hearing – to inquire about the noise.

Then, with an irony that Mohammed could not have appreciated as he spoke, he began to say he refused to be drawn into a comparison about whose suffering was worse when an enormous explosion threw him from his chair and severed the internet connection. Switching back to the studio, Sesay reassured viewers that Mohammed had not been hurt.

The bombs, however, spoke more eloquently than either Mohammed or Nissim. More

 

In Paper, Chief of Egypt’s Army Criticized U.S.

As a student at the United States Army War College in Pennsylvania, the chief of staff of Egypt’s armed forces argued in a paper that the American military presence in the Middle East and its “one sided” support of Israel were fueling hatred toward the United States and miring it in an unwinnable global war with Islamist militants.

Gen. Sedky Sobhi

The paper, written seven years ago by the new chief of staff, Gen. Sedky Sobhi, offers an early and expansive look into the thinking of one member of the new generation of military officers stepping into power as part of a leadership shake-up under Egypt’s newly elected president, Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood.

General Sobhi’s sharp rebuke of American policy is especially striking because he now oversees the military institution that has been the closest United States ally in the Arab world, relied on by American officials as a critical bulwark in support of Israeli security and against Iranian influence. Despite decades of military collaboration, he urged a full pullout of American forces from the region.

Scholars say his paper is even more significant in part because many of its themes reflect opinions widely held by Egyptians, their new president and people throughout the region — an increasingly potent factor in regional foreign policy, as Egypt and other countries struggle toward democracy.

American officials said their confidence in Egypt was unshaken, while analysts argued that despite the changes in the nation’s military and civilian leadership, any realignment in relations with Washington could be slow — in part because of Egypt’s urgent need for assistance from the United States and the West.

“For sure there are going to be big changes in Egypt’s relationship with Washington,” said Shibley Telhami, a political scientist at the University of Maryland and a scholar at the Brookings Institution who has studied Arab and Egyptian public opinion.

In surveys across the Arab world for more than a decade, he said, about 70 percent of the public has named the United States as the second-greatest threat to regional security, after Israel — even in Egypt, where Washington provides $1.3 billion in annual military aid, and in Saudi Arabia, another close American ally.

As General Sobhi argued, Professor Telhami said, “there were always two central issues driving Arab and Egyptian anger with the U.S., the Palestinian question — the prism of pain through which Arabs see the West — and the U.S. military presence.”

General Sobhi’s paper, first reported by an independent journalist in Cairo, Issandr El Amrani, offers a rare look into the foreign policy thinking of a military institution often considered all but impenetrable to outsiders.

For decades under President Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian military, and the nation’s foreign policy, had been closely allied with the United States and its regional interests. There was concern in Washington after Mr. Mubarak’s ouster that the relationship might not survive — an anxiety that was revived when Mr. Morsi was elected president.

But Washington knew that the longtime defense minister, Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, and his chief of staff, Sami Hafez Anan, still wielded considerable power and were reliable allies.

Then, after an embarrassing terrorist attack in northern Sinai this month, Mr. Morsi appeared to consolidate his power by announcing their replacement, while keeping them on as presidential advisers. The shake-up raised for the first time the possibility that Mr. Morsi might begin to exert some real sway over Egyptian foreign policy, and General Sobhi’s paper suggested that at least some of the younger cadre of generals might share an interest in more independence from Washington. More

 

Drums of war: The US media's 'Iranian threat'

 

On Listening Post this week: Beating the drum for war - the US media and 'The Iranian Threat'. Plus, the burgeoning media scene in post-revolutionary Libya.

Something sounds familiar. 'Long-range nuclear missiles', 'terrorist sleeper cells', 'WMDs': terms which quickly became part of the media's vocabulary in the run up to the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq. Fast-forward to 2012 and they are featuring heavily once again, only now it is not about Iraq, but Iran. Last time, the media's saber-rattling followed the Bush administration's lead in selling the attack on Iraq. This time, the so-called 'Iranian Threat' is a narrative being constructed by the US media all by itself - with scant public support from the Obama administration. Our News Divide this week takes a close look at the coverage of Iran and a culture of journalism that seems to have forgotten the very real dangers of hypothesis and conjecture. More

One would think that paranoia was an infectious disease given the way is spreads in certain countries and among the media. However, given the level of greed in today's world that drives corporate motivation it should surprize no one. On the other hand no sector of the economy should be beating the drums of war. All corporations should be practicing Corporate Social Responsability. Editor.