This fall, I began my first lecture on Eurocentrism by asking my students, How Eurocentric is your day? I explained what I wanted to hear from them. Can they get through a typical day without running into ideas, institutions, values, technologies and products that originated outside the West – in China, India, the Islamicate or Africa?

The question befuddled my students. I proceeded to pepper them with questions about the things they do during a typical day, from the time they wake up.

Unbeknownst, my students discover that they wake up in ‘pajamas,’ trousers of Indian origin with an Urdu-Persian name. Out of bed, they shower with soap and shampoo, whose origins go back to the Middle East and India. Their tooth brush with bristles was invented in China in the fifteenth century. At some point after waking up, my students use toilet paper and tissue, also Chinese inventions of great antiquity.

Do the lives of my students rise to Eurocentric purity once they step out of the toilet and enter into the more serious business of going about their lives? Not quite.

I walk my student through her breakfast. Most likely, this consists of cereals, coffee and orange juice, with sugar added to the bargain. None originated in Europe. Cereals were first cultivated in the Fertile Crescent some ten thousand years BCE. Coffee, orange and sugar still carry – in their etymology – telltale signs of their origins, going back to the Arabs, Ethiopians and Indians. Try to imagine your life without these stimulants and sources of calories.

How far could my students go without the alphabet, numbers and paper? Yet, the alphabet came to Europe courtesy of the ancient Phoenicians. As their name suggests, the Arabic numerals were brought to Europe by the Arabs, who, in turn, had obtained it from the Indians. Paper came from China, also brought to Europe by the Muslims.

Obstinately, my students’ day refuses to get off to a dignified Eurocentric start.

In her prayer, my Christian student turns to a God who – in his human form – walked the earth in Palestine and spoke Aramaic, a close cousin of Arabic. When her thoughts turn to afterlife, my student thinks of the Day of Judgment, paradise and hell, concepts borrowed from the ancient Egyptians and Persians. ‘Paradise’ entered into English, via Greek, from the ancient Avestan pairidaeza.

Of medieval origin, the college was inspired and, most likely, modeled after the madrasa or Islamic college, first set up by a Seljuk vizier in eleventh century Baghdad. In a nod to this connection, professors at universities still hold a ‘chair,’ a practice that goes back to the madrasa, where the teacher alone sat in a chair while his students sat around him on rugs.

When she finishes college and prepares to receive her baccalaureate at the graduation ceremony, our student might do well to acknowledge another forgotten connection to the madrasa. This diploma harks back to the ijaza – Arabic for license – given to students who graduated from madrasas in the Islamicate.

Our student runs into fields of study – algebra, trigonometry, astronomy, chemistry, medicine and philosophy – that were introduced, via Latin, to Western Europe from the Islamicate. She also encounters a variety of scientific terms – algorithm, alkali, borax, amalgam, alembic, amber, calibrate, azimuth and nadir – which have Arabic roots.

If my students play chess over the weekend and threaten the King with ‘check mate,’ that phrase is adapted from Farsi – Shah maat – for ‘the King is helpless, defeated.’

When she uses coins, paper currency or writes a check, she is using forms of money first used outside Europe. Gold bars were first used as coins in Egypt in the fourth millennium BCE. With astonishment, Marco Polo records the use of paper currency in China, and describes how the paper used as currency was made from the bark of mulberry trees.

At college, my student will learn about modernity, ostensibly the source and foundation of the power and the riches of Western nations. Her professors in sociology will claim that laws based on reasoning, the abolition of priesthood, the scientific method, and secularism – hallmarks of modernity – are entirely of Western origin. Are they?

During the eighteenth century, many of the leading Enlightenment thinkers were keenly aware that Chinese had preceded them in their emphasis on reasoning by some two millennia. By the end of this century, however, a more muscular, more confident Europe chose to erase their debt to China from its collective memory.

Similarly, Islam, in the seventh century, made a more radical break from priesthood than the Reformation in Europe. In the eleventh century, an Arab scientist, Alhazen – his Latinized name – devised numerous experiments to test his theories in optics, but, more importantly, theorized cogently about the scientific method in his writings. Roger Bacon, the putative ‘founder’ of the scientific method, had read Alhazen in a Latin translation.

When our student reads the sonnets of Shakespeare and Spenser, she is little aware that the tradition of courtly love they celebrate comes via Provencal and the troubadours (derived from taraba, Arabic for ‘to sing’) from Arab traditions of love, music and poetry. When our male student gets down on one knee while proposing to his fair lady, he might do well to remember this.

On a clear night, with a telescope on her dormitory rooftop, our student can watch stars, many of which still carry Arabic names. This might be a fitting closure to a day in the life of our student, who, more likely than not, remains Eurocentric in her understanding of world history, little aware of the multifarious bonds that connect her life to different parts of the ‘Orient.’

The ultimate goal…is, in time, to take over the Land of Israel and to restore to the Jews the political independence they have been deprived of for these two thousand years…The Jews will yet arise and, arms in hand (if need be), declare that they are the masters of their ancient homeland.

— Vladimir Dubnow, 1882

Zionism is best described as an abnormal nationalism. This singular fact has engendered a history of deepening conflicts between Israel — leading an alliance of Western states — and the Islamicate more generally.

Jewish ‘nationalism’ was abnormal for two reasons. It was homeless: it did not possess a homeland. The Jews of Europe were not a majority in, or even exercised control over, any territory that could become the basis of a Jewish state. We do not know of another nationalist movement in recent memory that started with such a land deficit — that is, without a homeland.

Arguably, Jewish nationalism was without a nation too. The Jews were a religious aggregate, consisting of communities, scattered across many regions and countries, some only tenuously connected to others, but who shared the religious traditions derived from, or an identity connected to, Judaism. Over the centuries, Jews had been taught that a divinely appointed Messiah would restore them to Zion; but such a Messiah never appeared; or when he did, his failure to deliver ‘proved’ that he was false. Indeed, while the Jews prayed for the appearance of the Messiah, they had no notion about when this might happen. In addition, since the nineteenth century, Reform Jews have interpreted their chosenness metaphorically. Max Nordau complained bitterly that for the Reform Jew, “the word Zion had just as little meaning as the word dispersion…He denies that there is a Jewish people and that he is a member of it.”

Since Zionism was a nationalism without a homeland or a nation, its protagonists would have to create both. To compensate for the first deficit, the Zionists would have to acquire a homeland: they would have to expropriate territory that belonged to another people. In other words, a homeless nationalism, of necessity, is a charter for conquest and — if it is exclusionary — for ethnic cleansing. At the same time, the Zionists would have to start creating a Jewish nation out of the heterogeneous Jewish colons they would assemble in their newly minted homeland. At the least, they would have to create a nucleus of Jews who were willing to settle in Palestine and committed to creating the infrastructure of a Jewish society and state in Palestine. For many years, this nucleus would be small, since, Jews, overwhelmingly, preferred assimilation and revolution in Europe to colonizing Palestine.

A Jewish nation would begin to grow around this small nucleus only if the Zionists could demonstrate that their scheme was not a chimera. The passage of the Zionist plan — from chimera to reality — would be delivered by three events: imposition of tight immigration restrictions in most Western countries starting in the 1900s, the Balfour Declaration of 1917, and the rise to power of the Nazis in 1933. As a result, when European Jews began fleeing Nazi persecution, most of them had nowhere to go to but Palestine.

In their bid to create a Jewish state in Palestine, the Zionists could not stop at half-measures. They could not — and did not wish to — introduce Jews as only one element in the demography of the conquered territory. The Zionists sought to establish a Jewish state in Palestine; this had always been their goal. Officially, they never acknowledge that the creation of a Jewish state would have to be preceded, accompanied, or followed by ethnic cleansing. Nevertheless, it is clear from the record now available that Zionists wanted nothing less than to make Palestine “as Jewish as England is English.” If the Palestinians could not be bribed to leave, they would have to be forced out.

The Zionists were determined to reenact in the middle of the twentieth century the exclusive settler colonialism of an earlier epoch. They were determined to repeat the supremacist history of the white colons in the Americas and Oceania. By the measure of any historical epoch, much less that of an age of decolonization, the Zionist project was radical in the fate it had planned for the Palestinians: their complete or near-complete displacement from Palestine. A project so daring, so radical, so anachronistic could only emerge from unlimited hubris, deep racial contempt for the Palestinians, and a conviction that the ‘primitive’ Palestinians would prove to be utterly lacking in the capacity to resist their own dispossession.

The Zionists faced another challenge. They had to convince Jews that they are a nation, a Jewish nation, who deserved more than any nation in the world — because of the much greater antiquity of Jews — to have their own state, a Jewish state in Palestine. It was the duty of Jews, therefore, to work for the creation of this Jewish state by supporting the Zionists, and, most importantly, by emigrating to Palestine. Most Jews in the developed Western countries had little interest in becoming Jewish pioneers in Palestine; their lives had improved greatly in the previous two or three generations and they did not anticipate any serious threats from anti-Semitism. The Jews in Eastern Europe did face serious threats to their lives and property from anti-Semites, but they too greatly preferred moving to safer and more prosperous countries in Western Europe, the Americas, South Africa, and Australia. Persuading Jews to move to Palestine was proving to be a far more difficult task than opening up Palestine to unlimited Jewish colonization. Zionism needed a stronger boost from anti-Semites than they had provided until the early 1930s.

The Zionists always understood that their movement would have to be driven by Jewish fears of anti-Semitism. They were also quite sanguine that there would be no paucity of such assistance, especially from anti-Semites in Eastern Europe. Indeed, now that the Zionists had announced a political program to rid Europe of its Jews, would the anti-Semites retreat just when some Jews were implicitly asking for their assistance in their own evacuation from Europe? This was a match made in heaven for the anti-Semites. Once the Zionists had also brought the anti-Semites in messianic camouflage — the Christian Zionists — on board, this alliance became more broad-based and more enduring. Together, by creating and continuing to support Israel, these allies would lay the foundations of a deepening conflict against the Islamicate.

Zionism was a grave assault on the history of the global resistance to imperialism that unfolded even as Jewish colons in Palestine laid the foundations of their colonial settler state. The Zionists sought to abolish the ground realities in the Middle East established by Islam over the previous thirteen hundred years. They sought to overturn the demography of Palestine, to insert a European presence in the heart of the Islamicate, and to serve as the forward base for Western powers intent on dominating the Middle East. The Zionists could succeed only by combining the forces of the Christian and Jewish West in an assault that would almost certainly be seen as a new, latter-day Crusade to marginalize the Islamicate peoples in the Middle East.

It was delusional to assume that the Zionist challenge to the Islamicate would go unanswered. The Zionists had succeeded in imposing their Jewish state on the Islamicate because of the luck of timing — in addition to all the other factors that had favored them. The Islamicate was at its weakest in the decades following the destruction of the Ottoman Empire; even a greatly weakened Ottoman Empire had resisted for more than two decades Zionist pressures to grant them a charter to create a Jewish state in Palestine. The first wave of Arab resistance against Israel — led by secular nationalists from the nascent bourgeoisie classes — lacked the structures to wage a people’s war. Taking advantage of this Arab weakness, Israel quickly dismantled the Arab nationalist movement, whose ruling classes began making compromises with Israel and its Western allies. This setback to the resistance was temporary.

The Arab nationalist resistance would slowly be replaced by another that would draw upon Islamic roots; this return to indigenous ideas and structures would lay the foundations of a resistance that would be broader, deeper, many-layered, and more resilient than the one it would replace. The overarching ambitions of Israel — to establish its hegemony over the central lands of the Islamicate — would guarantee the emergence of this new response. The quick collapse of the Arab nationalist resistance in the face of Israeli victories ensured that the deeper Islamicate response would emerge sooner rather than later. As a result, Israel today confronts — now in alliance with Arab rulers — the entire Islamicate, a great mass of humanity, which is determined to overthrow this alliance. If one recalls that the Islamicate is now a global community, enjoying demographic dominance in a region that stretches from Mauritania to Mindanao — and now counts more than a billion and a half people, whose growth rate exceeds that of any other collectivity — one can easily begin to comprehend the eventual scale of this Islamicate resistance against the Zionist imposition.

In the era preceding the rise of the Nazis, the Zionist idea — even from a Jewish standpoint — was an affront to more than two millennia of their own history. Jews had started migrating to the farthest points in the Mediterranean long before the second destruction of the Temple, where they settled down and converted many local peoples to the Jewish faith. Over time, conversions to Judaism established Jewish communities farther afield — beyond the Mediterranean world. In the 1890s, however, a small but determined cabal of European Jews proposed a plan to abrogate the history of global Jewish communities extending over millennia. They were determined to accomplish what the worst anti-Semites had failed to do: to empty Europe and the Middle East of their Jewish population and transport them to Palestine, a land to which they had a spiritual connection — just as Muslims in Bangladesh, Bosnia, and Burkina Faso are connected to Mecca and Medina — but to which their racial or historical connections were nonexistent or tenuous at best. Was the persecution of Jews in Europe before the 1890s sufficient cause to justify such a radical reordering of the human geography of the world’s Jewish populations?

A more ominous implication flowed from another peculiarity of Zionism. Unlike other white settlers, the Jewish colons lacked a natural mother country, a Jewish state that could support their colonization of Palestine. In the face of this deficiency, the career of any settler colonialism would have ended prematurely. Instead, because of the manner in which this deficit was overcome, the Zionists acquired the financial, political, and military support of much of the Western world. This was not the result of a conspiracy, but flowed from the peculiar position that Jews — at the end of the nineteenth century — had come to occupy in the imagination, geography, economy, and the polities of the Western world.

The Zionists drew their primary support from the Western Jews, many of whom by the middle of the nineteenth century were members of the most influential segments of Western societies. Over time, as Western Jews gravitated to Zionism, their awesome financial and intellectual assets would become available to the Jewish colons in Palestine. The Jewish colons drew their leadership — in the areas of politics, the economy, industry, civilian and military technology, organization, propaganda, and science — from the pool of Europe’s best. It can scarcely be doubted that the Jewish colons brought overwhelming advantages to their contest against the Palestinians and the neighboring Arabs. No other colonists, contemporaneous with the Zionists or in the nineteenth century, brought the same advantages to their enterprise vis-à-vis the natives.

Pro-Zionist Western Jews would make a more critical contribution to the long-term success of Zionism. They would mobilize their resources — as well-placed members of the financial, intellectual, and cultural elites of Western societies — to make the case for Zionism, to silence criticism of Israel, and generate domestic political pressures to secure the support of Western powers for Israel. In other words, the Zionist ability to recruit Western allies depended critically upon the peculiar position that Jews held in the imagination, prejudices, history, geography, economy, and politics of Western societies.

The Jews have always had a ‘special’ relationship with the Christian West; they were special even as objects of Christian hatred. Judaism has always occupied the unenviable position of being a parent religion that was overtaken by a heresy. For many centuries, the Christians regarded the Jews, hitherto God’s ‘chosen people,’ with disdain for rejecting Jesus. Nevertheless, they incorporated the Jewish scriptures into their own religious canon. This tension lies at the heart of Western ambivalence toward Jews; it is also one of the chief sources of the enduring hatred that Christians have directed toward the Jews.

In addition, starting in the fifteenth century, the Protestants entered into a new relationship with Judaism and Jews. In many ways, the Protestants drew inspiration from the Hebrew bible, began to read its words literally, and paid greater attention to its prophesies about end times. The theology of the English Puritans, in particular, assigned a special role to the Jews in their eschatology. The Jews would have to gather in Jerusalem before the Second Coming of Jesus; later, this theology was taken up by the English Evangelicals who carried it to the United States. Over time, with the growing successes of (Jewish) Zionism, the Evangelicals slowly became its most ardent supporters in the United States. The obverse of the Evangelical’s Zionism is a virulent hatred of Islam and Muslims.

Most importantly, however, it was the entry of Jews into mainstream European society — mostly during the nineteenth century — that paved the way for Zionist influence over the politics of several key Western states. The Zionists very deftly used the Jewish presence in the ranks of European elites to set up a competition among the great Western powers — especially Britain, Germany, and France — to gain Jewish support in their wars with each other, and to undermine the radical movements in Europe that were also dominated by Jews. Starting with World War II, the pro-Zionist Jews would slowly build a network of organizations, develop their rhetoric, and take leadership positions in important sectors of American civil society until they had gained the ability to define the parameters within which the United States could operate in the Middle East.

Serendipitously, it appears, pro-Zionist Jews also found, ready at hand, a rich assortment of negative energies in the West that they could harness to their own project. The convergence of their interests with that of the anti-Semites was perhaps the most propitious. The anti-Semites wanted the Jews out of Europe, and so did the Zionists. Anti-Semitism would also become the chief facilitator of the Jewish nationalism that the Zionists sought to create. In addition, the Zionists could muster support for their project by appealing to Western religious bigotry against Muslims as well as their racist bias against the Arabs as ‘inferior’ non-whites.

The Zionists would also argue that their project was closely aligned with the strategic interests of Western powers in the Middle East. This claim had lost its validity by the end of the nineteenth century, when Britain was firmly established in Egypt and it was the dominant power in the Indian Ocean. Indeed, the insertion of an exclusionary Jewish colonial settler state into the Islamicate geographical matrix was certain to provoke waves of resistance from the Muslim peoples. Western interests in the Islamicate were not positively aligned with the Zionist project. Yet, once Israel had been created, it would provoke anti-Western feelings in the Middle East, which, conveniently, the Zionists would deepen and offer as the rationale for supporting and arming Israel to protect Western interests against Arab and, later, Islamicate threats.

Israel was the product of a partnership that seems unlikely at first blush, between Western Jews and the Christian West. It is the powerful alchemy of the Zionist idea that produced and sustained this partnership. The Zionist project to create a Jewish state in Palestine possessed the power to convert two historical antagonists, Jews and Gentiles, into allies united in a common imperialist enterprise against the Islamicate. At different times, the Zionists have harnessed all the negative energies of the West — its imperialism, anti-Semitism, Crusading zeal, anti-Islamic bigotry, and racism — and focused them on a new project, the creation of a surrogate Western state in the Islamicate heartland. At the same time, the West could derive considerable satisfaction from the success of the Zionist project. Western societies could take ownership of, and revel in, the triumphs of this colonial state as their own; they could congratulate themselves for helping ‘save’ the Jewish people; they could feel they had made adequate amends for their history of anti-Semitism; they could feel they had finally paid back the Arabs and Turks for their conquests of Christian lands. Israel possessed a marvelous capacity to feed several of the West’s egotistical needs.

As a vehicle for facilitating Jewish entry into the stage of world history, the Zionist project was a stroke of brilliance. Since the Jews were influential, but without a state of their own, the Zionists were going to leverage Western power in their cause. As the Zionist plan would unfold, inflicting pain on the Islamicate, evoking Islamicate anger against the West and Jews, the complementarities between the two ancient adversaries would deepen, and, over time, new commonalities would be discovered or created between these two antagonist strains of Western history. In the United States, the Zionist movement would encourage Evangelical Christians — who looked upon the birth of Israel as the fulfillment of end-time prophecies — to become fanatic partisans of Israel. The West had hitherto traced its central ideas and institutions to Rome and Athens; in the wake of Zionist successes, it would be repackaged as a Judeo-Christian civilization, drawing its core principles, its inspiration from the Old Testament. This reframing would not only underscore the Jewish roots of the Western world: it would also make a point of emphasizing that Islam is the outsider, the eternal adversary opposed to both.

Zionism owes its success solely to this unlikely partnership. The Zionists could not have created a Jewish state in Palestine by bribing the Ottomans into granting them a charter to colonize Palestine. Despite his offers of loans, investments, technology, and diplomatic expertise, Theodore Herzl was repeatedly rebuffed by the Ottoman Sultan. It is even less likely that the Zionists, at any time, could have mobilized a Jewish army to invade and occupy Palestine, against Ottoman and Arab opposition. The Zionist partnership with the West was indispensable for the creation of a Jewish state.

This partnership was also fateful. It produced a powerful new dialectic, which has encouraged Israel — as the political center of the Jewish diaspora and the chief outpost of the West in the heart of the Islamic world — to become ever more aggressive in its designs against the Islamicate. In turn, a fragmented, weak and humiliated Islamicate, more resentful and determined after every defeat at the hands of Israel, has been driven to embrace increasingly radical ideas and methods to recover its dignity, wholeness, and power, and to seek to attain this recovery on the strength of Islamic ideas. This destabilizing dialectic has now brought the West itself into a direct confrontation against the Islamicate. This is the tragedy of Israel. It is a tragedy whose ominous consequences, including those that have yet to unfold, were contained in the very idea of an exclusive Jewish state in Palestine.

These are hallowed institutions. The power of private capital to produce jobs, wealth and freedom is one of the central dogmas that many Americans absorb with their mother’s milk. To hear this dogma challenged – in any context – is unsettling. I sometimes suspect that this bitter pill is harder to swallow because it emanates from someone who, so transparently, is not a native-born American.

As the weeks pass, however, my students appear to settle down. In the past, they have been reassured to learn that markets have done a good job at delivering prosperity to a few centers of global capitalism. They do work for us, even if they have not worked for most Asians, Africans and Latin Americans.

Nevertheless, the thesis that ‘free’ markets have rarely worked for economies lagging far behind the economic leaders, does not quite take root. The fault could not lie with markets. For too long, the West has believed that Asians, Africans and Latin Americans failed because they were lazy, spendthrift, venal and unimaginative.

My students – like most Americans – have been conditioned to look at capitalism from the standpoint of the winners in global capitalism. Because of the accident of birth, they have been the beneficiaries of the wealth and power that global capitalism concentrates at the nodes of the system. They cannot conceive how a system that has worked so well for them could produce misery for others in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

I have been away from my teaching duties as the United States has led the world into a deepening recession. Within a few months, the titans of Wall Street have been laid low, rescued from extinction by tax-financed bailouts. Teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, the auto giants have been placed on life-support also by taxpayers, their future still uncertain. In this maelstrom, there steps forward Bernard L. Madoff, the Einstein of Ponzi schemes, who operated his colossal con for twenty years without notice from regulators.

Millions of Americans have lost their jobs; millions are threatened with loss of their homes; millions have seen their retirement funds melt before their eyes; millions are threatened with loss of health care. As Americans on Main Street were being devastated, executives of bailed out banks continued to receive millions in bonuses. That straw now threatens to break the back of the fabled American tolerance for the foibles of the capitalist system.

Ordinarily, American democracy directs its venom against writers and activists on the left, foolish enough to want to defend the underprivileged. For a change, Americans are threatening captains of finance, venerable bankers, with dire consequences – even death threats.

I was on sabbatical when Al-Qaida brought down the Twin Towers on September 11. Then, I was relieved to be away from my students, afraid that some of them might want to lump me with those who had perpetrated these attacks.

I am on sabbatical, again, as the towers on Wall Street were being toppled by greed, recklessness and fraud; by a free-market ideology that has no regard for human life; by capitalist elites and their partners in the White House and Congress, who had turned the financial sector into a giant Ponzi scheme.

Americans have been subjected to acts of ‘terrorism’ whose final human toll will make September 11 look like a tea party. The perpetrators of this terror are all homegrown; they were trained not in the mountains of Afghanistan but at Harvard, Yale and Stanford; the bankers, executives and legislators who preyed on Americans are the crème de la crème of American society.

When I return to teach in Fall of this year, I expect to meet students chastened by their experience. Nothing undermines capitalist ideologies faster and more effectively than capitalist crises. No critique of capitalism can be more penetrating than the depredations of unemployment, immiseration, homelessness that it inflicts on its victims. So recently victimized – at the very center of global capitalism – perhaps, Americans might learn to empathize with victims elsewhere – in Africa, Asia and Latin America – who have been ravaged by this system for centuries.

Capitalist ideologues will be working overtime to deflect American anger away from the system to a few villains, to a few rotten apples. Congressional hearings will identify scapegoats; they will hang a few ‘witches.’ A few capitalist barons will be sacrificed. As public anger subsides, attempts will be made to shift the blame to feckless homebuyers and compulsive consumers. At all costs, the system must be saved. The capitalist show must go on, with as little change as possible.

Quite apart from this crisis, however, new technologies, in combination with the irreversible shift of sovereignty to some segments of the capitalist periphery, have been changing the dynamics of unequal development. The high-wage workers – the so-called middle classes in the developed countries – have been losing the protection they have long enjoyed against competition from low-wage workers in China and India.

More and more global capitalism will enrich some workers in the ‘periphery’ at the cost of workers in the ‘centers’ of capitalism. In the years ahead, the great alliance that was forged between capitalists and workers in the centers of capitalism will come under greater strain. More and more, the interests of these two classes will diverge.

Powerful corporations will still insist on openness, while growing ranks of workers will press for protectionism. This revival of class conflict in the old capitalist centers will strain existing political arrangements. After a co-optation that has lasted for more than a century, the demos will begin to threaten the corporate elites. New demands will be placed on intellectual mercenaries in the media and academia to use new, more effective tools to dumb down the demos.

As growing segments of high-wage workers in the rich countries become the new victims of capitalism, will they slowly learn to see capitalism from the standpoint of its victims? In this new emerging reality, will orthodox economics migrate from its old centers in London, Cambridge and Chicago to new centers in Bangalore and Beijing?

A curious world this will be when seen from the old centers. In truth, this will only be a long-delayed correction to two centuries of unequal development, dominated by Western centers. Sadly, the correction will not go far enough: it will leave much of the world mired in poverty and disease.

Consider, first, the fate of three previous invasions of Afghanistan by two great European powers, Britain and Soviet Union, since the nineteenth century.

These invasions ended in defeat – for the Europeans.

The first British occupation of Kabul lasted for four years. When the British garrison retreated from Kabul in 1842, it was picked off by Ghilzai warriors as they trudged through the snow. Only one British officer, William Brydon, survived this harrowing retreat. This solitary survivor was memorialized in a haunting painting by Elizabeth Butler, titled, Remnants of an Army.

The British occupied Kabul a second time in 1878, withdrew a year later, leaving behind a British resident to keep an eye on the Afghans. They returned the same year, when their resident in Kabul was killed in an uprising. When the British withdrew in 1880, discretely, they did not insist on leaving behind a British resident.

Nearly a hundred years later, 30,000 Soviet troops, invading from the north, occupied Kabul in December 1979. In order to oppose the growing Afghan resistance, the Russians soon raised their troop strength to 100,000 but never controlled any areas beyond the limits of a few cities. With 15,000 deaths, and unable to sustain growing casualties, the Soviets retreated in February 1989.

Will the United States fare better than Britain or the Soviet Union?

In terms of logistics, British India and Soviet Union were better placed than the United States. Afghanistan was next-door neighbor to both. It is half a world away from the United States, which, as a result, depends on long rail and road transit through Pakistan to supply and re-supply its troops. Moreover, the supply routes – from Karachi to Kabul – are vulnerable to attacks by the Taliban and their allies in Pakistan.

Alternative land supply routes would have to pass through Russia or Iran. Russia might make these routes available, at a steep cost, and keep raising the cost as US troop concentration in Afghanistan rises. Dependence on the Russians may turn out to be trap. Almost certainly, the Iranians will refuse, since, to do so, would badly tarnish its image with Sunni Islam.

The Soviet and British invaders primarily had to deal with Afghan fighters. The Americans are fighting the Taliban on both sides of the Afghan border, who, besides the Pushtuns, also have help from several Jihadi groups based in Punjab and Pakistani Kashmir.

Pakistan, America’s indispensable ally in the war against the Taliban, is an unwilling partner at best; it is also unreliable. Pakistan army has been gang-pressed and bribed into fighting the Taliban, and, as a result, the war is not popular with the junior officers and soldiers. In a rising spiral, Pakistan’s war against the Taliban has provoked them to carry their war deeper into Pakistan. At some point, this could split the Pakistan army, intensify Taliban attacks on Islamabad and Lahore, or force Islamist and nationalist officers to take over and end Pakistan’s collaboration with the United States.

Under pressure, the Taliban could launch another attack inside India. After the attacks on Mumbai last November, India was threatening ‘surgical strikes’ against Pakistan, forcing Pakistan to divert its troops to the eastern front. Another Mumbai, followed by Indian surgical strikes against Pakistan, could produce consequences too horrendous to contemplate.

Are US objectives in Afghanistan so vital as to bring two nuclear powers to the brink of a war?

Iran was not much of a factor when British India and Soviet Union were fighting in Afghanistan. It is now. In Iraq, Iran favored the defeat of the Sunni insurgency once it had denied the United States a victory. In Afghanistan, Iran prefers to create a quagmire for the Americans, ensuring a long stalemate between them and the Taliban.

In light of the consequences that have flowed from the US presence in Afghanistan, who would advise an escalation? President Obama still has time to put on hold his plans to send more troops to Afghanistan. Instead, the best political minds around the world should be examining the least costly exit from a war that promises to become a quagmire, at best, and, at worst, a disaster, which no US objective in the region can justify.

Unless, dismantling the world’s only Islamicate country with the bomb is an objective worthy of such horrendous costs.

As an exclusionary settler-colony, Israel does not stand alone in the history of European expansion overseas: but it is the only one of its kind in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Since the sixteenth century Europeans have established exclusionary settler-colonies in the Americas, Australia and New Zealand – among other places – whose white colons displaced or nearly exterminated the indigenous population to recreate societies in the image of those they had left behind. By the late nineteenth century, however, this genocidal European expansion was running out of steam, in large part, because there remained few surviving Neolithic societies that white colons could exterminate with ease; in tropical Africa and Asia, the climate and the pathogens were not particularly kind to European settlers.

The Zionist decision in 1897 to establish an exclusionary colonial-settler state in Palestine marked a departure from this trend. In 1948, some fifty years later, the Jewish colons from the West would create the only state in the twentieth century founded on conquest and ethnic cleansing. Israel is also the only exclusionary colonial-settler state established by the modern Europeans anywhere in the Old World.

In Israel, moreover, settler-colonialism is not something that belongs to its past. After their victory in the June war of 1967, the Israelis decided to extend their colonial-settler project to the West Bank, Gaza, Sinai and the Golan Heights. In recent decades, the demand for another massive round of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the ‘Occupied Territories’ – and even inside Israel’s pre-1967 borders – has moved from the extremist fringes of the Israeli Right to the mainstream of Israeli politics.

Israel is most likely the only country in the world that insists on defining citizenship independently of geography. On the one hand, it has continued to deny the right of return – and, hence, rights of citizenship – to millions of Palestinians who or whose parents and grandparents were expelled from Palestine in two massive rounds of ethnic cleansing since 1948. At the same time, under it Law of Return, Israel, automatically and instantly, grants citizenship to applicants who are Jews, persons of Jewish parentage, or Jewish converts. Under this law, as Mazin Qumsiyeh puts it succinctly, “no Jew emigrates to Israel; Jews (including converts) ‘return’ (hence the name of the law).” In addition, the Jewish immigrants receive generous support from the state upon their arrival in Israel. In other words, Israel turns internationally recognized rights of residence and citizenship on their head, denying these rights to those who have earned them by birth, while granting them freely to those who claim them because of ancient religious myths.

In recent years, critics have increasingly charged Israel with practicing legal discrimination against Palestinians. Such discrimination is massive and blatant in the ‘Occupied Territories’ where Israel has established Jewish-only settlements, connected to pre-1967 Israel by Jewish-only roads. Since June 1967, the Palestinians in these territories have suffered under a system of military occupation, which shows even less regard for their human rights than South Africa’s apartheid. A former US President, Jimmy Carter, has recently dared to acknowledge the existence of apartheid in the ‘Occupied Territories’ in the title of his new book, Palestine: Peace not apartheid. Instantly, America’s mainstream media – led by Zionist censors – began savagely attacking President Carter for mentioning the unmentionable. Not a few political and academic careers in the United States have met a premature end for lesser offenses. Jimmy Carter, the octogenarian former President, had little to lose.

Inside its pre-1967 borders too, Israel has allocated rights based on ethnicity. Until 1966, Palestinians in Israel were governed under martial law, which severely restricted their civil and political rights, including their right to free movement, to establish their own media, and to protest or form political parties. Since its founding, Israel has openly tied its immigration policy to Jewish ethnicity. Israeli law defines land to be a property of the Jewish people, owned on their behalf by the Jewish National Fund (JNF), a quasi-governmental organization. Israel nationalized all the lands belonging to the Palestinians it expelled in 1948, and it has continued to expropriate Palestinian lands under a variety of arbitrary measures. As a result, the JNF today owns 93 percent of all the lands in pre-1967 Israel. Yet, even in his moment of daring, President Carter shrank from addressing the presence of apartheid inside pre-1967 Israel.

Israel is the only country in the world that refuses to define its borders. Its de facto borders have shifted with impressive frequency. At first, the armistice line of 1948 served as Israel’s borders; but they expanded outwards in 1956, 1967 and 1982, because of wars and conquests. On a few occasions, Israel had to retract from the territories it had conquered: from the Sinai in 1957, from the Sinai again in 1978, from Southern Lebanon in May 2000, and from Southern Lebanon again in August 2006. In addition, since the Oslo Accord of 1993, Israel has defined a new set of internal ‘borders’ inside the West Bank to contain and neutralize the Palestinian resistance in a set of regulated Bantustans.

If Israel has not yet reached or exceeded the borders of the mythic David’s Kingdom, it is not because of any lack of ambition. The constraint is demographic. In order to expand beyond its present borders, Israel would need a more ample supply of Jewish colons willing to assume the risks of colonization. Fortunately, for the Arabs, these colons are in short supply, as they were before the rise of the Nazis in Germany. Had Israel succeeded in attracting five million Jewish colons after 1967, the Sinai would still be under Israeli occupation, and its borders in the north would extend to the Litani River and across the Jordan River in the east. Luckily, for the Arabs, Israeli expansionism has been stalled by the poverty of Jewish demography. That could change very quickly, however, if Israel decides to soften the requirements for conversion to Judaism. Millions of Jewish converts from the poorest countries in the world, attracted by the promise of a ‘better life,’ could start pouring into Israel under its Law of Return.

President Truman had shepherded the creation of Israel in 1947 not because the American establishment saw it as a strategic asset; this much is clear. “No one,” writes Cheryl Rubenberg, “not even the Israelis themselves, argues that the United States supported the creation of the Jewish state for reasons of security or national interest.”¹ Domestic politics, in an election year, was the primary force behind President Truman’s decision to support the creation of Israel. In addition, the damage to US interests due to the creation of Israel – although massive – was not immediate. This was expected to unfold slowly: and its first blows would be borne by the British who were still the paramount power in the region.

Nevertheless, soon after he had helped to create Israel, President Truman moved decisively to appear to distance the United States from the new state. Instead of committing American troops to protect Israel, when it fought against five Arab armies, he imposed an even-handed arms embargo on both sides in the conflict. Had Israel been dismantled [at birth], President Truman would have urged steps to protect the Jewish colonists in Palestine, but he would have accepted a premature end to the Zionist state as fait accompli. Zionist pressures failed to persuade President Truman to lift the arms embargo. Ironically, military deliveries from Czechoslovakia may have saved the day for Israel.

Once Israel had defeated the armies of Arab proto-states and expelled the Palestinians to emerge as an exclusively Jewish colonial-settler state in 1949, these brute facts would work in its favor. Led by the United States, the Western powers would recognize Israel, aware that they would have to defend this liability. At the same time, the humiliation of defeat had given an impetus to Arab nationalists across the region, who directed their anger against Israel and its Western sponsors.

This placed Israel in a strong position to accelerate its transformation into a strategic asset. In tandem with the Jewish lobby in the United States, Israel sought to maximize the assistance it could receive from the West through policies that stoked Arab nationalism; and as Israel’s military superiority grew this emboldened it to increase its aggressive posture towards the Arabs. Israel had the power to set in motion a vicious circle that would soon create the Arab threat against which it would defend the West. As a result, at various points during the 1950s, France, the United States, and Britain began to regard Israel as a strategic asset.

America’s embrace of Israel did not begin in 1967. Israel’s victory in the June War only accelerated a process that had been underway since its creation – even before its creation. Indeed, the Zionists had decided in 1939 to pursue the United States as their new mother country; they knew that they could use the very large and influential population of American Jews to win official US backing for their goals.

This paid off handsomely in 1948; but thereafter, the United States sought to contain the damage that would flow from the creation of Israel. However, these efforts would be self-defeating; the die had been cast. Israel – not the United States – was in the driver’s seat; and Israel would seek to maximize the negative fallout from its creation. As Israel succeeded in augmenting – within limits – the Arab threat to itself and the United States, the Jewish lobby would regain confidence; it would re-organize to reinforce Israel’s claim that it was now a strategic asset.

We have here another vicious circle – virtuous, for Israel. The Jewish lobby would gain strength as the Arab-cum-Soviet threat to the Middle East grew. When Israel scaled back the Arab threat in 1967, the Jewish lobby would step in to spend the political capital the Jewish state had garnered in the United States. The Israeli capture of Jerusalem in 1967 also energized the Christian Zionists, who, with encouragement from Jewish Zionists, would organize, enter into Republican politics, and soon become a major ally of the Jewish lobby. The sky was now the limit for Israel and the Zionists in the United States. The special relationship would become more special under every new presidency.

Several writers on the American left have pooh-poohed the charge that the Jewish lobby has been a leading force shaping America’s Middle East policy. They argue that the United States has supported Israel because of the convergence of their interests in the region.² Oil, primarily Saudi Arabian oil, they maintain correctly, is “a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history.”³ Incorrectly, however, they insist that this is what has driven US policy towards the Middle East.

A priori, this is an odd position to maintain, since Britain – up until 1948 – had managed quite well to maintain complete control over Middle Eastern oil, a dominance the United States could not sustain ‘despite’ the ‘strategic support’ of Israel. Successively, they argue, Western control over oil came under threat from Arab nationalism and militant Islamism. Israel has demonstrated its strategic value by holding in check and, later, defeating, the Arab nationalist challenge. Since then, Israel has fought the Islamist challenge to US hegemony over the region.

It may be useful to examine Noam Chomsky’s analysis of this relationship, since he enjoys iconic status amongst both liberal and leftists in the United States. Chomsky frames his analysis of ‘causal factors’ behind the special relationship as essentially a choice between “domestic pressure groups” and “US strategic interests.” He finds two limitations in the argument that the “American Jewish community” is the chief protagonist of the special relationship between Israel and the United States.

First, “it underestimates the scope of the “support for Israel,” and second, it overestimates the role of political pressure groups in decision-making.” Chomsky points out that the Israel lobby is “far broader” than the American Jewish community; it embraces liberal opinion, labor leaders, Christian fundamentalists, conservative hawks, and “fervent cold warriors of all stripes.”⁴ While this broader definition of the Israel lobby is appropriate, and this is what most users of the term have in mind, Chomsky thinks that the presence of this “far broader” support for Israel diminishes the role that American Jews play in this lobby.

Two hidden assumptions underpin Chomsky’s claim that a broader Israel lobby shifts the locus of lobbying to non-Jewish groups. First, he fails to account for the strong overlap – barring the Christian fundamentalists – between the American Jewish community and the other domestic pressure groups he enumerates. In the United States, this overlap has existed since the early decades of the twentieth century, and increased considerably in the post-War period. It is scarcely to be doubted that Jews hold – and deservedly so – a disproportionate share of the leadership positions in corporations, the labor movement, and those professions that shape public discourse. Starting in the 1980s, the ascendancy of Jewish neoconservatives – together with their think tanks – gave American Jews an equally influential voice in conservative circles. Certainly, the weight of Jewish neoconservative opinion during the early years of President Bush – both inside and outside his administration – has been second to that of none. The substantial Jewish presence in the leadership circles of the other pressure groups undermines Chomsky’s contention that the pro-Israeli group is “far broader” than the American Jewish community.

There is a second problem with Chomsky’s argument. Implicitly, he assumes that the different pro-Israeli groups have existed, acted and evolved independently of each other; alternatively, the impact of the lobbying efforts of these groups is merely additive. This ignores the galvanizing role that Jewish organizations have played in mobilizing Gentile opinion behind the Zionist project. The activism of the American Jews – as individuals and groups – has operated at several levels. Certainly, the leaders of the Zionist movement have directed a large part of their energies to lobbying at the highest levels of official decision-making. At the same time, they have created, and they orchestrate, a layered network of Zionist organizations who have worked very hard to create support for their aims in the broader American civil society.

American Jews have worked through several channels to influence civil society. As growing numbers of American Jews embraced Zionist goals during the 1940s, as their commitment to Zionism deepened, this forced the largest Jewish organizations to embrace Zionist goals. In addition, since their earliest days, the Zionists have created the organizations, allies, networks and ideas that would translate into media, congressional and presidential support for the Zionist project. In addition, since Jewish Americans made up a growing fraction of the activists and leaders in various branches of civil society – the labor, civil rights and feminist movements – it was natural that the major organs of civil society came to embrace Zionist aims. It makes little sense, then, to maintain that the pro-Israeli positions of mainstream American organizations had emerged independently of the activism of the American Jewish community.

Does our contention fail in the case of the Christian Evangelicals because of the absence of Jews in their ranks? In this case, the movement has received the strongest impetus from the in-gathering of Jews that has proceeded in Israel since the late nineteenth century. The dispensationalist stream within Protestant Christians in the United States – who believe that the in-gathering of Jews in Israel will precede the Second Coming – has been energized by every Zionist success on the ground. They have viewed these successes – the launching of Zionism, the Balfour Declaration, the creation of Israel, the capture of Jerusalem, ‘Judea’ and ‘Samaria’ in 1967 – as so many confirmations of their dispensationalist eschatology. The movement expanded with every Zionist victory. At the same time, it would be utterly naïve to rule out direct relations between the Zionists and the leaders of the evangelical movement. The Zionists have rarely shrunk from accepting support even when it has come from groups with unedifying beliefs.

Noam Chomsky raises a second objection against the ability of the Jewish lobby to influence policy on its own steam. “No pressure group,” he maintains, “will dominate access to public opinion or maintain consistent influence over policy-making unless its aims are close to those of elite elements with real power [emphases added].”⁵ One problem with this argument is easily stated. It pits the Jewish lobby as one “pressure group” – amongst many – arrayed against all the others that hold the real power. This equation of the Jewish lobby with a narrowly defined “pressure group” is misleading. We have argued – a position that is well supported by the evidence – that Jewish protagonists of Zionism have worked through many different channels to influence public opinion, the composition of political classes, and political decisions. They work through the organs that shape public opinion to determine what Americans know about Israel, how they think about Israel, and what they can say about it. This is no little Cuban lobby, Polish lobby or Korean lobby. Once we recognize the scale of financial resources the Jewish lobby commands, the array of political forces it can mobilize, and the tools it commands to direct public opinion on the Middle East, we would shrink from calling it a lobby.

Chomsky quickly proceeds to undermine his own argument about “elite elements with real power.” He explains that the “[elite] elements are not uniform in interests or (in the case of shared interests) in tactical judgments; and on some issues, such as this one [policy towards Israel], they have often been divided.”⁶ Yet, despite the differences in their interests, their tactics, and their divisions, Chomsky maintains that these “elite elements” have “real power.” Oddly, these “divided” elites – whoever they are – exercise the power of veto over the multi-faceted Jewish lobby with its deep pockets, hierarchical organizations, and influence over key organs of civil society, campaign contributions, popular votes, etc.

Chomsky’s argument shifts again – a second time in the same paragraph – away from “elite elements” to “America’s changing conceptions of its political-strategic interests” in the Middle East.⁶ This suggests a new theory of the chief determinant of US policy towards Israel. At the heart of these “political-strategic interests” is the oil wealth of the Middle East – and the twin threats to American control over this oil wealth from Arab nationalists and the Soviets. Presumably, Israel protects these “political-strategic interests” by holding the Arabs and the Soviets at bay. Chomsky conveniently forgets that the Arab nationalist threat to US interests in the Middle East was – in large part – the product of Israel’s insertion into the region, its ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, and its aggressive posture towards Arabs since its creation. It is unnecessary to account for the Soviet threat, since they entered the region on the back of Arab nationalist discontent. Indeed, had Israel never been created, it is more than likely that all the states in the Middle East – just like Turkey and Pakistan – would have remained firmly within the Western sphere of influence.

In another attempt to convince his readers that oil has driven US policy towards the Middle East, Chomsky claims that the United States was “committed to win and keep this prize [Saudi oil].” Presumably, the United States could not keep this “prize” without help from Israel.

This argument fails because it ignores history. Starting in 1933, American oil corporations – who later merged to form Aramco – gained exclusive rights to explore, produce and market Saudi oil. Saudi Arabia first acquired a 25 percent ownership stake in Aramco in 1973. Had there emerged an Arab nationalist threat to US control over Saudi oil in the 1950s – in the absence of Israel – the United States could have handled it by establishing one or more military bases in Saudi Arabia or, preferably, in one of the Emirates, since American military presence in Saudi Arabia might inflame Islamic sentiments. Far from helping entrench American control of Saudi oil, Israel, by radicalizing Arab nationalism, gave Saudi Arabia the excuse to first gain a 25 percent stake in Aramco and then nationalize it in 1988.

Chomsky claims that the United States was committed to winning and keeping the “stupendous” oil prize. This claim is not supported by the results that America’s Middle Eastern policy has produced on the ground over the years. If the United States was indeed committed to this goal, it would have pursued a Middle East policy that could be expected to maximize – with the lowest risks of failure – the access of US oil corporations to exploration, production and distribution rights over oil in this region. This is not the case.

In creating, aiding and arming Israel, the United States has followed a policy that could easily have been foreseen to produce, as it did produce, exactly the opposite effects. It gave a boost to Arab nationalism, radicalized it, and led within a few years to the Arab nationalist takeover of three of the four key states in the Arab world. In turn, this contributed to the nationalization of oil wealth even in those Arab countries that remained clients of the United States, not to speak of countries that were taken over by Arab nationalists , who excluded the US oil corporations from this industry altogether. In addition, America’s Middle Eastern policy converted the Middle East into a leading arena of wars. It also became a source of deep tensions between the US and the Soviets, since US partisanship of Israel forced the Arab nationalist regimes to ally themselves with the Soviet Union. In the October War of 1973, the United States provoked the Arab nations – because of its decision to re-supply the Israeli army during the war – to impose a costly oil embargo against the United States. In opposition to the pleadings of its oil corporations, the United States has also prevented them from doing business with three oil-producing nations in the Middle East – Iran, Iraq and Libya.⁷

If oil had been driving America’s Middle East policy, we should have seen the fingerprints of the oil lobby all over this policy. In recent decades, according to Mearsheimer and Walt, the oil lobby has directed its efforts “almost entirely on their commercial interests rather than on broader aspects of foreign policy.” They focus most of their lobbying efforts on getting the best deals on tax policies, government regulations, drilling rights, etc. Even the AIPAC bears witness to this. In the early 1980s, Morris J. Amitay, former executive director of AIPAC, noted, “We rarely see them [oil corporations] lobbying on foreign policy issues…In a sense, we have the field to ourselves.”⁸

Why does it matter whether it is oil or the Jewish lobby that determines US policy towards Israel and the Middle East?

The answer to this question has important consequences. It will determine who is in charge, and, therefore, who should be targeted by people who oppose Israel’s war mongering and its destruction of Palestinian society. If US policy is driven by America’s strategic interests – and Israel is a strategic US asset – opposing this policy will not be easy. If Israel keeps the oil flowing, keeps it cheap, and keeps down the Arabs and Islamists – all this for a few billion dollars a year – that is a bargain. In this case, opponents of this policy face an uphill task. Sure, they can document the immoral consequences of this policy – as Noam Chomsky and others do. Such moral arguments, however, will not cut much ice. What are the chances that Americans can be persuaded to sacrifice their “stupendous prize” because it kills a few tens of thousands of Arabs?

On the other hand, if the Jewish lobby drives US policy towards the Middle East, there is some room for optimism. Most importantly, the opponents of this policy have to dethrone the reigning paradigm, which claims that Israel is a strategic asset. In addition, it is necessary to focus attention on each element of the real costs – economic, political and moral – that Israel imposes on the United States. Winning these intellectual arguments will be half the battle won; this will persuade growing numbers of Americans to oppose a policy because it hurts them. Simultaneously, those who seek justice for the Palestinians must organize to oppose the power of the Israel lobby and take actions that force Israel to bear the moral, economic and political consequences of its destructive policies in the Middle East.

1. “Virtually every professional in the foreign affairs bureaucracy, including the secretaries of state and war (later, defense) and the joint chiefs of staff, opposed the creation of Israel from the standpoint of US national interests (Rubenberg: 1986, 9-10).”
2. For criticisms of Chomsky, see James Petras, The Power of Israel in the United States (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2006): 168-81; and Jeff Blankfort, “Damage control: Noam Chomsky and the Israeli-Palestine conflict.”
3. This assessment comes from a 1945 report of the State Department (Chomsky: 1999, 17).
4. Noam Chomsky, Fateful Triangle: 13.
5. Noam Chomsky, Fateful triangle: 17.
6. Noam Chomsky, Fateful Triangle: 17.
7. Mearsheimer and Walt, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006): 143.
8. Mearsheimer and Walt, The Israel Lobby: 145.

Laundry is the only thing that should be separated by color.

– Anonymous

It is perhaps a bit late in the day, nearly two weeks after November 4, to be writing about Barack Obama’s electoral victory. This want of alacrity, however, is intentional.

I thought it would be cruel to write any sooner, when whites and blacks alike were so effusively celebrating Obama’s victory. It would be unseemly to strike a discordant note when a clear majority of Americans was savoring this putative post-racial moment in their history.

Did this victory signal a shift in America’s racial tectonic plates?

Memories are so short. In the weeks following his choice of Sarah Palin on August 29, John McCain began closing the gap behind Obama. The election got closer after Palin electrified the Republican Convention with her line about how “We grow good people in our small towns…” The message to blacks, Hispanics and Asians in America’s cities was clear: they are not “good people.”

In the absence of the financial meltdown that began in early September, the election could have easily gone the other way. Sarah Palin too may have helped Obama a bit when she began displaying the breathless scope of her ignorance.

Who should we thank for Obama’s victory?

The answer is sobering. We can thank the financial meltdown and, in some measure, the threat of an Armageddon – likely to follow Palin’s succession to a geriatric McCain – for Obama’s victory. There was no shifting of tectonic plates on this continent.

If anything, America’s unquestioning identification of Obama as a black’ candidate is deeply problematic. It demonstrates that the United States remains firmly rooted in ideas of race that go back to the era of slavery and Jim Crow Laws.

Obama’s mother was white and, apparently, so were all her forebears; while his father was a black African and, apparently, so were all his forebears. Obama is biracial — half-black and half-white. Why did that, automatically, make him black? If being half-black makes Obama black, by the same logic we could identify him as white.

Why didn’t we?

The answer is rooted in the history of racism in the United States, in the categorical rejection by whites of the mixing of white and black races. A person was ‘black’ if it was known that there was black ancestry, any-where, in her lineage. This was the arithmetic of white racism. White + Black = Black.

The ban on mixed marriages in the US began quite early. It was first introduced in 1691 in slave-holding Virginia, followed a year later by another slave-holding state, Maryland. It soon spread to all the states.

At the height of the Jim Crow Era, starting in 1910, one by one the South-ern states passed the one-drop rule to define race. A person with any known trace of black ancestry was condemned as black.

This arithmetic was the manifestation of white power. Its power to de-fine race and make it stick. This arithmetic ensured that blacks could not escape their low status by marrying into whites. It would discourage whites from marrying blacks because their offspring — and their off-spring — would be born into the low status of blacks.

Another aspect of Obama’s ‘race’ is conveniently forgotten. Obama is black but he is not quite African-American — the way that Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were African-American. As a ‘black,’ Obama is not descended from generations of Americans who were victimized as slaves and blacks till 1865, as blacks under Jim Crow Laws till 1964, and as America’s underclass till the present day. Arguably, some whites were more comfortable voting for a black candidate who is not ‘burdened’ with the history of blacks in this country.

Lest we forget this shame, Obama’s candidacy highlighted a new form of racism that has been on the rise since the fall of the Soviet Union, but has become quite respectable since 9-11. Concerted efforts were made by some Republicans to sink his candidacy by accusing him of being a Muslim, of having attended a madrasah.

Obama protested that he is Christian. He did not seek to distance to him-self, however, from the racist premise of this accusation. On the contrary, he took care to stay away from Muslim groups who wished to meet him or host him during his campaign. On one occasion, his staff removed two Muslim women from the background that would be panned by the cam-era during Obama’s speech. They were a risk because they were wearing headscarves. Their presence would taint Obama’s campaign.

Is there no retreat from race in Obama’s victory? Perhaps, there is, but it is mostly symbolic. It is a brilliant victory for one black man, but will his presidency make a difference for the black underclass in this country. Will Obama make amends to the continent of his paternal forefathers by launching a new Marshall Plan for Africa? Can he dare do this?

Gladly, I voted for a Democrat this time, skipping a vote for Ralph Nader. And, when Obama won, I was relieved. We would not be staring over the next four years — with baited breath — at a gun-toting, moose-killing, hate-spewing, race-baiting, war-mongering, Rapture-seeking Sarah Palin just a heart-beat away from the Presidency of this country.

I cannot say that I felt a surge of hope at Obama’s victory. A president is only the visible face of lobbies and corporations who own this country and its ‘elected’ institutions. Unless the people are out in the streets de-manding change, there will be none. Populist election-year slogans are forgotten once they have done their job at the polling stations.

Alas, my relief may be short-lived. The religious right in this country — the strongest constituency in the Republican Party — has been frustrated for now by the financial meltdown. But they are already plotting a comeback — in partnership with their Neocon cousins — riding a wave of fear-mongering and fight-them-there, alien-bashing, racist rhetoric.

“Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages . . . There is not a single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.”

David Ben-Gurion¹

All too often, the failure of Israel and the Arabs to make peace — especially since the creation of Israel — has been described as the folly of missed opportunities. In a discourse that is dominated by the Zionists, the Palestinians are forced to carry much of the burden of this folly.

How often have the Zionists, with delightful malice of the strong, accused the Palestinians – using the words of Abba Eban — that they “never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity?”

The objective of these Zionist accusations is plain: blame the victims. In order to make their accusations stick, the Zionists have elaborated a false but imposing history of their movement. In this history, it is the Jews who have the original, historical, natural, eternal, God-ordained, and Biblical right to Palestine.

The Zionists also invented an entirely new species of claim to our affections — one that trumps all morality and man-made laws — because Jews were the victims of a uniquely inhuman crime.

At the same time, the Zionists have labored hard to represent Palestine as empty, a land that had fallen into decay with the departure of its Jewish owners. The few Arabs occupants of this now desolate land are Bedouins, mere squatters, migrants, with no attachment to the land. They are only part of the wild fauna of Palestine, to be cleared as the colons take possession of their divine patrimony.

Once their rights had been negated by the incomparably ‘superior’ rights of Jews, the Palestinians would have no ground to stand on. They would be seen as utterly dependent on the mercy of the Jewish colonists. Any scrap the Jewish colonists threw at them would be better than manna from heaven.

Therefore, if the Palestinians rejected these scraps; if they refused to be spirited across the borders of Palestine; if they rejected two-thirds, one-third, one-tenth or some smaller fraction of their country; if they resist apartheid inside Israel; if they reject their dispossession and exile; they could only be acting out of a boundless hatred of Jews.

Whenever the Palestinians reject the scraps offered to them, the Zionists accuse them of ‘missing another opportunity.’ So deep is their spite, their obtuseness, their perversity, the Palestinians now do not know what is good for them: what is the best deal they will ever get.

Occasionally, Israel too is blamed for missing opportunities.

Indeed, Uri Avnery — an octogenarian Israeli peace activist, a former member of the Israeli Knesset, and a one-time member of the terrorist organization, Irgun — argues that Israel enjoys a clear lead in missing opportunities to make peace with the Arabs.²

This is scarcely surprising. As the stronger party in its conflict with the Arabs — it is easy to argue — Israel could have shown magnanimity instead of using its strength to gain new advantages over the Arabs: or after each of its military victories over the Arabs Israel could have offered to give up its gains, and thereby gained the confidence of its adversaries. Yes, these opportunities existed — and Avnery lists several such opportunities — but Israel ‘missed’ every one of them.

In principle, during the war of 1948 the Haganah — the military forces of the Jewish colons in Palestine — could have chosen to limit its conquests to the borders defined by the UN partition plan: or withdrawn to these borders once the conflict ended.

Instead, the Haganah pushed beyond these borders to capture a little more than half the territories that were ‘given’ by the UN to the Palestinians. It also expelled more than eighty percent of the Palestinians in these territories: and forcibly prevented them from returning to their homes.

Had the Zionists ‘missed’ an opportunity for peace here? This question is entirely misplaced: it can only be based on a blatant disregard of the settler-colonial character of the Zionist movement.

Nearly from the outset, the Zionist founders scarcely concealed their intent to create their Jewish state in all of mandatory Palestine — at the least — whose Jewish character could be guaranteed only by evacuating the Palestinians from their lands.

On any honest assessment, the Zionists had merely seized the opportunity for which they had been preparing since 1897. It would have gone against their grain had they done anything else.

Similarly, in terms of possible outcomes, one could argue that Israel, after its creation, could have taken the high road in its dealings with the Palestinians and Arabs. “On the morrow of the war of 1948, in which Israel was founded,” writes Avnery, “we could have achieved peace.”

Israel could have supported the creation of a Palestinian state; given heed to Nasser’s peace feelers instead of joining hands with Britain and France in 1956 to overthrow him; after 1967, when Israel occupied all of Palestine, Israel could have given the Palestinians a state; and so the list goes on.

Yet Israel took the path that led to escalation of its conflict with the Arabs. This was not the result of the repeated wrong-headed decisions of Israel’s leaders: it was the working out of the dialectic of Zionism.

Once launched, the Zionist project carried within itself the forces that pointed it towards success. Israeli successes would trigger the maximalist ambitions that many of the leading Zionists had cherished from the beginning; they would increase the flow of Jewish colons to Israel; they would empower the Jewish state to act as the political center of world Jewry, organizing them globally to strengthen Israel, to win allies, and shield it from criticism.

At the same time, Israel’s capture of Palestine, its ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, and its lengthening record of wars against the Arabs would create the Arab and Islamic enemy, whom Israel — with Western arms and money — would very helpfully crush, only to demand and receive yet greater supplies of arms and money from the West.

Once created, the Jewish state would be driven by a powerful, nearly irresistible dialectic to draw the United States — and to a lesser degree much of the West — into a deepening conflict against the Islamic world.

In truth, the Palestinians have never missed an opportunity — to assert their rights against the greatest odds, against a settler-colonial movement aided and abetted by the most powerful states in the West. For their heroism, their endless sacrifices, the Palestinians deserve the accolades of all men and women who cherish human rights over brute force.

In truth, Israel too has never missed an opportunity — to defenestrate the Palestinians, denude their lives, demonize their resistance, and denigrate their culture. For their unending violations of the rights of Palestinians, the world needs to look the Israelis in their eyes and tell them that their conduct dishonors the victims of the Holocaust, victims they eagerly claim as flesh of their flesh and bone of their bone.

The narrative of missed opportunities is malicious when it refers to Palestinians; or misleading, when it is aimed at Israelis.

1. The first two quotes are from Nahum Goldmann, The Jewish Paradox (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1978): 99, 121-122.
2. Uri Avnery, “Israel’s missed opportunities for peace (partial list),” Redress (May 28, 2006).

Anti-Semitism has grown and continues to grow, and so do I.

– Theodore Herzl¹

As a self-defined movement for the national ‘liberation’ of European Jews, Zionism had an anomalous relationship with its perennial Other, the Gentile nations, from whom it wanted the Jews to secede and become a distinct nation under a Jewish state.

The Zionists did not define Europe’s Gentile nations as the adversary they would have to oppose, and against whom they would struggle, to secure the rights of Jews to emerge as a distinct nation.

On the contrary, the Zionists would harness the strength of their perennial Other — their adversary — to gain their nationalist objective. Unlike nationalists who secede from a state or empire by drawing new borders, the Zionists did not demand any European territory; they planned to establish their Jewish state outside the borders of Europe.

In other words, the Zionists were offering to execute what any state facing secessionist demands would have embraced quite avidly: the Jewish ‘secessionists’ would sail away from Europe and establish their state in the Middle East, well-removed from Europe.

This was a novel approach to national liberation.

As a first step, the Zionists proposed to liberate Jews from European persecution by arranging for their exodus from Europe. This had always been the dream of European anti-Semites: to cleanse their landscape of Jewish presence. Over the past thousand years, different states in Europe had periodically attempted this voiding of Jews through forced conversions, pogroms, expulsions, and segregating Jews from Gentiles.

The Zionists were now proposing to purge Europe of its Jews on a scale never attempted before, and without the inconvenience of disturbing the peace. It was a contract that Europe’s anti-Semites would have difficulty turning down. Indeed, the Zionists fully expected the anti-Semites to give them whatever help they needed to effect the Jewish exodus.

The Zionists were counting on this help; it was indispensable for the completion of their project. The second step in the Zionist plan was to seize control of Palestine, open it up to Jewish colonization, and, when the Jewish colons had gained sufficient demographic mass in Palestine, they would convert it into a Jewish state, preferably without the natives. The Zionists could not undertake this step without the help of European powers.

This was a clever stratagem: quite original to Zionism.

The Zionists sought to convert an impossible nationalism — with little prospect of ever achieving its goal inside Europe — into a settler-colonial project. In addition, they would convert the Jews’ erstwhile adversaries into strategic partners. The Zionists expected to persuade at least one European power to play the part of ‘mother country’ to the Jewish colons in Palestine.

It appeared that the Zionists were going to outperform Moses of Jewish tradition. Moses too had chosen to liberate the Hebrews of ancient Egypt by marching them out of Egypt into Canaan, where they would establish their own state. There were important differences, however, between the two plans.

The Zionists did not seek divine help, but they would receive help from the anti-Semites. Moses had divine help but his plan was opposed by the Egyptians. The Egyptians could not have agreed to Moses’ long march because he was running away with their property — their Hebrew slaves. In Europe, on the other hand, the Jews owned considerable property — banks, bank accounts, factories, houses, lands — that they would leave behind.

Clearly, the Zionists were offering the Europeans an attractive deal. Help us create a Jewish settler-state in Palestine: and we will solve your Jewish problem, free you from Jewish competition, free you of the Jewish presence, and you can have all their property we leave behind. This Jewish property was another gift the Zionists offered to Europe’s anti-Semites.

To Europe’s anti-Semites, the deal was irresistible. In fact, some of them would think they could kill two birds with the Zionist stone. They would get rid of the Jews, and renew the Crusades against the Muslims.

Of course, there were complications. States do not get into deals without considering all the costs. The great powers with an interest in the Middle East knew that backing the Zionist plan would mean war against the Ottomans. It would also mean perpetual war against the Muslims, since this was an egregious injustice against them and a deep violation of their historical space. That is why the great powers balked.

It was World War I that changed the calculus. When the Ottomans joined the war on the side of Germany, the Allied Powers — Britain, France and Russia — decided to dismantle the Ottoman empire. Even then, there was little interest in the Zionist plan, despite intense Zionist lobbying.

Two factors turned the tide in 1917. In Britain, a new cabinet had taken office in December 1916 with at least five strongly pro-Zionist ministers, including the prime minister, David Lloyd George. In addition, the war had been going badly for the Allied Powers on the eastern and western fronts.

Now more than ever before, Zionist lobbying became a formidable force. The Zionists lobbied Britain, Germany, and the US for their support of Zionist goals. They made sure that their lobbying of one power was known to others: thus forcing them to compete for the support which the Zionists promised them in their war effort.

The Zionists promised to bring the US more fully into the war, to keep Russia in the war, and to mobilize the resources of world Jewry on the side of the power that would support their cause. It did not matter if the Zionists could deliver these promises: the European leaders were convinced they could.

At this point, all the pro-Zionist forces converged – anti-Semitism, Christian Zionism, Crusader zeal, racism, national interests, and, above all, Zionist lobbying — to place the power of the British empire behind the Zionists.

By late October 1917, after many months of maneuvers, the Zionists and the British finally agreed upon a statement that would signal British commitment to Zionism. On November 2 1917, this statement was delivered by Lord Balfour — British foreign secretary — in a letter to Lord Rothschild, a distinguished leader of Britain’s Jewish community.

This was the Balfour Declaration: this was the document that would formalize a new – and for the most part, irreversible — partnership between Western Jews and the West, joined, pitted, in expanding wars against the Islamic world.

During the nineteenth century, when Britain and France competed to control the land bridge of the Levant, each sought to lure the Jews into their scheme to create a Jewish protectorate in Palestine. The Jews then quietly rejected these overtures: they could sense that a Jewish state in Palestine would be a trap.

Starting in 1897, when the European powers had lost interest in this colonial scheme, it was the Zionists who revived it. Their hubris was so great, they were willing to ignore the hazards of their plan. No doubt, the Zionists did overcome these hazards: and their successes have been stunning.

But Zionist successes have not helped to establish a political equilibrium in the Middle East. On the contrary, they have been deeply destabilizing. Zionist victories over existing foes produce new ones, harder to defeat than those they replace.

Despite its military superiority, Israel feels paranoid. It seeks its security in the total obliteration of its foes. It works round-the-clock to strangulate the Palestinians, it has repeatedly unleashed destruction against the Lebanese, it was the leading advocate of the war against Iraq. And now it threatens to unleash a nuclear holocaust against Iran.

Most Zionists now believe that Israel is just another war away from forging an absolute, irreversible ‘right to exist’ — a code for the right to exercise perpetual hegemony over the Middle East. Will the world grant Israel this ‘right’ if this last war turns Iran into a nuclear wasteland? Will history forget or forgive this crime?

1. David Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence in the Middle East (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2003): 286.

The Winograd Commission offers a quite honest appraisal of some aspects of the July 2006 War. It acknowledges that it was “a serious missed opportunity.” Israel had “initiated a long war, which ended without its clear military victory (italics added).” The Commission notes that a militia “of a few thousand men resisted, for a few weeks, the strongest army in the Middle East, which enjoyed full air superiority and size and technology advantages.” Nothing could reverse Israel’s handicaps: not even a massive ground offensive launched in the last days of the war.

Yet, after this clear-headed assessment, the Commission stumbles. It blames Israel’s military setback on “serious failings and flaws” in decision-making, preparedness, coordination between the civilian and military leadership, and strategic planning. In other words, the Israeli military’s poor showing in July 2006 was not the result of any fundamental shift in the balance of forces. These failures were the result of a few bad judgments, inadequate preparation and less-than-optimal coordination between different branches of the Israeli military: all of them errors which can and will be easily corrected in a rematch with the Hizbullah.

We cannot credibly blame the Israeli defeat on failures in decision-making. Israel had many years to destroy the Hizbullah during its long occupation of southern Lebanon; but it withdrew unilaterally in April 2000, with the Hizbullah claiming victory. In July 2006 too, the Israeli military fell far short of matching its earlier easy victories over Arab armies: but this was not because of failures of leadership, the failure to use sufficient firepower (which it did), or the failure to launch a timely ground offensive (it would get grounded the way it had before).

The Israeli military offensive of July 2006 had failed because Israel was fighting a war that did not play to its advantages in size and technology. Israel had finally met its match — a foe that was prepared to fight, that knew how to fight on its own terms, a foe that was elusive and cunning, skilled and daring, ready to adapt its methods to neutralize Israel’s technical superiority, that controlled its terrain, and, most importantly, was backed by Iran and Syria. For the first time in its history, an Israeli invasion had been reversed by a cunning guerilla resistance.

In the past, Arab armies had handed easy victories to Israel. Repeatedly, the Arab states chose to fight conventional wars: these backward, recently decolonized countries sent their poorly trained, poorly led, poorly motivated military to fight against the best, most determined military force the developed West could put together. Israel’s victories against the Arab armies is overrated: it always remained an unequal match. The Palestinians chose to fight a guerilla war in Jordan in the late 1960s, but they did so prematurely, without preparing the political conditions for their success. They were defeated because they were forced to fight on two fronts: against Arab enemy states and the Israelis.

The Israelis only deceive themselves when they use alibis — bad decisions or inadequate preparation — to ‘explain’ their military failures. Ever since their withdrawal from southern Lebanon in April 2000, the Israeli leadership had prepared for the occasion to deal a knockout blow to Hizbullah. Indeed, when the Israelis launched their latest invasion of Lebanon on July 12 2006, they had had more than six years to prepare; and they had had more than two decades to study their adversary.

The Hizbullah too had prepared. Without fanfare, but with dedication, discipline, skill, and cunning, the Hizbullah leaders assembled an arsenal of low-tech rockets as well as more advanced missiles; they built secret bunkers; they laid out defensible communications; they acquired capabilities in electronic warfare; they used drones and eaves-dropping equipment to gather information; they placed spies inside Israel; they studied their enemy; and, most importantly, they had planned and trained, while maintaining the highest secrecy. In a word, the small bands of Arab guerillas in southern Lebanon were prepared and ready.

Israel executed its long-planned offensive against Hizbullah on July 12, 2006, using the excuse of a border skirmish to launch a full-scale and devastating war against Lebanon. They launched massive air and artillery strikes against Lebanon’s civilian infrastructure — targeting Beirut and sites as far north as the port city of Tripoli. Israeli ground forces crossed the Lebanese border the same day, and continued to expand their ground invasion in stages throughout the war. During the 33-day war, the Israeli air force flew more than 15,000 sorties and struck 7000 targets in Lebanon; the Israeli navy imposed a blockade on Lebanon, and bombed 2,500 Lebanese targets; and, all told, the Israelis destroyed 15,000 homes, 900 commercial buildings, 400 miles of roads, 80 bridges, and Lebanon’s international airport. Lebanon’s human toll at the end of the war consisted of 845 dead, including 743 civilians, 34 soldiers and 68 Hizbullah guerillas. In addition, close to a million Lebanese were forced to flee their homes. The intent of these genocidal attacks was to turn the Lebanese against the Hizbullah. The Israelis failed in this objective too.

In all its wars against Arab armies, the Israelis had achieved clear victories within days. In 1956, they had captured nearly all of the Sinai in about seven days. In June 1967, they crippled the Egyptian air force within two hours: and the war against the three front-line Arab armies was over in six days. In October war of 1973, the Israelis recovered from their initial losses to cross the Suez Canal ten days after the start of the war, and five days later they had encircled the Egyptian Third Army, a mere 40 miles from Cairo. On the Syrian front, the Israelis had advanced to within ten miles of Damascus. Since 1973, Israel has many times violated the sovereignty of Arab states with impunity.

In contrast, Israel’s full-scale war against Hizbullah’s small guerilla force of some 3000 fighters had lasted for 33 days, without giving the Israelis the satisfaction of claiming victory. On July 12 2006, Israel had started a full-scale war against Lebanon, convinced that it could destroy Hizbullah or greatly diminish its military force within a few days — and do it with air power alone. Israel’s decision to end the war 33 days later, even as Hizbullah kept up its barrage of Katyusha rockets into Israel, was a dark chapter in Israel’s military history. Israel’s military might had been neutralized by a seemingly Lilliputian adversary.

In July 2006, agility and cunning favored the Hizbullah. Consider the victories that Israel failed to score against this tiny but agile foe: it failed to destroy or jam Hizbullah’s communications network, to knock out Hizbullah’s television and radio stations, to kill or capture Hassan Nasrallah, or to dent Hizbullah’s ability to launch Katyusha rockets into Israel. Hizbullah was firing Katyusha rockets at the rate of 100 a day during July, doubled this rate in early August, and, in the last few hours before the ceasefire came into effect, fired 250 rockets. On the day of the ceasefire, the Hizbullah still had 14,000 rockets in its arsenal, enough to continue the war for another three months.

Contrary to Israeli denials, the daily barrage of Katyusha rockets took a heavy toll on the Israeli economy. Altogether, a quarter of the 4000 rockets Hizbullah launched during the war hit urban areas: they “paralyzed the whole of northern Israel, its main port, refineries, and many other strategic installations. Over one million Israelis lived in bomb shelters and about 300,000 temporarily left their homes and sought refuge in the south.” For a change, the Hizbullah had brought the war to Israel.

Moreover, the Hizbullah scored several clear victories over Israel’s military. According to an IDF Report Card published in the Jerusalem Post, Israel had deployed some 400 Merkava MK-4 tanks — its safest and deadliest tank — in Lebanon: 40 of these were hit by Hizbullah’s anti-tank weapons, 20 of them were destroyed, and 30 tank crewmen were killed. According to a report published by The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, “Hizbullah’s success with antitank weapons during the July War reflects many years spent training on these weapons as well as a good plan to use these weapons once the battle began.”

Hizbullah’s infantry or ‘village units’ — deployed along the border to slow down the advance of Israeli ground forces — “made the IDF pay for every inch of ground that it took. At the same time, crucially, Hizbullah dictated the rules of how the war was to be fought.” It is worth noting that the fighters Hizbullah deployed in southern Lebanon were not its best. “One of the war’s ironies,” Andrew Axum writes, “is that many of Hizballah’s best and most skilled fighters never saw action, lying in wait along the Litani River with the expectation that the IDF assault would be much deeper and arrive much faster than it did.”

The Hizbullah scored its most impressive military victory in the area of intelligence. Israel’s electronic warfare systems are amongst the most advanced in the world; they are war-tested and developed in cooperation with the United States. Indeed, the Israeli commanders were certain at the outset of the war of their ability to jam Hizbullah communications. They were wrong. Hizbullah’s command and control system remained operational throughout the war; they evaded Israeli jamming devices by using fiber optic lines instead of relying on wireless signals.

The Hizbullah had blocked the Barak anti-missile system on Israeli ships; hacked into Israeli battlefield communications in order to monitor Israeli tank movements; and, they monitored cell phone conversations in Hebrew between Israeli reservists and their families. They intercepted Israeli military communications on battlefield casualties and announced them on their media network. They successfully employed decoys to hide the location of hundreds of bunkers they had built in southern Lebanon to store weapons and shelter their fighters. As a world leader in weapons technology and communications, Israel had held a decisive advantage in electronic warfare in its wars with Arab armies. In July 2006, the Hizbullah had neutralized this advantage.

Israel claims that it killed 400-500 Hizbullah fighters. Crooke and Perry insist that these numbers are exaggerated. “It is impossible for Shi’ites (and Hezbollah),” they argue, “not to allow an honorable burial for its martyrs, so in this case it is simply a matter of counting funerals. Fewer than 180 funerals have been held for Hezbollah fighters — nearly equal to the number killed on the Israeli side.”

The Israeli setbacks in the July War of 2006, then, represents a paradigm shift — not something that can be pinned on careless errors in decision-making. Unlike the Arab armies in the past, the Hizbullah had fought a people’s war. It neutralized Israel’s technological superiority by deploying its mobile, elusive, disciplined and skilled guerilla detachments — not a centralized, conventional army — to fight the Israelis.

The Hizbullah fights in small groups, it is evasive, it is secretive, it owns its terrain, it trains, it has high morale, and it enjoys complete popular support amongst Lebanon’s Shi’ites. It can launch thousands of low-tech rockets which rendered sophisticated anti-missile defenses useless. It has also acquired and learned to use with great effectiveness anti-tank missiles that make Israel’s most advanced tanks vulnerable. They have successfully targeted even Israeli warships.

If the Hizbullah can extend these advantages, if it can add shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles to its arsenal and bring down a few Israeli helicopters and jets, Israel could quickly lose its unchallenged control over Lebanese skies. Israel’s daily and wanton violations of Lebanese airspace would also come to an end.

The Hizbullah offers Israel a new kind of asymmetric warfare: it combines low-tech guerilla tactics with sophisticated missile and communications technology. Understandably, the Israelis find these Hizbullah achievements hard to digest. What the world witnessed in Lebanon in July 2006 were events that contain the potential for shifting the balance of power in the Middle East. Earlier, the Iraqi insurgents had demonstrated that they can make an occupation — even by the world’s greatest power — very costly. Now, the Hizbullah had shown that a disciplined guerilla force, with access to advanced missiles, can repel the most powerful invading army.

It appears that the weapons gap that had opened up in recent decades between Western powers and the weaker, technologically backward nations may be closing. How rapidly this happens will depend on the willingness of Russia, China, North Korea, Iran — with other countries getting ready to join them — to make these weapons available to movements of resistance. Alternatively, if these countries hesitate, the arms smugglers will step in to provide this service. Once anti-tank, anti-ship and shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles can be bought on the world’s illicit arms markets as readily as AK-47s, this will begin to alter the fortunes of resistance movements battling great powers.

In the late nineteenth century, the advanced Western nations had opened a lethal weapons gap with their automatic weapons: this gave them a quick, nearly costless colonization of Africa and Southeast Asia. When that gap began to close in the interwar period, it gave an impetus to resistance movements in Indonesia, Vietnam, Kenya and Algeria. Already weakened from fighting their own fratricidal wars, the Western colonial powers retreated: and the Third World was born.

Will the twenty-first century herald the dawn of another era of gains for movements of resistance across Asia, Africa and Latin America?

Did Benazir Bhutto’s life have to end this way?

Benazir Bhutto had entered politics to ‘avenge’ her father’s hanging in April 1979 by Zia-ul-Haq, Pakistan’s third military dictator. Having twice avenged her father’s murder — by assuming the office of Pakistan’s prime minister in April 1988 and October 1993 — she has now paid with her life trying to reach that office a third time.

Sadly, the truth is that her violent end could have been foretold with near certainty. What are the circumstances that made her violent end very nearly a certainty? She did not have the military security — and luck, one must add — that has shielded General Parvez Musharraf from several assassination attempts. With some expense and planning, Benazir Bhutto too could have made better security arrangements, but, fatefully, she seemed to be in too much of a haste to be slowed down even by 150 deaths during the first attack on her life in Karachi.

Immediately after her death, a spokesman for Al-Qa’ida operations in Afghanistan claimed that this was their work. ”We terminated,” the spokesman claimed ominously, “the most precious American asset which vowed to defeat mujahideen.”¹

That Benazir Bhutto was a ‘precious American asset’ — perhaps, even the ‘most precious’ — few anywhere would deny, least of all the Americans. It is widely known that her return to Pakistan was brokered by the United States. She could return to Pakistan’s politics — and, most likely, to the prime minister’s office — by dropping her opposition to another term of five years for President Musharraf. Indeed, Benazir Bhutto instructed the members of her party not to resign from their seats in the national assembly but abstain from voting. This defeated the opposition’s plan to deny the quorum necessary for the deeply flawed presidential elections.

One of the most remarkable developments in Pakistani politics since the events of 9-11 is the transparency — shall we say, daring — with which the United States now intervenes in Pakistan’s affairs. Conversely, Pakistani leaders also work openly to advance American interests in Pakistan. In an earlier era, the Americans generally took care to conceal their meddling in Pakistani politics. As a result, only the politically astute understood the depth of their influence over Pakistan. Now, this knowledge has become commonplace.

Although greatly weakened since the protests that erupted over his firing of Pakistan’s Chief Justice in March 2007, the Americans believe that General Parvez Musharraf is still the best person to lead their war against the militants in Pakistan. However, they were now convinced that the General’s badly battered reputation had to be salvaged: and a partnership with the pro-American Benazir Bhutto would do just that. In turn, the General, under duress, had accepted a partnership with Bhutto as the price he must pay or lose US support.

A tripartite deal was brokered involving the US, General Musharraf and Benazir Bhutto. This deal freed Bhutto from the corruption cases pending against her in Pakistani courts. She was also allowed to return to Pakistan to lead her party to — she was convinced — a nearly certain electoral victory: and a third term as Pakistan’s prime minister. The elections would give the General the democratic veneer that he now so badly needed.

As the New York Times reveals in a recent article, “How Bhutto won Washington,” Benazir Bhutto’s deal-making with the Americans has a long history.² She had decided quite early that she would return her party to power by trolling the corridors of power in Washington.

In the words of her friend from Oxford days, Peter Galbraith, who was on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the time, Benazir Bhutto first began her campaign in Washington in the spring of 1984. She was on a mission to persuade the Reagan administration that “she would much better serve American interest in Afghanistan than Zia.” Under the tutelage of Galbraith and his friend, Mark Siegel — formerly executive director of the Democratic National Convention — she cultivated the friendship of important power brokers in Washington.

These Washington contacts paid off handsomely. In the parliamentary elections of November 1988 Benazir Bhutto’s party gained only a plurality of seats. Since Pakistan’s military establishment looked upon her with considerable distrust, they could easily have pulled strings to deny her the right to form the government. US pressure, however, persuaded Ghulam Ishaq Khan, the President at the time, to invite Benazir Bhutto to form the government.

Benazir Bhutto never gave up on this winning strategy. As the NYT writes, “she kept up her visits to Washington, usually several a year.” She continued to cultivate friends amongst the Washington elite, including the Congress and the media. In the first six months of 2007 alone, Benazir Bhutto spent $250,000 in lobbying fees to gain access to Washington insiders.

Once again, to win American backing for her return to Pakistan in 2007, which could only happen with US pressure on General Musharraf, Benazir Bhutto used the same strategy that had worked before: she would promise to do better than General Musharraf in advancing American interests in Pakistan.

Over the past year, Benazir Bhutto has repeatedly pointed out that General Musharraf’s war against terrorism in Pakistan was failing. Instead of curbing terrorism, the militants had become more daring during the General’s tenure. She promised to do better. She would wipe out the “religious extremists,” shut down “extremist” madrasas, and even hand over Dr. Qadeer Khan — the architect of Pakistan’s nuclear program — to the US for questioning. Insistently, and loudly, Benazir Bhutto was seeking to assure the United States that she would do a lot better than their General.

This strategy won her the support of the United States, but it was fatally flawed. If Musharraf had not acted more vigorously against the militants that was not because he had gone soft in his commitment to America’s plan. Instead, it was because he faces restraints on three fronts: the opposition within the army, especially from its lower ranks; the very real fear that stronger measures against the militants would provoke a domestic outcry and, worse, a more determined response from those militants; and, there are concerns too that defeating the Taliban would entrench Indian influence over Afghanistan. Would these constraints be any different for Benazir Bhutto?

In presenting herself as the only Pakistani politician to openly challenge the militants, wasn’t Benazir Bhutto — in effect — also daring them to target her? Since these Islamists were regularly targeting the Pakistan military itself — even inside the security of their cantonments — would they hold back from attacking a politician who threatened to take even stronger actions against them than General Musharraf?

General Musharraf’s decision to make Pakistan the leading partner in America’s war against terrorism had already revealed its deep flaws. Most ominously, it had provoked the Islamists into targeting the Pakistani military. Already there were defections from the army, and if the clashes continued, there could be rebellion in the ranks of the army: or clashes between Pukhtoons and the Punjabis within the army.

In pushing Benazir Bhutto into this dangerous corner, a corner in which she could not have survived, the US too has shown its gross ineptitude. By openly anointing her as the American candidate, the US had effectively hastened the violent end that she has now met. The US helped to bring about the untimely death of the ‘Daughter of the East’ by transforming her into the ‘Daughter of the West.’ In the process, Pakistan too has lost a flawed but charismatic leader, who might have risen to the occasion at a time of crisis.

Benazir Bhutto crafted her political career by embracing her father’s populism, but decisively rejected what was its natural complement: his independent foreign policy. Could she have followed a different path? Was she free to claim the legacy of her father’s independent foreign policy?

Benazir Bhutto’s embrace of her father’s populism was indispensable: without it, she could not lay claim to his charismatic following amongst Pakistan’s largely illiterate masses. On the other hand, by rejecting an independent foreign policy, she opened a path to the centers of American power without losing any of her popularity. The mostly poor and illiterate Pakistanis could not have cared much for the arcana of foreign politics.

Benazir Bhutto saw her courting of the US as necessary to her ascent to power? The Americans have long cultivated Pakistan’s military as the best vehicle for subordinating Pakistan to its ends: first, Pakistan’s military became a US partner in the Cold War, and since 9-11 it has been drafted as a leading ally in the ‘global war against terror.’ The 1990s — the interim between the two wars — was a window of opportunity for Pakistan’s politicians.
But Benazir Bhutto first had to neutralize the Pakistani generals — whose power had been challenged only once by her father, and, who, therefore, were opposed to the return of his populist party to power. She had used this strategy to neutralize Pakistan’s military establishment before. Now, with the generals in trouble, she struck the same bargain.
Tragically, this time, it was fatal mistake. Benazir Bhutto was binding herself to a strategy — waging America’s war against the militants — that had already pushed Pakistan to the brink of a civil war and disintegration. In her impetuous quest for power, she had acted in blind disregard of realities.

But did Benazir Bhutto have an alternative?

Perhaps she did. Pakistan has a chance of averting a civil war, but only by distancing itself from the United States. This distancing is now vital for Pakistan: and one could argue, for the United States too. Only by distancing itself from the United States does any Pakistani government now have a chance of preventing the militants from overwhelming Pakistan itself. No government that cleaves to the United States and Israel has a chance of winning popular support in its efforts to contain the spread of the Islamist insurgency. Sadly, Benazir Bhutto too — like Musharraf — has cultivated the Israeli lobby in the United States.³

It is perhaps unrealistic to expect that Benazir Bhutto, had she had wanted to, could have done this on her own. However, if she had joined a pro-democracy and nationalist partnership with Nawaz Sharif — and perhaps some of the other parties in the opposition — together they had a fair chance of sending the Pakistani generals back to the barracks. It would not take Hazrat ‘Ali’s oratory to convince the Pakistanis that this partnership — and an independent foreign policy — were at this juncture indispensable for the integrity of Pakistan.

Sadly, this was an option that Benazir Bhutto rebuffed. She did not want to remove the generals: she sought to join their fight against the Islamist militants as a civilian cheerleader. Perhaps, she could not think of another option, given how much of her political capital she had invested in gaining the support of the United States. Trapped in her myopia, she saw this as the easier option, the only option. Sadly, she had chosen to enter a blind alley. Worse: it was a death trap.

That is what makes her death a Pakistani tragedy. It is a tragedy because she was the only political figure in Pakistan who commanded the charisma to try to galvanize Pakistanis into a vital coalition that could reverse the damage done by the military generals. But, instead, she chose to outdo the failed generals.

That was Benazir Bhutto’s fatal flaw; but it was not only a personal flaw. Behind this fatal flaw lay the a sad history of a country whose elites time and again chose to prostitute the state, to compromise national interests, and sacrifice the lives of Pakistanis for their personal gains. That is what makes Benazir Bhutto’s murder a Pakistani tragedy. In a single tragic event, it crystallizes the malfeasance of Pakistan’s political classes and the failure of Pakistanis to bring them to account for their treasonous crimes.

1. Syed Saleem Shehzad, “Al-Qaeda claims Bhutto killing,” Asia Times, December 29, 2007.
2. Elisabeth Bumiller, “How Bhutto won Washington,” New York Times, December 27, 2007.
3. According to Dan Gillerman, Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Benazir Bhutto sent him a copy of her new autobiography, Daughter of Destiny, including “a warm dedication to Israel.” He added, “ She {Benazir Bhutto] wrote me of how she admired Israel and of her desire to see a normalization in the relations between Israel and Pakistan, including the establishment of diplomatic ties,…” Tali Rabinovsky, “Gillerman: Bhutto told me she feared for her life,” December 28, 2007.

The targeted countries — we were told — sought weapons of mass destruction. In truth, Iraq and Iran were targeted because they stood in the way of Israeli ambitions — and they had oil.

Although Pakistan has been unlucky in oil, it could make stronger claims as a target for American and Israeli ire. It is the only Muslim country with nuclear weapons, a nuclear proliferator, the Taliban’s chief patron, and a sponsor of jihadis in Kashmir.

Why, then, did the US not target Pakistan?

Six years later, this question is not less pertinent: and for two reasons. After being stalled by the Iraqi resistance, US plans for war against Iran are again gathering steam. If Iran is such a tempting target, why not take a few potshots at Pakistan also?

In addition, since their rout in Afghanistan, bands of Muslim ‘extremists’ have found safe havens in Pakistan’s northern districts, as well as Quetta and Karachi. More ominously, last July, the Taliban challenged the authority of the state in Pakistan’s capital.

Yet, there has been little talk in Washington or Tel Aviv about adding Pakistan to the ‘axis of evil.’ This is the Pakistani paradox.

This paradox has a simple explanation. In Pakistan, the US had effected regime change without a change of regime. Almost overnight, following the attacks of 9-11, the US had drafted the Pakistani military to wage war against Muslim extremists. The US had gained an army: and Pakistan’s military dictators had gained longevity.

Yet, could the Pakistani military deliver on its promise to fight the Taliban and Al-Qaida? At first, it appeared that it was succeeding. General Musharraf boasted that Pakistan had collected $50 million in exchange for extremists handed over to the US.

These losses, however, did not deter the extremists from regrouping; and before long they were attacking NATO forces in Afghanistan from bases inside Pakistan. As NATO casualties rose, the US ratcheted its pressure on Pakistan. And by August 2004, the Pakistan had deployed 100,000 troops to guard its frontier with Afghanistan.

The extremists now began targeting Pakistani troops. In September 2006, in the face of rising losses, Pakistan pulled out its troops from Waziristan in return for a Taliban promise not to mount attacks from bases in Pakistan. It was an improbable truce.

In reality, the Taliban had ‘liberated’ Waziristan.

The US was unhappy about the truce. And with good reason: Taliban attacks in Afghanistan began to rise after the truce. Since then, US has been ratcheting its pressures on Pakistan to hunt down the extremists operating out of bases along its northern frontier.

According to the Newsweek of Oct. 8, the Pentagon is now demanding that General Musharraf “turn much of Pakistan’s military into a counterinsurgency force, trained and equipped to combat Al-Qaeda and its extremist supporters along the Afghan border.”

This Latin American approach to counter-insurgency is not likely to work in Pakistan. Their military juntas were firmly rooted in the elites and middle classes, set apart from the leftist insurgents — mostly Amerindians or Mestizos — by both class and race. The boundary between the adversaries in Latin America was firmly drawn.

In Pakistan, the insurgents are Muslim nationalists. They are drawn mainly from Pashtun peasants, but they enjoy broad support among the peasants as well as the middle classes all over Pakistan.

On the other side, about a fourth of Pakistan army consists of Pashtuns; and mid- and low-ranking officers are middle-class in their origin and orientation. Only the top military brass identify firmly with the elites.

In Pakistan, the boundary between the opposite camps is not as firmly drawn as in Latin America. As a result, as Pakistan army escalates the war against its own people, this boundary has been shifting, shrinking the support base of the military elite.

If this is the irreversible dynamic behind the US-inspired counterinsurgency, it is unlikely that Pakistani elites can long sustain their decision to fight America’s war against Muslim nationalists.

Recent events support this prognosis. As the military has escalated its offensive, its reputation has plummeted. Hundreds of soldiers have surrendered or, more likely, defected. General Musharraf has rescinded corruption cases against Benazir Bhutto to court her party; but this has eroded the standing of her party.

How is this ‘civil war’ likely to end? In one scenario, at some point, an alliance of Muslim nationalists — the fighters and their allies in the army and civil society — will enforce their own regime change, and create an Islamist Pakistan.

This will end the civil war, but not Pakistan’s troubles. Instantly, US and Israel will clamor for a regime change of the hard variety: through covert operations, air strikes, invasions, and civil wars.

As these events unfold, the US may well decide to start a war against Iran. This can only advance the timetable for an Islamist take-over in Pakistan. When that happens, the US and Israel will be engaged in a major war along an Islamic arc stretching from Lebanon to Pakistan — and perhaps beyond, to the north and the east.

Is this the ‘clash of civilizations’ that the Neocons had advocated — and have worked so hard to advance? Over the past century, the nations that initiated the two major wars eventually came to regret them. Is it likely that this history may repeat itself?

Once begun, the course of wars cannot always be foretold. Germany, Japan and Italy learned this lesson the hard way. With some wisdom, the US and Israel could learn this lesson the easy way — from the mistakes of belligerent nations before. Even now, it may not be too late to take this lesson to heart, and avoid a major war that promises to be catastrophic for all sides.

In January 2002, when President George Bush defined his near-term agenda for waging wars, he fixed his sights on Iraq, Iran and North Korea: the “axis of evil,” marked for regime change. These countries were targeted, we were told, because they were developing “weapons of mass destruction.” In the case of Iraq and Iran, this was only a cover. More likely, the two countries were targeted because they opposed Israeli hegemony. Perhaps, too, the US wanted their oil.

Oddly, Pakistan was not targeted for regime change. Yes, Pakistan has no oil. But the US-Israel axis could find her culpable on several other counts, each quite damnable. Pakistan is the only Islamicate country to possess nuclear weapons; she was guilty of nuclear proliferation; she was the chief patron of the Taliban regime; she has been accused by India of supporting cross-border terrorism in Kashmir; and, on the first two counts, Israel could tag Pakistan as the most serious threat to her security.

Why was Pakistan not being targeted?

This question has gathered even greater force over the past two years; and for two reasons. After being stalled for a while by the ferocity of the Iraqi resistance, US plans for war against Iran are once again gathering steam. In the past few weeks, Israelis, Neocons, Christian Zionists and assorted hawks have again been baying for Iranian blood. Now, the US Senate too has joined the chorus. On September 26, with an overwhelming vote, it virtually handed President Bush the license to wage war against Iran.

At the same time, there is little doubt now that Pakistan is “hosting” both al-Qaida and the Taliban. Now rejuvenated, both organizations are operating from “liberated” territories in Pakistan’s Waziristan. More ominously, last July, Pakistani allies of the Taliban dared to challenge the authority of the state in Pakistan’s capital. And since their rout there, they have continued to mount deadly attacks on the Pakistan army.

Yet, even today there is no talk of adding Pakistan to the “axis of evil.” Why is there no clamor in the United States or Israel to invade Waziristan, to attack Pakistan’s nuclear facilities, to punish her for nuclear proliferation, or to launch covert operations to seize Pakistan’s nuclear assets before they fall into the hands of Pakistani nationalists, the Taliban or al-Qaida? This is the Pakistani paradox.

This paradox has a simple explanation: simple but also indicative of the malaise that afflicts nearly all the Islamicate world. In Pakistan, the US effected regime change without a change of regime. There was no need for an invasion, no need to fire a shot, no need for covert operations. At the first American touch, almost overnight, a terrible beauty was born. Instantly, the US had drafted the Pakistani military, nay the Pakistani state, to wage war against Islamic “extremists.” The US had gained an army: and Pakistan’s military dictators had gained longevity.

The ease with which Pakistan’s sovereignty was terminated, the speed of this transaction, and no less the completeness of the foreign take-over, speaks volumes about Pakistan’s history, the nature of her ruling elites, the timbre of her “national” institutions, and the alienation, degradation and dereliction of Pakistan’s middle classes. Within a few years of her birth, the state was privatized by landlords, generals and bureaucrats: three factions created, nurtured and guided into positions of leadership by the British.

Instead of mobilizing the people, instead of educating them in the values of citizenship, instead of enriching Islamic traditions, instead of building a national economy, instead of developing indigenous technologies, Pakistan’s ruling elites built bridges to the United States, to the US military, to foreign corporations, and to US-dominated multilateral institutions to create a technologically weak, a debt-ridden, and financially dependent economy controlled from outside through local elites.

Pakistan today is the fruit, the logical culmination of the agenda of accommodation launched in the nineteenth century by the two Ahmads of India — one founded a college to produce clerks who would be loyal to the British, another fashioned a whole new religion to instill servitude. The glorious hope of the two Ahmads was to serve the Empire. They were Muslims for the Empire. More than a hundred years later, their spiritual progeny serve a different Empire. If they are still around fifty years from now, they will be serving new Empires risen from the east.

For sixty years, Pakistan has been managed by different factions of its ruling elites — the military, bureaucracy, landlords — taking turns to plunder the people, competing against each other to serve foreign masters, at first covertly, but of late more openly, more blatantly, more treasonously. So complete now is the alienation of the domestic elites from their own society that their bidding against each other, the domestic competition to sell the institutions of the “state” is now conducted in open view.

In order to stifle resistance, this dependent state methodically creates a weak, alienated, demoralized, and corrupt society. By failing to provide education, skills, and jobs, the state forces people to look outward, to turn to foreign shores for education, for jobs, and cultural inspiration. For every person who leaves for foreign shores, there are ten who are forced to stay at home, and whose education, careers, and very lives are organized around the chance of leaving the country. Pakistani society increasingly consists of would-be migrants waiting for their chance to dash out of the country’s airports, ports and border-crossings.

It is the middle classes now who ape the elites, who in turn have been aping their foreign masters for more than a century. As English increasingly becomes the passport to success, they are forsaking their native languages. In the colonial era, the elites sent their children to the grammar schools, the missionary schools, and then they were packed off to Cambridge and Oxford. On succeeding their white masters, these “whitened” natives brandished their command of English as the visible symbol of their new elevation to power. It marked them off from the “natives” over whom they now ruled. A new caste had emerged, the native “whites” segregated from their “backward” cousins by their alien language, their affluence, their Western loyalties and dress, their moral turpitude, and their Western vacations and honeymoons.

The most damaging product of this alienation has been a deepening intellectual sterility. Despite the proliferation of degrees, every new generation of Pakistanis is intellectually more sterile than its predecessor. Each new generation has eagerly surrendered the traditional virtues of its predecessor without acquiring the virtues of its masters, their scholarship, their energy, and the humanity which they practice among their own kind. The aping and mimicking of the diseases of foreign masters is far easier than the cultivation of the virtues that distinguish them, that are the sources of their power over their dark subjects.

Yet, resistance revives in some troubled hearts. At some point, this wholesale degradation of a society, this prostitution of national institutions, this miscegenation of foreign and native elites, produces revulsion in a few sensitive hearts. It gives birth to anger, art, struggle, new theories, and hopes for regenerating society.

But this regeneration is arduous. The mongrel elites have raised many barriers, they have strung barbed-wire fences with watch-towers across the country’s landscape. They have trained a mercenary military and perfidious police, led by officers schooled in the arts of repressing dissent. However, it is not these overt forces of repression alone that weaken and deflect the resistance.

The resistance can stand up to repression if it resonates with the people, if it can engage, stir, and mobilize them behind the cause of justice. But the alienation in society is so deep, the demoralization and apathy so complete that the few sensitive souls who choose to resist are left to twist in the wind, unsupported, unshielded, to be singled out and decapitated by the mercenary military and police.

Yet, Pakistan is not without hope. In one corner of Pakistan, that hope comes from the sons and daughters of the mountains, yet uncontaminated by “civilization”, firm in their faith, clear in their conviction, proud of their heritage, and ready to fight for their dignity. Though unschooled, they are clear-eyed as the eagle of the mountains. Their poverty steels their determination. They stood up against the Soviet marauders: and defeated them. Today, they are standing up again to reclaim their dignity and their lands from foreigners and native mercenaries.

In Pakistan now, as in much of the Islamic world, the alienation of the institutions of the state has reached its climax. In Iraq, the United States could not have restored colonialism without planting her boots on the ground. In Iran too, they dare not dream of capturing the state without boots on the ground. In Pakistan, however, the task of regime change has been truly a cake walk: it was achieved with Pakistani boots on the ground.

A US weekly, Newsweek, has written that the Pentagon “wants [Musharraf] to turn much of Pakistan’s military into a counterinsurgency force, trained and equipped to combat Al-Qaeda and its extremist supporters along the Afghan border.” There, you have it, dear Pakistanis, in clear, bold print. What is this if not a plan for plunging your country into civil war, into a carnage far worse than what the Algerians have gone through?

How is it that the Pentagon dares to make such outlandish demands on the Pakistani army? The answer is simple. They do it because they know for a certainty that Pakistan’s elites are eager to deliver; they know that Pakistan’s mercenary-generals compete for American patronage; and Pakistan’s scavenger-politicians crawl to Washington begging not to be left out of the deals to sell the Pakistani state. Worse, until recently, Pakistanis have watched from the sidelines, or turned away, and let it happen.

For the first time now, a tiny segment of Pakistan’s middle classes, the lawyers — though still outfitted in the ridiculous black attire given them by their erstwhile English masters — have stuck out their necks against the mercenary-generals, against the mercenary military, against the commodification of their state. It is an auspicious turning point for Pakistan.

It is a sign that the Iqbalian spirit stirs a few Pakistanis. And observe what it has already accomplished. A few hundred Iqbalians have put the mercenary-generals on notice. The mercenary-generals postured, they scowled, they threatened, in desperation they turned to their masters for advice, they called up the scavenger-politicians to provide civilian cover. In short, for a brief moment, there was panic in the top ranks of the mercenary military.

For a brief moment only. The mercenary generals will not surrender so soon, or so easily. Indeed, it does not matter if one batch of mercenary-generals departs the scene: many more wait in the wings to take their place. If Pakistanis wish to avert civil war — and a bloody civil war it will be — then they must steel their hearts, they must gather courage, they must plan, they must organize, they must mobilize to take back their country, their state, and their military: to take it back definitively and with a clear understanding of how to make this nationalist appropriation irrevocable.

The lawyers alone cannot do it for them; when they become too troublesome, the mercenary state will start disappearing the lawyers. Nevertheless, change will come to Pakistan: for those who can read the signs, the writing is on the wall. Pakistan’s mercenary elites have hitched their wagon to the US “global war on terror.” The United States will direct this war, and it will be a dirty war. As in Iraq, American experts in counterinsurgency will not hesitate to turn Pakistan into a Guatemala or worse.

Will Pakistanis dare to exert to make a stand for the change they want? If they choose to stay unconcerned, unthinking, disengaged, impassive, change will be imposed on them by the mercenary state. They will find themselves being dragged through a dirty war: many will loose their lives. Disappearances, executions, arbitrary arrests, in short, state terror will become common: the order of the day.

If Pakistanis dare to change themselves, they can choose the change they want: to make the state work for them not against them, to reclaim history, to become the historical force that produces change. However, this change demands a price, a price in will, values and sacrifice. Pakistanis must search their hearts to revive the fire they have smothered for too long: the will to struggle, to resist, to live in dignity, connected to their history, drawing on their best traditions to forge a future that they will control. If they fail now, the game is lost. It may be lost forever.

Pakistanis can learn from Latin America, whose oppressed peoples — in particular, their indigenous people — after five centuries of oppression are raising their heads everywhere. Together, they are throwing off the shackles of the predatory state, the mercenary state that collaborated with a succession of Empires to destroy their lives, their hopes, their struggles. Today, they are reclaiming the state in Venezuela, in Bolivia, in Ecuador, in Nicaragua, and they are getting ever closer to victory across the entire continent.

The United States today is powerless to roll back these revolutions. It is powerless because the struggles of oppressed peoples are interconnected, interwoven. When the dispossessed resist in Palestine, when Iraqis battle behemoths in their country, when underdogs make a stand in Lebanon, when Afghan peasants run circles around armies of occupation: in short, when the wretched of the earth tie down the Empire in West Asia, they raise hopes of liberation in every quarter of the world, even amongst the oppressed classes in the very centers of power.

The struggles of the past six years in West Asia have quickened the pace of history: they have opened a window for the liberation of the oppressed peoples everywhere. Just when the Empire was hatching its Project for the New American Century, history decided otherwise. It will be a new century alright, but there is scarce a doubt six years later that it will not be an American century, a reality that Americans should have the courage to accept graciously. Instead, it will be multipolar century, with many centers of power, scattered across all the continents of the world. Once again, power is being decentralized, and we can hope that this new round of decentralization will produce more enduring results than the last one. The men and women leading the new decentralization are a new breed: they have not been chosen by their erstwhile masters.

It is for Pakistanis now to seize this historical moment, to join the forward march of history. The historic changes underway in Latin America, and the new forms of resistance being forged in Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan and Palestine are delivering new hope, new ideas, and new inspiration to oppressed peoples everywhere. Global empires are too costly to be sustained anymore: that is the singular message that Iraqis and Afghans are delivering to the world.

Will Pakistanis dare to join this universal struggle, harness its power, and seize the scales of justice? Will they follow the lead of the brave lawyers so that the streets of every city, every town, every village in Pakistan reverberate with their cries for honor and justice? Or will they choose to lengthen their vegetative seance, embrace ignominious death, and become the litter in the graveyard of history, their epitaph written by the foreign masters they have served for so long and so well?

These questions are historical: they are also urgent. The choices before Pakistanis are clear: it is life or death. If they fail to act now, they will concede the stage to the Taliban and the mercenary elites. May the Pakistanis ponder deeply for an answer: may they choose to walk in the paths of justice: and may their difficult journey be victorious.

Yet few Zionists would deny one central fact of their history: and that is the history of violence that has attended the insertion of Jewish colons into the Middle East. The history of the Zionist movement in Palestine — it can scarcely be disputed — has been attended by violence between the Jewish settlers and the Palestinians; it has led to unending conflicts between Arab societies and Israel; and these conflicts continue to draw Western powers, especially the United States since 1945, into ever widening clashes with the Islamic world.

The history of this violence was contained in the Zionist idea itself. Violence is integral to Zionism: not incidental to it.

This violent history of Zionism had been foreseen by the early Zionists in their private musings; and certainly, the risks inherent in Zionism could scarcely remain hidden once its victims began to resist the colonization of their lands. However, the Zionists chose to shelve these concerns, convinced that the ‘natives’ lacked the will, organization and resources to derail their plans.

Thus it is that the Zionists, who engaged in voluminous and intense discussions about the nature of their movement, never developed a coherent “Arab doctrine” that would examine and appraise the unfolding Arab response to Zionism.

In part, they may have felt that this was unnecessary. After all, many of the early Zionists — according to Ahad Ha’am writing in 1891 — believed that “the Arabs are all savages who live like animals and do not understand what is happening around them.” Why worry about these “savages,” when they were sure to be swept away by the inexorable advance of civilization the Jewish settlers were introducing into the region?

Other Zionists who took note of the incipient Arab resistance nevertheless chose to dismiss their concerns with wishful thinking. Once the Palestinians would begin to reap the benefits of Jewish colonization — in rising land prices and new employment opportunities – they would welcome the settlers with open arms.

In the Zionist worldview, the Palestinians were not a people; they had no national identity, no national aspirations.

In any case, it would have been impolitic for the early Zionists to air their concerns in public. In the face of open discussions about the violent consequences of Jewish colonization, and the resistance this was certain to evoke among Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims, the meager support that Zionism enjoyed among Jews would quickly have dried up. At this stage, Zionism could not have survived sober consideration of its long-term, violent consequences.

Despite the absence of a public debate, these concerns could not have been limited to the Zionist leadership. How else can we explain — despite the putative Jewish yearning for Zion — that only a trickle of Jews had heeded the call to colonize Palestine in the years before the rise of Nazi Germany? Weren‘t they afraid that they might be walking into a trap?

The Zionists also made an effort to overcome Palestinian resistance by invoking pan-Arab nationalism. In return for help from Jews, who would advocate their cause in the councils of great powers, the Arab nationalists could be persuaded to sacrifice Palestine for a higher objective, the creation of an Arab kingdom stretching from Morocco to Iraq.

The historic centers of Arab civilization — so the Zionists argued — lay in Baghdad, Damascus and Cairo, not in Jerusalem. Why would the Arabs grudge the loss of Jerusalem if this would help them to realize their dream of restoring the ancient Arab empire?

The Zionists met with some initial success in these efforts. In 1919, at the Conference of Versailles Chaim Weizmann persuaded Emir Faisal, a leader of what is known as the Arab revolt against the Ottomans, to cede Palestine to the Zionists. When he confronted Arab anger at this surrender of Islamic lands, the Emir inserted a clause making his contract with the Zionists conditional on the creation of the Arab kingdom that he and his family sought. This conditional agreement too was short-lived. Under Arab nationalist pressure, the Emir was forced to repudiate his deal with the Zionists.

The Zionists could not long maintain their fiction about somehow creating a Jewish state in Palestine without violence; the challenge came from the right wing of the Zionist movement. In an essay that laid the foundations of Revisionist Zionism in 1923, Ze’ev Jabotinsky punctured the fiction that the Palestinians would voluntarily surrender their historical rights to their country. He wrote that the Arabs would “resist alien settlers as long as … they possess a gleam of hope that they can prevent ‘Palestine’ from becoming the Land of Israel.”

Jabotinsky argued that a change in the stated Zionist strategy was imperative: in order to succeed, the Zionists would have to extinguish the Arab’s “gleam of hope.” If the Arabs were not going to sell their lands and move out, they would have to be defeated and driven out. Settlement would proceed, in the words of Jabotinsky, “under the protection of force that is not dependant on the local population, behind an iron wall which they will be powerless to break down.”

Jabotinsky had forced into the open what was always implicit in the Zionist idea — and, indeed, in the thinking of the Zionist leadership. Despite appearances, they had always known what Jabotinsky now challenged them to acknowledge openly.

The use of violence was not the Zionist fallback plan: privately, the Zionists knew that this was the only plan that had a chance of succeeding. Covertly and openly, with or without British support, they had always prepared for a showdown against the Arabs; and they had prepared well.

When the showdown came in 1948, the Zionists achieved their goals almost in their entirety: they defeated five Arab armies to create a Jewish state in 78 percent of Palestine nearly cleansed of its Arab population. Eight years later, in alliance with Britain and France, in a lightning strike, Israel occupied all of Egyptian Sinai.

And less than twenty years after its creation, in the June war of 1967, Israel went on to deal a crushing defeat on three Arab armies, occupied the rest of Palestine, the Sinai, and the Golan Heights – and, in the process, quadrupled its territories. Most importantly, however, they had dealt a stinging blow to the power of Arab nationalism, a humiliation from which it would not recover.

Yet, despite these dramatic successes, Israel has failed to attain normalcy — or, more likely, its interests are not served by normalcy. Many Israelis now openly acknowledge that something has gone awry.

Despite two massive rounds of ethnic cleansings in 1948 and 1967; despite repeated military victories over Arabs; despite a ten-fold increase in its Jewish population; despite unlimited US support; despite its deepening strangulation of Palestinians; despite the largest economic and military transfer from one country to another in history; despite one of the most powerful armies in the world; despite the sustained support of a Jewish Diaspora, more powerful and better organized than ever before; and despite the readiness of all Arab states to recognize Israel, the Zionist project has not come to rest.

Israel has yet to break away from its dependence on Western powers; it has not succeeded in extinguishing the Palestinian’s “gleam of hope”; and Israelis are far from being assured of a secure future.

Why have Israel’s triumphs — and no one would question the magnitude of these achievements — failed even to secure confidence in its survival?

Nearly six decades after its creation — six decades of impressive military, territorial, demographic and economic gains — Israel is still working to destroy its neighborhood, out of insecurity and to remove the last pockets of resistance to its hegemony.

After defeating nearly all its Arab adversaries, after successfully urging the United States to occupy Iraq, after devastating Lebanon in a new war in the summer of 2006, Israel is once again urging the United States to unleash its war machine against Iran, and to use nuclear strikes if necessary to destroy its nuclear sites.

Despite the “iron wall” that Israel erected against Palestinians in 1948, despite the wall of apartheid it has built in the past few years, the Palestinians have not disappeared. Indeed, the Israelis continue their policy of ethnic cleansing against Palestinians in slow motion, all the while preparing to launch a final round of ethnic cleansing to finish the job they had begun in 1948.

Israel is now seen as one of the leading threats to world peace. What is worse, Israelis are increasingly seen in nearly every country barring the United States as oppressors, as racists, the inheritors of South Africa’s apartheid.

Is it the case — as Hugo Bergmann, a young Jewish philosopher from Prague had feared in 1919 — that Palestine had became a Jewish state but only by betraying Jewish ideals?

In short, the creation of Israel has not solved the ‘Jewish question;’ it has changed its locale, its form and name. The Europeans had long wrestled with what they called the ‘Jewish question.’ Israel has transformed the ‘Jewish question’ into the ‘Zionist question’: and made it global.

Anxiously, the world now waits for the Zionist creation — Israel — to make its next significant move.

Anxiously, the world hopes that this next significant move will be historic and not destructive: that it will secure the rights of Palestinians, all Palestinians; that it will redress the wrongs done to Palestinians, all Palestinians, in the same way that Jews still demand redress for the wrongs done to them by the Nazis.

Yet, there is little reason for optimism. Israel cannot render justice to the Palestinians without abolishing its exclusively Jewish character, without dismantling the apartheid that grinds the Palestinians.

No colonialism yet has restrained itself because the colonial masters had acquired a conscience. It was force that stopped them: countervailing force, with or without violence.

The challenge before the Western world, before the Americans especially, is to develop the countervailing force that can compel a solution without violence.

If the West — if the Americans — fail here, if they fail to nurture this countervailing force: they only leave the room wide open to violent solutions.

History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history that we make today.

– Henry Ford, 1916

On some days, a glance at the leading stories in the Western media strongly suggests that Muslims everywhere, of all stripes, have gone berserk. It appears that Muslims have lost their minds.

In any week, we are confronted with reports of Islamic suicide attacks against Western targets in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan or Western countries themselves; terrorists foiled before they could act; terrorist attacks gone awry; terrorists indicted; terrorists convicted; terrorists tortured; terrorist suspects kidnapped by CIA; or warnings of new terrorist attacks against Western targets.

Unprovoked, without cause — we are repeatedly told — Muslims everywhere, even those living in the West, are lashing out against the civilized West. Many in the Western world – especially in the US – are beginning to believe that the entire Islamic world is on the warpath against Civilization itself.

Expert commentators in Western media want us to believe that the Muslims have lost their minds. They tell us that Muslims are inherently, innately, perverse; that never before has violence been used in this way, against innocent civilians. It is always ‘innocent’ civilians.

Other peoples too have endured colonization, slavery, expulsions, extermination at the hands of Western powers: but none have responded with violence on this scale against the West. Certainly not with violence against civilians. Never have Aborigines, Africans, indigenous Americans, Hindus, Jews, or the Chinese targeted civilians. They never attacked Westerners indiscriminately. They never targeted ‘innocent Western civilians.’

Is this ‘insanity’ slowly raising its head across the Islamic world really unique? Is this ‘insanity’ a uniquely Islamic phenomenon? Is this a uniquely contemporary phenomenon? Is this ‘insanity’ unprovoked?

We cannot of course expect any history from the corporate US media on this Islamic ‘insanity.’ In order to take the moral high ground, to claim innocence, the rich and powerful — the oppressor classes — prefer not to talk about history, or invent the history that serves their interest.

What is surprising, however, is that few writers even on the left bring much history to their analysis of unfolding events. Not being a historian — of Islam, China or Britain — I can only thank serendipity for the little bit of history that I will invoke to provide some background to the ‘malaise’ unfolding in the Islamic world. A little history to connect Islam today to China in the middle of the nineteenth century.

Implausibly — perhaps for some — the history I invoke comes from Friedrich Engels – yes, he of the Communist Manifesto, friend of Karl Marx, revolutionary — writing in May 1857 when the British were waging war against China, known to history as the Second Opium War.

More implausibly, this history comes from an article published in a leading US newspaper: The New York Daily Tribune (available in the Marx and Engels Internet Archive). Yes, in some remote past, a leading US newspaper routinely published commentaries by the likes of Marx and Engels. Today, the publishers of the New York Times, the Washington Post or LA Times would become apoplectic just thinking about it.

During the First Opium War of 1840-42, when the British waged war to defend their ‘right’ to smuggle opium into China, Friedrich Engels writes, “the people were quiet; they left the Emperor’s soldiers to fight the invaders, and submitted after defeat with Eastern fatalism to the power of the enemy.” Yes, in those times, even enlightened Westerners spoke habitually of Oriental fatalism, fanaticism, sloth, backwardness, and — not to forget their favorite — despotism.

However, something strange had overtaken the Chinese some fifteen years later. For, during the Second Opium War, writes Friedrich Engels, “the mass of people take an active, nay fanatical part in the struggle against the foreigners. They poison the bread of the European community at Hongkong by wholesale, and with the coolest premeditation . . . They go with hidden arms on board trading steamers, and, when on the journey, massacre the crew and European passengers and seize the boat. They kill and kidnap every foreigner within their reach.”

Had the Chinese decided to trade one Oriental disease for another: fatalism for fanaticism? Ah, these Orientals! Why can’t they just stick to their fatalism? If only the Orientals could stick to their fatalism, all our conquests would have been such cakewalks!

It was no ordinary fanaticism either. Outside the borders of their country, the Chinese were mounting suicide attacks against Westerners. “The very coolies,” writes Friedrich Engels, “emigrating to foreign countries rise in mutiny, and as if by concert, on board every emigrant ship, and fight for its possession, and, rather than surrender, go down to the bottom with it, or perish in its flames. Even out of China, the Chinese colonists . . . conspire and suddenly rise in nightly insurrection . . .”

Why do the Chinese hate us?

No doubt the Europeans then were asking this question. And, like the democracy-mongers in the United States today, unwilling to examine the root causes, the history of their own atrocities, unwilling to acknowledge how they “throw hot shell on a defenseless city and add rape to murder,” the Europeans then too were outraged. European statesmen and newspapers fulminated endlessly about Chinese barbarity, calling their attacks “cowardly, barbarous, atrocious . . . ” The Europeans too called for more wars, endless wars, till China could be subdued, totally. Friedrich Engels was not deceived by the moralizing of the British press. Yes, the Chinese are still ‘barbarians,’ but the source of this “universal outbreak of all Chinese against all foreigners” was “the piratical policy of the British government.” Piratical policy? No, never! We are on a civilizing mission: la mission civilizatrice Européenne. It was not a message that the West has been ready to heed: then or now.

Why had the Chinese chosen this form of warfare? What had gone wrong? Was this rage born of envy; was it integral to the Chinese ethos; was this rage aimed only at destroying the West? Westerners claim “their kidnappings, surprises, midnight massacres” are cowardly; but, Friedrich Engels answers, the “civilization-mongers should not forget that according to their own showing they [the Chinese] could not stand against European means of destruction with their ordinary means of warfare.” In other words, this was asymmetric warfare. If the weaker party in a combat possesses cunning, it will probe and fight the enemy’s weaknesses: not its strengths.

Then as now, this asymmetric warfare caused consternation in the West. How can the Europeans win when the enemy neutralizes the West’s enormous advantage in technology, when the enemy refuses to offer itself as a fixed target, when it deploys merely its human assets, its daring, cunning, its readiness to sacrifice bodies?

“What is an army to do,” asks Engels, “against a people resorting to such means of warfare? Where, how far, is it to penetrate into the enemy’s country, how to maintain itself there?” The West again confronts that question in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine. The West has ‘penetrated into the enemy’s country,’ but is having considerable trouble maintaining itself there. Increasingly, Western statesmen are asking: Can they maintain this presence without inviting more attacks?

Friedrich Engels asked the British to give up “moralizing on the horrible atrocities of the Chinese.” Instead, he advises them to recognize that “this is a war pro aris et focis [“for altars and hearth”], a popular war for the maintenance of Chinese nationality, with all its overbearing prejudice, stupidity, learned ignorance and pedantic barbarism if you like, but yet a popular war.” If we can ignore the stench of Western prejudice in this instance, there is a message here that the West might heed. Is it possible that the Muslims too are waging a “popular war,” a war for the dignity, sovereignty of Islamic peoples?

In 1857, the Chinese war against Westerners too was confined to Southern China. However, “it would be a very dangerous war for the English if the fanaticism extends to the people of the interior.” The British might destroy Canton, attack the coastal areas, but could they carry their attacks into the interior? Even if the British threw their entire might into the war, it “would not suffice to conquer and hold the two provinces of Kwangtung and Kwang-si. What, then, can they do further?”

The United States and Israel now hold Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan. How strong, how firm is their hold? On the one hand, they appear to be in a much stronger position than the British in China. They have the ‘rulers’ — the Mubaraks, Musharrafs and Malikis — in their back pockets. But how long can these ‘rulers’ stand against their people?

What if the insurgency that now appears like a distant cloud on the horizon – no larger than a man’s fist — is really the precursor of a popular war? What if the “extremists,” “militants,” “terrorists,” are the advance guard of a popular war to restore sovereignty to Islamic peoples? Can the US and Israel win this war against close to a quarter of the world’s population? Will this be a war worth fighting: worth winning?

Shouldn’t these great powers heed the words of Friedrich Engels? Shouldn’t they heed history itself? After nearly a century of hard struggle, the Chinese gained their sovereignty in 1948, driving out every imperialist power from its shores? Today, China is the world’s most powerful engine of capitalist development. It threatens no neighbor. Its secret service is not busy destabilizing any country in the world. At least not yet.

Imagine a world today — and over the past sixty years — if the West and Japan had succeeded in fragmenting China, splintering the unity of this great and ancient civilization, and persisted in rubbing China’s face in the dirt? How many millions of troops would the West have to deploy to defends its client states in what is now China — the Chinese equivalents of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, Egypt, Pakistan and Iraq? If Vietnam bled the United States, imagine the consequences of a quagmire in China?

Would the United States prefer this turbulent but splintered China — held down at massive costs in blood and treasure, with bases, client states, wars, and unending terrorist attacks on American interests everywhere in the world — to the China that it has today, united, prosperous, at peace; a competitor but also one of its largest trading partners?

At what cost, and for how long, will the United States, Europe and Israel continue to support the splintering, occupation and exploitation of the Islamic heartland they had imposed during World War I? At what cost – to themselves and the peoples of the Islamic world? There are times when it is smarter to retrench than to hold on to past gains.

That time is now: and that time may be running out.

Another turn of the screw — another attack by the United States or Israel — and this window may close irrevocably. If wars, civil conflicts or revolutions sweep across the Islamic world — unlike the Chinese revolution, most likely this turbulence will not be confined to one segment of Asia. In one way or another, this violence will draw the whole world into its vortex. One cannot even begin to imagine all the ramifications, all the human costs of such a conflagration.

The most vital question before the world today is: Can the United States, Israel or both be prevented from starting this conflagration?

At first, political Zionism had little to recommend itself aside from the mythic allure of the Promised Land. Most Jews greeted the project alternatively with consternation and derision. They could instantly sense that the creation of a Jewish state would give an impetus to anti-Semitism in Europe; the project also struck most of them as a fantastic utopia with little chance of success. The success of the Zionist plan required three steps: persuading Jews to abandon their homes in Europe for the hazards of colonizing a backward land, wresting Palestine from its Ottoman sovereign, and somehow making the Palestinians disappear. Some very real hurdles blocked each of these steps.

In addition, there was another hitch. The political Zionists did not have the religious sanction to work for Jewish restoration to Palestine. Jews had long believed that this would be the work of the Jewish Messiah as part of God’s plan for the culmination of history; and some had come to invest the return to Zion with symbolic meaning that could be pursued even in exile. Overcoming these theological objections would not be easy.

The Zionists, some of whom were secular, regarded these objections as minor inconveniences. The vision of reconstituting Jewish power was heady. It revived Jewish memories of Davidic splendor. It inspired hopes of establishing Jewish power in the Middle East on a scale that their ancestors could not attain in ancient times. In as much as it appeared utopian, even quixotic when it was first proposed, Zionism offered a Nietzschean challenge to create a new world, to change a destiny of ‘exile’ into which Jews had been trapped for close to two millennia.

Once the moral implications of their plan became clearer, the Zionists would again find the doctrine of Jewish chosenness handy. “One need only imagine what would happen in the world,” Nahum Goldmann was to write, “if all the peoples who lost their states centuries or millennia ago … were to reclaim their land.”³ In other words, how were the Zionists going to justify the ‘theft’ of Palestinian land? One argument claimed that since the Palestinians were not a ‘people’ — presumably, because they were not rulers over Palestine — they had no juridical rights over their lands. Another, more cleverly argued that most of the Arabs living in Palestine at the end of the British mandate were not natives; they were recent immigrants from neighboring Arab countries, attracted by the growing demand for labor induced by Jewish colonization.⁴ A third argument was simpler. It contended that Palestine was ‘empty,’ that the Palestinians simply did not exist.

However, it was the theological doctrine of chosenness that would most convincingly settle the morality of Zionist claims to Palestine.⁵ The Zionists would have little difficulty convincing their Jewish and Christian audiences, the only ones that mattered at that time, that this was no ‘theft.’ It was widely believed by populations raised on Biblical myths that God had promised Palestine to the Jews as their eternal inheritance. Since Jewish ownership rights were divinely ordained, they could not be annulled by absence of the owners. In other words, Zionism was not a colonial movement to expropriate the natives: it was a ‘messianic’ movement to restore Palestine to its divinely appointed Jewish owners. The European Jews who arrived in Palestine could not be accused of stealing their lands; as the Jewish National Fund claims, they were only ”redeeming” lands which had had always been theirs.

The sacred history of the Jews supported Zionist plans on another important matter. The Zionist plans for a Jewish state required a Jewish majority in Palestine, and preferably a territory cleansed of its native inhabitants. At first, the Zionist thinkers gave little thought to the Palestinian presence. They assumed that the Palestinians were Bedouins, temporary sojourners, without any love for their land or homes, and could be easily persuaded to move on.⁶ When the Palestinian resistance dashed these hopes, the Zionists quickly made plans to evict them from their lands by force of arms. Indeed, in 1948 the Zionists nearly implemented their totalitarian vision when they expelled some 800,000 Palestinians, leveled their towns and villages, and made sure that they would never return to their homes in the Jewish state of Israel. This may have been troubling to some, but Zionists steeped in Jewish sacred history knew that their Lord had urged even more radical measures when their ancestors were taking possession of Canaan.⁷

The theology of chosenness offered another advantage; it did not limit Zionist ambitions to Palestine alone. The Lord’s promise was not restricted to Canaan; in a few more generous verses, He had expanded the Jewish inheritance to include all the lands between the Nile and Euphrates (Genesis: 15.18).”⁸ With present-day borders, this expansive Israeli empire would include Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and perhaps more. If the Zionists could successfully use the Bible to claim Palestine, they could invoke the same divine authority to claim the rest of the Arab Middle East as well. In the middle of the Suez War in 1956, Ben-Gurion told the Knesset “that the real reason for it [the Suez War] is ‘the restoration of the kingdom of David and Solomon’ to its Biblical borders. At this point in his speech, almost every Knesset member spontaneously rose and sang the Israeli national anthem.”⁹

The doctrine of election did not merely set the Jews apart from other nations; it also set them above other nations.¹⁰ Over time, this has encouraged racist tendencies. Since the Jews were the chosen instruments of God’s intervention on earth, this was interpreted by some Jewish thinkers to mean that Jews were not subject to the laws of nature and society.¹¹ In other words, as long as the Jews believed that they were acting as instruments of God’s will, they did not have to follow the laws of gentile nations. As Israelis have moved to the religious right, a shift propelled by the rationale and experience of Zionism itself, Zionist advocates have shown an increasing willingness to justify their human rights abuses as a Jewish prerogative. As Zionist plans continue to be challenged by their victims, the ‘chosen people’ slowly but surely take on the hues of a ‘master race’: they begin to imagine that they have the power to legitimize their actions by merely willing them into existence.

1. All quotes from the Jewish Bible are from: Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler, eds., The Jewish study Bible (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004): 111, 383.
2. The doctrine of Jewish chosenness incorporates three interlocking divine choices made by the God of the Jewish scriptures. First, God chose Abraham’s lineage through Isaac to be His “treasured people (Deuteronomy: 7.6), a people “consecrated” to the Lord and “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation (Exodus: 19.5).” He also chose a land where His people would come together; although its borders vary, this land always included the land between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean sea as its core. Like God’s chosen people, this land too was unique: it was a pure land, “flowing with milk and honey (Exodus: 33.3),” devoid of impurities, the best of all lands on the earth; it was also a holy land, set apart from other lands, because it was His earthly dwelling place. Finally, this God makes a Covenant with His chosen people. He promises to given them owners and rulers over the holy land, and to guide, bless and favor them as long as they observe His laws. Conversely, He threatens them with dire punishments, including exile from the Promised Land, if they break their Covenant (Exodus: 19.5). It appears that the cumulative deficit in Jewish conduct finally led to their expulsion from the Promised Land in the first century CE. In their centuries of exile, the overwhelming majority of the Jews lived in Europe and the Middle East outside of Palestine.
3. Nahum Goldmann, “Zionist ideology and the reality of Israel,” Foreign Affairs 57, 1 (Fall 1978): 72.
4. This argument was revived in 1985 by Joan Peters, From time immemorial: The origins of Arab-Jewish conflict over Palestine (New York: Harper and Row, 1985). Joan Peters attributes the natural increase since the 1850s, brought about by improvements in health care and sanitation, to immigration. This natural increase can also be observed in Israel’s Palestinian population: that is, among the 150,000 who survived the ethnic cleansing of 1948-49. In 2004, that population had grown to some 1.3 million. Although Peter’s book was widely acclaimed by the leading Zionists in United States, including Saul Bellow and Barbara Tuchman, the book, according to Norman Finkelstein, is a “monumental hoax.” See Norman Finkelstein, Image and reality of the Israeli-Palestine conflict (London: Verso, 1995).
5. This was starting point, the chief inspiration for nearly all the early Zionists. Anita Shapir writes: “One of the covert assumptions present among all the poet and the majority of Zionist thinkers and leaders was that Jews had a special right to the Land of Israel, that is, Palestine.” Ahad Ha-Am also commented that this was “a land to which our historical right is beyond doubt and has no need for farfetched proofs.” Anita Shapira, Land and power: The Zionist resort to force, 1881-1948 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992): 40-41.
6. In an essay he wrote in 1891, after a short trip to Palestine, Ahad Ha-Am wrote that Jews in Europe believe that “all Arabs are savages of the desert, a people similar to a donkey.” Quoted in Anita Shapira, Land and power: 42.
7. As the Israelites prepared to take possession of the Promised Land, the Lord’s instructions were unequivocal: “When the Lord your God brings you to the land that you are about to enter and possess, and He dislodges many nations before you … and the Lord your God delivers them to you and you defeat them, you must doom them to destruction: grant them no terms and give them no quarter Deuteronomy (7.1-3).”
8. Similar promises were also made in Deuteronomy: 11. 24 and Joshua: 1.4.
9. Israel Shahak, Jewish history, Jewish religion: The weight of three thousand years (London: Pluto Press, 1994): 8-9.
10. In 1904, Rabbi Kook, the chief Ashkenazi rabbi of Palestine, wrote: “So on the collective level of Israel, God ordained these two faculties: a faculty corresponding to the physical entity, that aspires to material improvement of the nation …, and a second facet devoted to the cultivation of spirituality. By virtue of the first aspect, Israel is comparable to all the nations of the world. It is by dint of the second aspect that Israel is unique, as it says: “The Lord leads it [Israel] alone”; “Among the nations it [Israel] shall not be reckoned.” It is the Torah and unique sanctity of Israel that distinguish it from the nations.” Rabbi Isaac Hakohen Kook, When God become history: Historical essays of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Hakohen Kook, translated by Bazalel Naor (Spring Valley, NY: Orot Inc., 2003).
11. In the fifteenth century, Isaac Abravanel, a Jewish statesman and bible commentator, offered a clear statement of the doctrine that Jewish election – in the words of his modern biographer – offered them “exemption from the laws of nature and society that govern gentiles.” See: Seymour Feldman, Philosophy in a time of crisis: Don Isaac Abravanel, defender of the faith (London: Routledge/Curzon, 2003): 137-38.