Once I had gotten past the Prologue – which I thought did not belong at the beginning of the book – Khan’s narrative never lost its power to sustain my interest. The book takes the reader through many unexpected shifts in the protagonist’s life – from cricket to charity work, from charity work to politics, from the life of a celebrity to a life of piety, from disdain for Islam to a deepening respect for its richness and depth, from contempt (a colonial legacy common to Pakistan’s elites) for ordinary Pakistanis to a growing concern for their tormented lives, from wilting shyness before audiences to a determination to face the glare of public life, from growing anxiety about Pakistan’s problems to an unshakable resolve to do something about them; etc. In short, the book takes the reader through the life of an extraordinary man, at first fully immersed in the privileges of his class and his cricket celebrity but slowly turning inwards, questioning the colonial mindset of his own privileged class, angry at the limitless corruption of Pakistan’s rulers, and, finally, reaching resolution in his commitment to take Pakistan back from its corrupt elites. A politician with Imran Khan’s record would be rare in Western ‘democracies.’ In a country like Pakistan, mired for decades in the corruption of rapacious elites, he is an anomaly – an outlier. Should the Pakistanis embrace Imran Khan, should they give him the chance to pick and lead the nation’s political team, this could be a game-changer for their country.

While describing his spiritual journey following the pain of his mother’s death, Imran Khan sums up his life in an aphorism, “A spiritual person takes responsibility for society, whereas a materialist only takes responsibility for himself (87).” Quite apart from the truth-value of this statement (since a ‘materialist’ or someone without belief in God or afterlife may also choose to take responsibility for society), this sentiment very aptly describes the author’s long and tortuous passage from indifference towards larger questions – both metaphysical and political – to a deepening engagement with God and the history and fate of Pakistanis and Muslims. In time, after much soul-searching, Imran Khan chooses to take “responsibility for society.” Once he has formed a conviction, Imran Khan has shown that there is no turning back for him.

Imran Khan’s autobiography contains some homespun theology too. At one point, he describes how cricket nudged him towards faith; it began with observations on cricketing luck. A game can turn on the toss of a coin; success in bowling can depend on the way the ball is stitched, on umpiring mistakes, on fortuitous injuries, on the weather, etc. In other words, “there seemed to be a zone beyond which players were helpless, and it was called luck (84).” He muses, “… could what we call luck actually be the will of God?” Is it possible, amidst the infinite complexity that produces any outcome, that God intervenes in our lives, nudges a particle here a particle there to confront us with outcomes that surprise us, overthrow our certainties, deflate our egos, forcing us to think of higher forces?

After his mother’s painful death from cancer, Imran Khan turned away from God. Questions of theodicy troubled him. He worried that his life’s accomplishments could vanish in a moment. In the face of this vulnerability, persuaded by a logic that recalls Pascal’s wager, he resumed his salaat. “This was really like an insurance policy – a sort of safety net in case God really did exist.” It is likely that Imran had arrived at his reasoning on his own, or he had encountered this argument in the Qur’an. Unknown to most Muslims, the Qur’an makes this argument on several occasions; it is then taken up by Hazrat Ali, the Prophet’s cousin, and in the eleventh century by al-Ghazzali.

Imran Khan speaks reverently of the influence of Mian Bashir on his life, an obscure but spiritually gifted man who gently led him to discover the inwardness and beauty of Islam. People who have lost touch with metaphysics will likely frown at this influence. Untroubled by such skeptics, Imran Khan recognizes this obscure sufi as the “single most powerful spiritual influence” on his life. I respect this openness to the Unseen, this divinely implanted ‘naiveté’ – if you will – that lies at the heart of all authentic religious experience, and that Western rationalism and scientism have nearly destroyed in modern man. Despite the materialism that assails us, we can stay in touch with this ‘naiveté.’ In better times too, very few men and women could reach the summits of the mystical ascent; but they sought spiritual sustenance in the baraka of the valis, friends of God. Unknown to Pakistan’s militant secularists, Asadullah Khan Ghalib too – despite his celebrated skepticism – sought intimacy with God through veneration of Hazrat ‘Ali and his family.

2.

Imran Khan is nothing if not resolute in pursuing the goals he sets for himself; and his goals have never been modest. “Over the years,” he writes, “I came to the conclusion that ‘genius’ is being obsessed with what you are doing (63).” Quite early in his cricket career, spurred by the example of Dennis Lillee, he decided to remake himself as a fast bowler. His teammates and coach warned him that he “had neither the physique nor the bowling action to become a fast bowler (118)” and he could ruin his career if he tried to change his bowling style. Imran Khan was not deterred. He remodeled his “bowling action to become a fast bowler,” and as he worked hard towards this goal – he writes – “my body also became stronger for me to bowl fast.” Most cricket commentators agree that Imran Khan went on to establish himself as one of the greatest fast bowlers of all time. Fewer still have combined his eminence in fast bowling with skill at batting and leading his team.

When Imran Khan set out in 1984 to establish Pakistan’s first cancer hospital – he ran into a wall of skepticism. When he presented his plans for the Hospital to the leading Pakistani doctors in Lahore and Lon-don, they were dismissive; he did not give up. Working indefatigably to collect mostly small donations from tens of thousands of people at home and abroad, Imran Khan began construction work on the project in April 1991. The Hospital admitted its first patients in December 1994, with a com-mitment to provide free care to all poor patients. Skeptics had warned that this policy was not viable, but generous Pakistanis proved them wrong. Now plans are underway for building two more cancer hospitals in Peshawar and Karachi.

Our author has shown the same dogged persistence in the arena of politics. When he announced his entry into politics in 1996 – with the for-mation of a new party, Tehreek-e-Insaaf, dedicated to fighting corrup-tion in public life – Pakistanis ignored him. In the first elections it contested in 1997, the Tehreek won no seat; in the second election in 2002, it won a single seat. Imran Khan could draw large crowds to his rallies, but they were drawn to their cricket hero not the political leader who promised to deliver a better future for them. Perhaps, Imran Khan had not done his homework. His promise to fight corruption did not yet carry a broad appeal; his message did not resonate with workers, peasants, students, clerks and small shop-keepers. Pakistanis knew that their leaders are corrupt, but they did not see Imran Khan as the force that could pry Pakistan out of their dirty but powerful grip. Imran Khan had not begun the hard work of building his party from the ground up, creating a cadre of committed workers and donors. He spent too much time on talk shows and too little time organizing his party.

The failure of Tehreek-e-Insaaf to make an impact in the 2002 elections may well have ended Imran Khan’s political career; but he was not ready to quit the field. He persisted in his attacks on Pakistan’s corrupt elites through regular appearances on television talk shows that had proliferated following General Musharraf’s liberalization of the media. Then came the attacks of 9-11, the US decision to draft Pakistan into its so-called Global War Against Terror. Gleefully, Pakistan’s generals accepted every demand that the US made on Pakistan’s sovereignty; they gave the US air and land corridors to Afghanistan, control of one or more airbases in Pakistan, and free run of Pakistan to CIA operatives. Only the religious parties and jihadi factions opposed this surrender of Pakistan’s sovereignty, but they occupied limited political space in Pakistan. With few exceptions, Pakistan’s ‘liberal’ and ‘left’ intellectuals also supported the US War; they were happy to see the Taliban driven out by the American invaders. The political tides were begging to turn for Imran Khan. This was his opportunity to broaden his critique of Pakistan’s corrupt political classes; their corruption now veered towards treason. None of this was surprising, but it did bring out into the open Pakistan’s descent to the depths of servitude.

As events unfolded, the charge of treason would gain greater plausibility. General Musharraf’s government kept the Americans happy by killing the Taliban who had sought refuge in Pakistan; others were captured and handed over to the Americans. In open violation of Pakistan’s constitution, the government also began to disappear Pakistanis who were then secretly transferred to the Americans. Pakistan’s involvement in America’s war entered a new phase in 2004 as the CIA mounted its first drone strikes on Pakistani territory. On American demand, the generals also directed the Pakistani military to attack Taliban sanctuaries in Waziristan. Pakistan’s political classes had now privatized the army. Pakistani soldiers now killed the Taliban and Pakistanis to enrich the country’s political elites.

While the generals collected cash from the US, Pakistanis would pay the price for this treason. Pakistan’s war against the Taliban and their Pashtun hosts produced a frightening backlash that has continued to grow. The logic of this backlash was simple, as Imran Khan also explains. No doubt encouraged by the Afghan Taliban, the families of the Pashtun victims – calling themselves the Pakistani Taliban – mounted devastating retaliatory attacks against military and civilian targets in Pakistan, but mostly against the latter. There was no change in Pakistan’s commitment to America’s war when a civilian government, led corrupt politicians rehabilitated under a deal hatched in Washington, replaced General Musharraf in 2008. While Pakistan’s liberal and left intellectuals wanted the government to exterminate the Pakistani Taliban; they insisted that the Pakistani Taliban was an Islamic fundamentalist movement to take power in Pakistan and had nothing to do with the war Pakistani military had unleashed against the Pashtuns. Imran made the opposite argument. Terminate the war against the Pashtuns and Afghans, and the Pakistani Taliban would cease their attacks; they would disappear as quickly as they had appeared.

After a long delay, Imran Khan’s strategy began to pay off. As Pakistan escalated the war against its own people in two of its four provinces, as Paki-stani capital fled and foreign capital shunned the country, as the economy worsened, as poverty deepened, as political factions in Karachi engaged in bloody turf battles, as power outages persisted, as supply of cooking gas be-come intermittent, the anger and desperation of Pakistanis also grew. Who could lift Pakistan from this descent into chaos? Pakistanis knew better than to expect a savior to emerge from the military or the established political classes: for they had produced the mayhem and were its chief beneficiaries. In this gloom, Imran Khan beckoned to Pakistanis. His calls for justice grew louder, his jeremiads against corrupt politicians became sharper, his critique of the generals became unsparing. Slowly, his message began to resonate with Pakistani youth and the urban middle classes in Pakistan. Starting in mid-2011, the polls signaled a surge in his popularity.

On October 30 2011, Imran Khan was ready to take a measure of his popularity with a rally in Lahore. The rally was a great success; more than two hundred thousand people showed up. Most people agreed that nothing like this had been seen since the days of the charismatic Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in the 1970s. On December 25, the Tehreek organized a second rally in Karachi, the stronghold of a local ethnic party, with the same results. Finally, some sixteen years after his entry into politics, people were beginning to rally around Imran Khan and his party. This surge in his popularity suddenly changed the political map of Pakistan. It also produced some unwelcome results; now that his prospects looked brighter, some members of the established political class began to knock on the Tehreek’s door. Imran Khan was now a political force; after wandering for many years on the margins, he had arrived with a bang on Pakistan’s political scene.

Imran Khan offered a more optimistic assessment of his prospects. He described the surge in his popularity as a political tsunami that would in time sweep out the old corrupt order. Was this a case of excessive self-congratulation? This would depend on whether the Tehreek could sustain the momentum it had generated, whether it could capitalize on this surge to build a grassroots organization, whether it could expand its program to incorporate the interests of workers and peasants, and whether it could create an intellectual cadre that would disseminate its message through print, television and the internet. Can Imran Khan energize the people, raise their hopes of change to a fever pitch, so that attempts to defeat them by extra-legal means could backfire and persuade the Tehreek to lead an uprising? I will return to these questions; but first, I wish to turn to the increasingly shrill and frenzied attacks against Imran Khan by Pakistan’s putative liberal and left-leaning intelligentsia; these attacks are most visible in the English-language print media. Their shrill commentary suggests that they are beginning to take him seriously.

3.

Pakistan’s ‘liberal’ and ‘left-leaning’ groups bring three related charges against Imran Khan: he is an Islamist (or fundamentalist), a partisan of the Taliban, and a rightist. They rely on less than half-truths in making their case.

Imran Khan is certainly Islamic in his thinking, inspiration and identity but he is not an Islamist, a term that generally applies to Muslims who subscribe to a literalist interpretation of the Qur’an and the Traditions of the Prophet. Unlike many Pakistanis who identify themselves as liberals or leftists – and take a Kemalist view of Islam as a backward religion that must be rigorously excluded from the public discourse and even public space – Imran Khan derives his identity from Islam and seeks inspiration in the Qur’an and the Traditions. In regards to the relevance of some of the legal aspects of the Qur’an, together with Allama Iqbal and Fazlur Rahman (for many years, a professor of Islamic Studies at University of Chicago), he recognizes the need for revisiting some of the rulings that were given currency by the consensus of a previous age. In this sense, it would be appropriate to describe Imran Khan as an Islamic modernist; but unlike most Islamic modernists he also feels a strong affinity for the sufi tradition of Islam that has emphasized the spirit and inward content religion without neglecting its outward practice. In both respects, I doubt if there are Islamists who would admit Imran Khan into their inner circles.

Is Imran Khan then a partisan of the Taliban? The United States has used its hegemonic control over mainstream global discourse – especially since launching its global military offensive under the cover of the Global War Against Terror – to smear all freedom fighters it does not support as terrorists. The discourse on terrorism is very cleverly designed to focus the world’s attention on the relatively insignificant acts of violence by oppressed peoples and thereby legitimize the massive acts of violence perpetrated by Western nations against the rest of the world. In American demonology, anyone fighting against the US occupation of Afghanistan is a terrorist – whether he is Afghan or Pakistani. Most ‘liberal’ and ‘left’ writers in Pakistan have internalized this American rhetoric; it follows that the Afghans and Pakistanis fighting the US occupation do not have a legitimate cause regardless of what fighting tactics they employ. In describing Imran Khan as Taliban sympathizer, then, these writers hope to smear him as a terrorist-sympathizer. This smear will not stick. Most Pakistanis recognize that Imran Khan supports the right of Afghans to rid their country of US occupation; other than that and his ethnic kinship with the Pashtuns, there can exist little affinity between him and the Afghan Taliban.

It is time now to explain the scare quotes surrounding the political labels left, right and liberal. In much of the Islamicate, politics has moved into strangely dubious territory, where these labels retain very little of their original meaning. As the liberal or left-oriented political elites in much of the Islamicate began to lose their legitimacy starting the 1970s – because of their dismal failure to create free, sovereign and prosperous polities – and faced growing opposition from various Islamist movements, they chose to sacrifice their ideology in order to cling to power. They had risen to power on an anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist and, in some cases, socialist platform. Starting in the 1970s, the survival of the increasingly repressive regimes they led was tied to the support of Western powers in return for keeping the Islamists out of power; this was the pact they made with the devil. It was an enduring pact that crushed any opposition to these regimes until the recent Arab uprising. The liberal and left factions in Pakistan also reprogrammed themselves after the end of the Cold War. Under Benazir Bhutto, the Pakistan People’s Party, once left-leaning, anti-imperialist, sought legitimacy in Washington and quickly embraced its neoliberal program to open the economy to Western capital.

If the formerly liberal and left leaning forces completed this metamorphosis with little difficulty, this is not entirely surprising. Even when they proclaimed socialist ideals or employed anti-imperialist rhetoric, the thinking of the politically dominant classes in much of the Islamicate had been shaped by an Orientalist narrative. After the Western powers had destroyed or marginalized the traditional learned classes – judges and jurisprudents trained in Shariah, theologians, physicians, engineers, architects and artists – this created space for the emergence of new intellectual classes that were beholden to their colonial masters. More often than not, they were secular and nationalist in their politics, and, following their Orientalist mentors, they blamed Islam for their backwardness; as a result, even when they paid lip service to Islam, they were determined to exclude it from their political discourse. In keeping with their colonialist thinking, they affected Western styles and mannerisms but did little to acquire the institutions, sciences and technology that were the motors of Western power and prosperity. It is no exaggeration to assert that these new elites – despite their nationalist rhetoric – felt closer to their colonial masters they had replaced than to the people they claimed to lead.

In consequence, as Islamist opposition movements began to reject their claims to leadership, the failed political elites retreated into the arms of their former colonial masters. They sought to convince the Western world that they faced a common enemy; the Islamist parties eager to replace them would turn the clock back on human rights, women’s rights and the rights of minorities. Worse, should the Islamist opposition gain power they would pursue policies openly hostile to Western interests. Despite the about-turn in their policies, however, these elites continued to sport their old political labels. They were ‘nationalists’ but owed their survival to Western arms, money, diplomatic support, intelligence, and advice. They were ‘liberals’ but they were happy to use the police state to suppress opposition to their regimes. They were ‘socialists’ but eagerly embraced the neoliberal dictates of the IMF and the World Bank.

In Pakistan, different factions of the ruling elites – who variously claim to be ‘nationalists,’ ‘liberals’ or ‘leftists’ – strenuously lobby the Americans or the British to gain power or to keep it. They outbid each other in sacrificing vital national interests; they never tire of proclaiming that the nation’s economic salvation depends on attracting foreign investment; they have backed unconditionally America’s so-called war on terrorism; they oppose the Afghans’ right to free their country of foreign occupiers; they cheered when General Musharraf used Pakistan’s military to fight Pakistanis who aided the Afghans; they privately assure the Americans that – despite their public stance – they stand firmly behind the deadly drone strikes against ‘targets’ inside Pakistan. Disregarding Pakistan’s Islamic sensibilities, a tiny minority of ‘secularists’ in Pakistan want to impose Western sexual mores on Pakistan; they have campaigned to abrogate the nation’s laws against blasphemy, not prevent its abuse or mitigate its penalties; they refuse to defend the rights of Muslim minorities in Western countries; they support America’s demands to shut down the madrasas in Pakistan but have long supported a colonial system of education for the elites that uses syllabi and exams designed in Cambridge.

Indeed, recently, one columnist at Dawn – a leading English newspaper – lampooned Imran Khan for refusing to share the podium with Salman Rushdie at a literary event in India. I do not know what inner demons drove Rushdie to produce his obscene caricature of Islam, but it does seem odd that a writer – that any person with imagination – would seek to sully and shatter a sacred treasure of humanity only because he finds himself excluded from its deep mystery. Needless to say, I did not support Ayatollah Khomenei’s call for Rushdie’s assassination; nor do I support the death penalty for apostasy. Islam supports free choice in matters of conscience, but the state may limit the activities of well-funded foreign missionaries that use pecuniary inducements to gain converts.

4.

Imran Khan has a great deal to say about the canker of Pakistan’s colonial legacy; the cultural divide that separates the class of brown sahibs and the great mass of Pakistanis who remain anchored in their history and traditions; and the new American masters this class has served since the departure of the British.

He also writes about his own struggles to overcome the Orientalist culture into which he was born, the culture of the brown sahibs, their sneering contempt for Islam, their denigration of the ‘natives’ and their culture. He describes his long and distinguished career in cricket that reveals a perfectionist and a man undaunted by failures. He shares with the readers his personal discovery of God, about growing spiritually through his own struggles in cricket and his charity work; finding inspiration in Islam’s great thinkers, poets and sages – most of all the great Islamic poet, visionary and philosopher, Muhammad Iqbal – but also seeking the blessings of nameless sufis, who prefer to live in obscurity and poverty despite their spiritual gifts. This review can only look at some of these issues; to accompany Imran Khan on his life journey, to walk through the many stages of his life, to explore his personal narrative of Pakistan’s political failures you have to read his Pakistan: A Personal History.

Quite rightly, Imran Khan blames the brown sahibs – a few thousand of the most powerful military officers, bureaucrats, and influential landed families – for never giving Pakistan the chance to develop into a self-respecting, sovereign and prosperous country. This class had retained or acquired its social rank, wealth and power during the colonial era by rendering loyal service to the British rulers; demonstrating their servility to their foreign masters by adopting their dress, mimicking their life style and mannerisms, and gaining familiarity with the history of British royalty, British place names, and British writers. They turned to jaundiced Orientalists for their knowledge of Islam, the history of Muslims and of India; and from them they acquired their deep contempt for Islam, the Muslims and their languages and traditions. Like their British masters, they interacted with the ‘natives’ – those who did not speak English or spoke it with a native accent – only as social inferiors, as clerks, peons, servants, peasants, low-ranking military officers and nameless jawans in the army.

Imran Khan provides several vignettes from the social life of these brown sahibs in Pakistan. “In the Gymkhana and the Punjab Club in Lahore,” he writes, “Pakistanis pretended to be English. Everyone spoke English including the waiters; the men dressed in suits; we, the members’ children, watched English films while the grown-ups danced to Western music on a Saturday night (43).” At Aitchison College, where the sons of Punjab’s landed elites were trained to become brown sahibs, boys “caught speaking in Urdu during school hours were fined, despite it being the official language of Pakistan (47).” Elsewhere, he writes, “When I was a boy I remember one of my uncles asking a cousin of mine, who was wearing shalwar kameez, why he was dressed like a servant (49-50).” Asked if he could speak Urdu – I can recall – the son of leading civil servant who served during General Ayub Khan’s tenure, shot back, “Only a little, when talking to the servants.”

Led by Iqbal, Jinnah and a small band of dedicated leaders – from the various provinces of British India – the struggles and sacrifices of ordinary Muslims had created a country they had hoped would make them proud, a country that would be guided by the highest Islamic ideals of justice, a country where they would be safe, where they could prosper, a country that would be a source of strength for the Muslims they had left behind in India, a country that would offer inspiration and leadership to the Islamicate. This was not to be. Within a few years of gaining independence, the brown sahibs in Pakistan seized control over the affairs of the country. That was the beginning of Pakistan’s descent into a shameless kleptocracy in the service of foreign powers.

“Far from shaking off colonialism,” writes Imran Khan, “our ruling elite slipped into its shoes (43-44).” Our brown sahibs made no significant changes to the colonial structures developed by the British to keep their Indian subjects on a tight leash. This omission was deliberate: the intent was to keep the ‘natives’ down, to continue to smother their long-suppressed energies, to stifle their creativity. As a result, the economy that Pakistan’s elites promoted soon became dependent on foreign loans; its capitalist class built its wealth on defaulted loans; its manufacturing sector could not move too far beyond processing raw materials; the educational standards at state institutions were allowed to deteriorate so that quality education was confined to the rich; and sixty years after independence more than half the population remains illiterate.

Over time, the emerging middle classes too began to mould themselves in the image of the brown sahibs. Since Urdu or the regional languages would get them nowhere in Pakistan’s private or public sectors, they began sending their children to English schools. Under colonial rule, the Muslim middle classes had abandoned Arabic and Persian, thus losing contact with the classics of their civilization; in the sixty years since gaining nominal independence, the new generations that attended English schools have become strangers to Urdu as well. Were it not for the logic of audience ratings – most viewers do not understand English – that forced the proliferating television channels to run their programs in Urdu, spoken Urdu too would be on its way out. Nevertheless, many of the actors who play lead roles in the Urdu serials can scarcely carry on a conversation in Urdu; the credits for these serials too are often presented in English. A growing number of commercial billboards in the cities also display their Urdu slogans and jingles in Roman letters.

The style of education at Aitchison College – the elite boarding school that he attended – Imran Khan writes, transformed Pakistani students “into cheap imitations of English public school boys.” These students adopted Western sportsmen, actors and pop stars as their role models. Only much later did Imran Khan come to understand how much this “education dislocated our sense of ourselves as a nation.” A generation later, this cultural dislocation is being reproduced on a much larger scale in dozens of elite schools – all run as profit-making enterprises – that prepare their students for the Cambridge O-level and A-level exams. As a result, writes Imran Khan, “Today our English-language schools produce ‘Desi Americans’ – young kids who, though they have never been out of Pakistan, have not only perfected the American twang but all the mannerisms (including the tilt of the baseball cap) just by watching Hollywood films.” In imitation, poorer children too are deserting the state-run Urdu schools to attend poorly staffed English medium schools run out of apartments but carrying exotic labels. Some are named after Catholic saints, in a tawdry attempt to bask in the prestige of Christian missionary schools. Others carry more hilarious names. One school, less inclined to borrow the halo of Catholic saints, calls itself, Oxford and Cambridge Islamic English-Medium School. I am aware that this faux Anglicization is being driven by global forces as well, but – in the Islamic world alone – Turkey, Iran and Indonesia continue to give primacy to their national languages.

A slavish Westernization among the elites has forced Pakistan into intel-lectual sterility. Over the past century, these Westernized classes have produced little world-class scholarship on the country’s history or social and economic structures; their scientific production too remains mostly meager and mediocre, if not worse. Nearly all the great Muslim thinkers and writers of the previous hundred and fifty years in South Asia had received their early education in wholly or partly traditional setting; and this includes Ghalib, Hali, Syed Ahmad Khan, Muhammad Iqbal, Abul Kalam Azad, Shibli Nu’mani, Syed Sulaiman Nadvi, Syed Abul ‘Ala Maududi, Saleemuzzaman Siddiqui, and Faiz, to name only a few illustrious figures from that period. Yet the growing cohorts of Western-educated Muslims since the 1900s have produced scarce any thinker or writer who could stand comparison with their predecessors. As the middle classes too increasingly submit themselves to the same shallow Westernization, this has deepened the poverty of Muslim intellect in South Asia. As the shift towards Western education has drained the Madrasas of its recruits from the middle classes, this has produced another deleterious effect: the coarsening of the Islamic discourse that flows from the madrasas. Imran Khan is deeply cognizant of this intellectual malaise. “If our Westernized classes started to study Islam,” writes Imran Khan, “not only would it be able to project the dynamic spirit of Islam but also help our society fight sectarianism and extremism… How can the group that is in the best position to project Islam do so when it sees Islam through Western eyes? The most damaging aspect of the gulf between the two sections of our society is that it has stopped the evolution of both religion and culture in Pakistan (340-1).”

The coarsening of religious discourse in the West too flows in large part from similar causes: the abandonment and denigration of religion and its mystical traditions by the intellectual classes. In the West this process began with the Renaissance and the Reformation, gained strength with the Enlightenment, and reached its apogee in the nineteenth century with the launching of Darwinian evolutionalism. As a result, over the past three centuries, Christianity has increasingly adopted hard fundamentalist positions – especially in the United States – that draw their inspiration from the conquest narratives of the Old Testament not the teachings of Jesus in the Gospels. Over the past half century, especially, the more fundamentalist variants of Christianity have become the refuge of whites who have been marginalized by the rapid economic and social changes in the United States. They vent their anger at immigrants, blacks and Muslims, at women who take charge of their bodies, and – paradoxically – at ‘big’ government, the only institution that could help reverse their economic marginalization. Increasingly also, they have been led by Christian Zionism and Israel’s military successes to identify with Jewish colonization of Palestine. In their commitment to Israeli expansionism, these messianic Christians are more intransigent than the Israelis themselves.

5.

Imran Khan blames the Westernized elites for the Pakistan’s deepening problems. Quite early on, these elites ensured that independence would merely exchange one set of white masters for another: the Americans for the British. Unlike the British, the Americans would rule over Pakistan through local surrogates; the brown faces of these surrogates would maintain the happy illusion that Pakistanis were in control of their destiny.

Although this neocolonial relationship has seen some ups and downs, starting in the 1990s, the top echelons of Pakistan’s governments have been appointed by Washington and, accordingly, their activities are monitored and supervised by the US ambassador in Islamabad. In turn, the Pakistani rulers and their cronies use the government to capture rent, much of which is transferred to foreign bank accounts. Pakistan’s subordination to the US reached a new low after the 9-11 attacks as the rulers – civilian and military – rented the country’s ports, highways, airspace, air bases, and, soon, its military to the US for moneys that have largely gone into private coffers.

Although Imran Khan does not spell out the manifold linkages that bind Pakistan’s corrupt rulers to the United States, he understands that Pakistan cannot move forward unless it ends its neocolonial ties to the United States. To this end, he sets himself several interrelated tasks. A Tehreek government will pull Pakistan out of America’s so-called war on terrorism; this means stopping the drone attacks on Pakistani territory, revoking all the territorial concessions General Musharraf made to the United States, and ending Pakistan’s war against its own people in Pakhtunkhwa. “Pakistan should disengage from this insane and immoral war,” writes Imran Khan (360). If this could be done, the chief factor that has been destabilizing Pakistan, pushing it to the edge of a civil war, will disappear. Pakistan’s military disengagement from the US will be followed by efforts to end Pakistan’s dependency on foreign loans to pay for gov-ernment programs, much of which have been diverted to private coffers in the past.

Is all this doable? Despite the dire warnings of slanted commentators, should Pakistan withdraw from the US war against terror, it is extremely unlikely that it would face a war. At present, the US has no stomach for starting another war even as it and Israel threaten to start a war against Iran. The US will certainly stop payments of the blood money, but this should not hurt Pakistan since most of this money finds its way back where it came from. China too will oppose any US attacks against Pakistan, and will stand ready to tide Pakistan through its balance of payments difficulties.

Pakistan can gain economic independence – Imran Khan argues – by ending tax evasions; this alone will double the government’s revenues. Ending corruption at the highest levels of government, therefore, is the Tehreek’s signature policy goal. Imran Khan has sought to develop a culture opposed to corruption in his own party; the Tehreek requires the party’s office bearers to declare their assets and tax returns; it has set in motion steps to elect all office bearers to the party; it will deny the party’s ticket to anyone with a record of corruption; and, it has promised to make all elected and unelected officials accountable to an independent National Accountability Board. Ending corruption at the top – Imran Khan maintains – will banish corruption from lower levels of government. I am afraid this is a wish not a well-considered expectation. It will take a lot of hard work – a variety of administrative reforms – to push back against Pakistan’s rampant corruption.

Reforming the country’s education system is a fundamental goal of the Tehreek. The country’s three-tiered system – consisting of private English-medium schools, public schools using Urdu and local lan-guages, and the madrasa system – is divisive. The English schools reproduce the class of brown sahibs and spread their pernicious culture to the growing middle classes; the poorly staffed and poorly equipped public schools deny the great majority of the country’s population a decent education; and the madrasas have become a welfare system for the poorest children. The plan is to replace this multi-tiered educational system, one that has perpetuated the colonial mindset, with a uniform system of education for everyone that will embrace mathematics, the natural and social sciences, and history while giving their proper place to the Pakistani languages, English, and the Islamic sciences.

Another important policy goal of the Tehreek is to create a system of local governance for Pakistan’s 50,000 villages. This will take local development funds out of the hands of politicians and put them in the hands of elected village councils, who will decide how this money is spent. They will also serve as the local government for the villages, with responsibility for maintaining municipal services, including a registry of births, deaths and marriages; and reviewing the work of local officials responsible for policing, health, irrigation, and education. In addition, like the panchayats of the pre-colonial era, the village councils will provide cheap and quick adjudication of local disputes.

Imran Khan has not articulated – at least in his book – an economic policy. Most likely, this omission is deliberate; he has had many occasions to set forth his economic policies but he has persisted in reiterating his position on a few signature issues, including corruption, lawlessness, and the betrayal of Pakistan’s , national interests by the rulers. As a result, we know very little about what policies he favors on infrastructure, industry, agriculture, urban labor, urban transportation, exports, energy, water, R&D, etc. This appears to suggest that he takes a rather Adam Smithian view of economic development. If you provide honest governance – I have heard him say this a few times – this will create the right incentives for all other matters to move in the right direction; the proverbial invisible hand will sort things out for the best. With their property rights secured, private individuals, pursuing their own interest, will generate savings, investments, innovation and, therefore, rapid economic growth. It is possible that Imran Khan has not had time to formulate policies in these areas; or he believes that the focus on a small number of core issues will best help to energize support for his party. In either case, it is this writer’s view, that he should quickly remedy this neglect. For good governance alone will not energize Pakistan’s people to become active economic agents of change. In addition, from an electoral standpoint, he is more likely to expand his support base by articulating his position on issues that are vital to the inter-ests of workers, peasants, ordinary citizens anxious for their health, and pro-spective investors in Pakistan’s economy.

Certainly, better governance will be a hugely positive thing for Pakistan; it can start to reverse the ruination produced by decades of rampant corruption. But good governance alone will not lift Pakistan out of poverty nor will it produce economic miracles. Objectively considered, no one will contest the British claim that they instituted ‘good governance’ in India once the rule of the East India Company was replaced by representatives of the Crown. Nevertheless, the evidence is also clear that during their long stay in India the British produced a great deal of economic misery; unfettered British imports destroyed India’s manufactures; British capital displaced indigenous capital from the most vital areas of the economy; their destruction of indigenous educational institutions produced mass illiteracy; and they pauperized the Indians. Good governance alone will not produce economic development if that governance is not used to encourage the growth of indigenous capital, institutions, technology, education and skills. Good governance must also be used to correct past social inequities and the new ones that a capitalist system is certain to produce. If good governance is used only in support of markets and capital, it will very quickly be overthrown by the inequities produced by the capitalist system. Let us not forget that Western democracies – especially in the United States and Britain – are now mostly hollow institutions; they are tolerated by corporate leaders only because they can game these systems to perpetuate their wealth and power.

6.

Notwithstanding the surge in his popularity in the cities, what are the chances that the Tehreek, if given the chance, will be able to form the country’s next government?

If Pakistan had a presidential system of government, it is more than likely that Imran Khan would sweep the polls; the rivals that any party might place against him would look like cretins. Under Pakistan’s parliamentary system, however, he faces an uphill task. In this decentralized system, where elections have to be won in several hundred local constituencies, the Tehreek candidates will have to fight against the power of corrupt local incumbents who will use their traditional authority, their money, dirty tricks, thugs, and help from their foreign masters to defeat a challenge that threatens to end their plundering binge. Winning a majority of these local contests cannot be easy.

On his path to power, Imran Khan will have to face a showdown with several factions of Pakistan’s corrupt elites. Many top generals, bureaucrats, politicians, media barons, loan-defaulting mill-owners, journalists, television anchors, and leaders of civil society have become entangled with American interests: they have cultivated ties with various US agencies; they or their close relatives hold green cards; they or their relatives work for subsidiaries of Western corporations; they have advised or worked for Western think tanks; their NGOs have thrived on foreign funding; and they have become rich and are hungry for more. Perhaps, the corrupt elites may concede victory to the Tehreek, since they may soon engineer a return to power; but it appears more likely that they will fight back, since this will end even if temporarily the bonanza they have enjoyed since 2001.

If it appears that the Tehreek is going to win the next elections scheduled for 2013, will these elections be held or, if they are allowed to proceed, will they not be rigged to ensure the Tehreek’s defeat? Alternatively, the political parties in power may try to increase the chaos in Pakistan’s cities, and thus pave the way for a military takeover that may end Imran Khan’s political career. More simply, the CIA or some segment of the corrupt elites, or the two working together, may assassinate Imran Khan. Can Imran Khan forestall these subterfuges? None of these options are certainties, but not to anticipate them and have contingent plans to deal with them would be reckless.

The power of the corrupt elites will be hardest to dislodge in Pakistan’s rural hinterlands that are still dominated largely by traditional power barons: the landlords, dynasties of so-called pirs, and tribal chiefs. Despite his tremendous charisma and notwithstanding his populist rhetoric, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto chose the easy route to electoral victory by co-opting the traditional rural power barons. This compromise brought an easy victory but, bending to the power of these barons, Bhutto proceeded to marginalize the left block in his party. At the same time, he implemented his farcical ‘socialist’ agenda of destroying Pakistan’s nascent capitalist class; he seized and handed over their industries, banks and even schools to the stalwarts in his party. Imran Khan too is aware of the handicap he faces in a parliamentary system; and – on a smaller scale so far – he too has opened leadership positions in his party to the old power barons. This compromise is certain to alienate the old workers in his party, but it also carries the more serious risk of alienating the young voters who have pinned their hopes for change on the Tehreek’s commitment to establish a just order in Pakistan. The propagandists of the old order are already hammering home this point. It does not inspire confidence when the Tehreek takes a strong stand against drone strikes but appoints a former foreign minister – who supported these strikes during his tenure – as the vice-chairman of his party.

Imran Khan’s defense of these compromises is not convincing. These old politicians – he parries – are welcome to join his party but he will vet them for corruption before he awards them the party’s tickets to the national and provincial assemblies. If the Tehreek cannot win the rural constituencies without enlisting the local power barons, he will have to embrace many more of their kind. Should he do this, however, he will surrender his chief strength – the unwavering commitment to reform the old order. Once the scions of the traditional political families begin to fill his party – even if they look less corrupt than others – the Tehreek cannot implement the reforms that will hurt the economic and political interests of this class of people.

Aware of these risks, Imran Khan is seeking to strengthen his hand by organizing his base, consisting of younger voters. He has launched a drive to register them as members of the Tehreek. Once the membership rolls are ready, he promises that they will elect their local, regional and national leaders. It is a formidable undertaking; it has never been done by any party other than the Jamat-e-Islami that restricts membership to practicing Muslims. If the Tehreek succeeds in this endeavor, this may begin to alter the dynamics of power at the local levels. As a grass-roots party with a strong organization, it could stand up more effectively against the power of the local barons. This will reduce the need to bring these rural barons into the party; the Tehreek could use them selectively to win a few seats in districts where its support base is weakest.

The Tehreek has a chance to extend its populist appeal to the rural areas with its plan to institute thousands of elected village councils. This is the only program that carries the prospect of mobilizing the peasants behind the Tehreek, but for this populist appeal to take roots, the party has to do two things. It must ensure that the rural population hears about this program and understands the benefits it can bring to them. More importantly, the Tehreek has to come up with a plan to assure the rural poor that these village councils will not be captured by the local power barons. How is this to be done? If the party members can be organized at the level of the villages, they can pit their organized strength against the bullying of the local thugs. The Tehreek should also create mobile brigades of young idealist college students who will be ready to travel and deploy to the villages to support – with their disciplined but non-violent presence – the rural poor during the elections to the village councils. The elections can be staggered to ensure that these college volunteers are available at the village elections. In addition, these elections should be held only after the Tehreek has had time to reform the police force.

Since it began drawing crowds, its rivals have accused the Tehreek of receiving support from the ‘establishment,’ a code word for the security agencies working under the umbrella of the Pakistan army. This is a smear. The Tehreek‘s support has grown because the people can see more plainly than before their country being pushed ever closer to the brink by the unbridled corruption of their rulers: and they see Imran as their only real chance of reversing their country’s slide into chaos. The Tehreek should continue to distance itself from any material assistance of the security agencies, but I hope that that it enjoys the tacit sup-port of the mid-level and junior officers and the jawans in the military, who cannot be too happy at having to kill other Pakistanis and whose lives were sacrificed by the military leadership so that they and the civilians leaders could collect blood money from the United States. In 1996, the Pakistan army faced a spate of desertions from its ranks as they were asked to fight the Afghan resistance and their Pakistani hosts. Although these desertions were contained, it cannot be doubted that resentment still simmers in the army’s rank and file against the military leadership for their readiness to do the bidding of the United States for pecuniary gain. One hopes that as the Tehreek ratchets its campaign, it will work in subtle ways to win the esteem of the rank and file in Pakistan’s army. The knowledge that their own rank and file have their eyes on their backs will restrain the generals who may want to extend their profitable partnership with the United States.

The Tehreek should also send out signals – convincing signals – that it has a second arrow in its quiver. It must let Pakistanis know that it is ready to mobilize its ranks for more forceful action if the corrupt political elites will use dirty tricks to extend their corruption binge for another five years. Pakistan cannot survive another five years of their depredations. In times of crisis – and Pakistan has never faced a greater crisis than it does now – the movement to save the country must be ready to proceed along two tracks: change through the electoral process but if that is obstructed the people must be ready to bring down the corrupt rulers through massive and sustained but non-violent protests. Victory only comes to those who are prepared to broaden their democratic struggle if change becomes impossible through the ballot box.

chatter all day, The Mozlems are coming;
they’ve dropped their drivel about fighting

them there. While our troops fought in Iraq
holding the ‘terrorists’ at the gates, back

home, greater troubles were brewing.
Radical Mozlems were actively scheming

to impose an Islamo-fascist theocracy
on the United States. Our great democracy

confronts an existential threat from within.
Let us act fast – good Republicans raise a din –

Moslems inside the US are working openly
to force sharia-law upon us. Act quickly,

harangue the pundits – or lose this great country
to heathens. Now’s not the time for an energy

plan, overhaul Medicare, fix the infrastructure,
or trim the deficit. We face greater dangers

from the enemy within: The Mozlems are coming.
It’s women in burqa, no gambling, no drinking,

nor driving for women. Americans get cracking
‘cause your country is calling. The Mozlems are coming.

The article made the point that the leaders of al-Qaida believe that they have to carry their war to the home ground of the ‘far enemy’ – the United States, Israel and Western powers – in order to free the Muslim world from foreign domination. This anyone can verify from the numerous communiqués of al-Qaida.

To say this is not to endorse the terrorist methods that al-Qaida employs. This was my moral position then: and it is my moral position now. At the same time, we should not shrink from recognizing that the total wars waged by many states, including the United States, since WWII differ from the methods of al-Qaida only in the infinitely greater scale of the destruction they wreak upon civilians.

The article made another critical point. It argued that al-Qaida, in some measure, reflects the political and moral failings of Muslim societies. If Muslims had shown more spine in resisting local tyrannies through non-violent means, their courage would have scotched the violent extremism of groups like al-Qaida.

This is how I argued this point in my 2004 article:

Above all, the question that the hijackers of 9-11 pose to their Islamic compatriots is this: “What have you risked to oppose your own tyrants, your own ruling cliques, tribes and sectaries, who are so easily co-opted by foreign powers, who have worked so treacherously to enslave their own peoples, who sell off their national treasures, and who have secretly worked with Israel to complete the dismantling of Palestinian society?”

“We engage in this violence against the United States,” they say, “because you force us to, because you have failed to act against the American surrogates in your own countries. Because you have failed to act politically and with courage, we send you this message of horror, of shame. We advertise your shame before the world. We announce the failure of a billion and a half people – keepers of the Qur’an and heirs to a moral civilization – to overthrow the craven ruling classes who commit treachery against their own societies, their own history, every day that they cling to power.”

“Mobilize now,” they repeat, “and we will join again your political struggle at home – in the Islamic lands stretching from Mauritania to Mindanao, from Bosnia to Borneo, from Jerusalem to Jakarta, from Tangier to Tanzania, and from Karachi to Kasghar. If you are willing to struggle, to fight, to secure your own homes, your own societies, your enemies cannot bind you through surrogates. America and Israel will have to fight you in your lands. Is America ready to fight a billion and a half people in their own streets, their own squares, their own backyards?”

“God,” the hijackers taunt, “does not change the condition of a people unless they want to change it themselves.”
Some ten years later, the Arab peoples are answering al-Qaida’s taunt. Arab peoples, leaderless and unarmed, have risen against their tyrannies. They have already overthrown two tyrants – in Tunisia and Egypt. Their revolt is spreading to other Arab countries: and if they are not rolled back, it will spread to other corrupt tyrannies in the world.

At no time has al-Qaida been more marginal than it is now. What young man will now answer their call to launch terrorist attacks against local tyrannies or their foreign backers? The attacks of al-Qaida gave the United States the excuse it needed to launch its ‘global war against terror’ – to invade, occupy and destroy two Muslim countries and launch attacks against many more.

This must worry the US and Israel a great deal. Very rapidly, their concocted rationale for waging wars against Muslims lands will lose its credibility with Americans.

The US and its allies must be working overtime to stop the Arab revolt in its tracks, to prevent it from spreading to Jordan, Algeria, and Saudi Arabia.

In Tunisia and Egypt, the United States and its allies will work – and no doubt are working – to save as much of the old regime as possible. In Egypt – at the moment – the US has supported a coup that will allow the military generals, all of them Mubarak loyalists, to ‘manage the transition.’ Will the Egyptian people stand for this? If they want the generals out, will they succeed? Will the US support the people or the generals?

No doubt the US and Israel have a strong interest in opposing the Arab revolt: the latter more than the former.
At the same time, sober heads in the US understand the risks of neutralizing the surge of people power in the Arab world. Pushing back this revolt, or encouraging the military to cheat the Arab peoples of the fruits of their victory, will hand the victory to al-Qaida.

Angry and frustrated, some Arabs will want to oppose their tyrannies by violent means. Others may swell the ranks of al-Qaida, convinced that they cannot defeat the ‘near enemy’ unless they first weaken the resolve of the ‘far enemy.’
Israelis, however, see the Arab revolt as a disaster. It threatens to bring down the Arab tyrannies that have worked with Israel to keep the Palestinians down. Israel will lobby the United States mightily to stand against the Arab revolt.

At this juncture, the United States faces a clear choice between the Arab peoples and al-Qaida. Can we hope that this time the United States will choose wisely?

The Arabs who are pouring into the streets of Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan and Yemen are not protesting only against their dictatorships. Simultaneously, they are also protesting against governments that have sold their dignity and bartered the honor of their country. Nearly, all the Arab rulers are self-castrated eunuchs in the courts of foreign powers, who have turned their own countries into police states, and who jail, maim, torture and kill their own people to please their masters.
The Arabs are venting their anger against elites who have stymied their energies by turning their societies into prisons. In complicity with foreign powers, these elites have ruled by fear, blocking the forward movement of their people because this movement collides with the imperialist ambitions of Israel and the United States.

It is true that Pakistan has had ‘elected’ governments alternating with military dictatorships. Increasingly, however, these governments, whether civilian or military, have differed little from each other. The priority for both is to keep their power and US-doled perks by doing the bidding of the United States and Israel.

Starting in the early 1990s, Pakistan hurriedly embraced the neoliberal paradigm that emanated from Washington. Hastily, successive ministers of finance and privatization – all of them IMF appointees – went about dismantling Pakistan’s industries, selling off for a song its state-owned enterprises, and empowering Pakistan’s elites to engage in unchecked consumerism.

In other words, Pakistan’s military, landed, and trading elites chose to align their economic interests with that of global corporations. Without a protest, they allowed Washington to impose a new colonialism with the glib mantra that ‘liberalizing’ Pakistan’s economic regime would bring massive flows of foreign capital – and enrich Pakistan.

The neoliberal paradigm is a lie: it subsumes the economic interests of the great powers. It has brought waves of devastation to Latin America and Africa, and while Pakistan has been spared a devastating blow, two decades of neoliberal policies have prevented Pakistan from acquiring any new growth-driving industries. To this day, Pakistan relies on the products of its farms and low-value manufactures for the modest volume of its exports. Pakistan’s capitulation to the IMF and the World Bank – added to the calamitous economic policies of the 1970s – has prevented Pakistan from climbing on the trajectory followed by China and India. If Pakistan has been Pakistan economic bankruptcy, in part this is because of the blood money it has ‘earned’ for waging America’s war against its own people.

Pakistan’s bouts of democracy have been a farce. The country’s elites jostle for power in the offices of foreign embassies or fly to Washington to present their credentials to their ultimate masters, each faction offering to outdo the others in doing Washington’s bidding. The farcical elections bring the same gaggle of wealthy parliamentarians, who have repeatedly proved their appetite for corruption, mismanagement, and untiring loyalty to foreign paymasters. Consider the shame of a country of nearly 200 million people, whose leaders often turn for patronage to the potentates who own oil wells in the Persian Gulf.

Since September 2001, these betrayals of Pakistan’s sovereignty and the erosions of its dignity have been sinking to new depths that know no bottom. Sham democracy or dictatorship: they do the same things. They have Washington, betrayal, inefficiency and corruption written all over them.

These governments trade in the lives, livelihood and dignity of their own people. In September 2001, at the sound of single threat from Washington, the ruling generals – who had recently usurped power – irrevocably committed Pakistan to fighting America’s sham global war against terror. Without consulting the people, they gave away Pakistan’s air space, air bases, and land corridors to the US military.

General Musharraf and his co-conspirators were ready to commit tens of thousands of Pakistani troops to fight the Iraqis, alongside US and NATO troops. They repeatedly tried to give full recognition to Israel: and Pakistan’s English media ably pleaded Israel’s case by touting the many advantages that the Jewish lobby in the US could confer on Pakistan. What blindness: what treachery. These plans had to be shelved in the face of mounting street protests from Pakistan’s mullahs.
Over the past decade, Pakistani governments have caved in to virtually every US assault on Pakistan’s sovereignty and dignity. For the first time in its history, thousands of Pakistanis have disappeared to be secreted in prisons, tortured, and renditioned to the United States. One thought that these things happened only in the brutal military dictatorships of Latin America; they could not happen in Pakistan. Once the US made the demands, disappearances quickly became common in Pakistan.

General Musharraf boasted in his autobiography of the blood money he took from the United States for kidnapping and renditioning ‘terrorists’ to the United States. Periodically, the US needs these ‘terrorists’ to lie to its own people about the progress it is making in its phony war against ‘terrorism.’ ‘You can feel safe (at least for now),’ the White House tells Americans. ‘Our loyal ally, Pakistan, has knocked a few more ‘terrorists’ out of operation.’

Pakistan’s rulers have turned its military into a mercenary army and worse. Not only have Pakistani rulers been using them against the Afghans fighting to free their country from foreign occupation; this army has been attacking and killing Pakistanis who give shelter to the Afghan fighters.

In retaliation, the Pakistani Taliban started attacking Pakistan’s military and – in desperation and folly – they have carried on a campaign of murderous attacks against civilians. These naïf’s do not know that Pakistan’s rulers will not change course to avoid any loss of life except their own. Don’t they know that this same army had carried out military operations against its own people in what was then East Pakistan? It is an army whose generals still behave like their British predecessors in India.

Soberly considered, is there much to choose between Mubarak and Musharraf, between Zein Ali and Zardari. Equally, under their rule and that of their likes, Arabs and Pakistanis have suffered from a calamitous loss of dignity. For too many decades, these nations have faced the same shameful deficits of sovereignty, justice and dignity.

Can we hope that the wave of protests that are now sweeping across the Arab world will sooner rather than later also reach Pakistan’s shores? The contagion of a people in motion, striding forward and making sacrifices, respects no cultural or religious boundaries. The impact of the new and still-spreading Arab intifada against US-Israeli hegemony, operating under the cover of local tyrannies, will be felt across the globe, wherever people suffer under the same imperialist yoke.
This is a wake-up call for Pakistan’s middle classes. In their often mindless pursuit of consumerism, their neglect of the knowledge-oriented culture of their ancestors, their excessive fascination with all things Western, Pakistan’s middle classes have lost their historical agency. They have not been the force that they could have been in shaping the laws, the knowledge and institutions that could move them forward while retaining an organic connection to the best traditions of their own heritage.

If Pakistan’s middle classes and its workers fail to act, Pakistan’s elites and their Taliban alter ego – the extremist backlash evoked by their treachery – will continue to push the country towards collapse. That collapse may not be too far away, unless Pakistan’s young generation – like those in Tunisia and Egypt – take matters into their hand.
Let a million voices tweet, let a million Pakistanis assemble in every major city, and produce the energy, the electricity, vibrations and waves that will coalesce into a thousand creative projects for reconstructing their society, projects to regain the knowledge they have lost, to recover their stolen dignity, and drink again from the spiritual fountain that alone gives meaning to life.

God has honored the children of Adam, the Qur’an says. Shamefacedly, Pakistan’s elites have dishonored the children of Adam in Pakistan for more than six decades. Now is the time for the Pakistani children of Adam to raise their hands and their voices to regain the honor that they have lost and that is theirs by God-given right.

One columnist in the Express Tribune, with high melodrama, proclaimed that the governor’s murder was the ‘death of reason’ in Pakistan. What reason and whose reason, Pakistanis might well ask, since Pakistan’s faux liberal elites have been strangulating the raison d’être of Pakistan’s creation for some sixty four years. More likely, the Tribune columnist feared the death of a different kind of reason: Pakistan’s wealthy and faux liberal elites, by carrying their treachery to extremes, by agreeing to rain death on Pakistanis from the skies, are losing the argument in Pakistan.

Going off on a limb, the governor began attacking Pakistan’s blasphemy law, which has been abused by some Pakistanis to settle personal scores. Is it a fault in the law or its execution? Or is the cause a generally lawless society, where abuses of law starting at the highest levels of society are rampant; and Pakistan’s Christians are not their only unfortunate victims. Nevertheless, the governor erratically took up the cause of Aasia Bibi, and began railing against the blasphemy law, although every previous death sentence under this law has been reversed by the higher courts of the country.

In the midst of a war against ‘extremists,’ it was unwise of the governor to call the law against blasphemy a ‘black law.’ Did he wish the law amended or repealed? If he believed it was ‘black law,’ perhaps he wanted it to be repealed. Pakistanis worried that this was only the start of a campaign to repeal the law – and open the floodgates for Salman Rushdi-style smearing of the Prophet. Another law maker from the ruling pro-Western Pakistan People’s Party had announced her intentions to introduce a bill in the parliament to amend the law. Was this an initiative inspired by foreign embassies, some Pakistanis speculated, not unjustifiably in a country where Western embassies routinely poke their nose in the country’s domestic affairs.

There are causes galore to champion in Pakistan. The disappearing of thousands of Pakistanis over the past decade – some renditioned to the USA under General Musharraf, the previous dictator – has been crying out for redress. Before the national elections of 2008, the governor’s ruling party had pledged to look into the cases of the disappeared Pakistanis. Once in office, that promise was forgotten. Indeed, the disappearances – especially in Baluchistan – have escalated. Legitimately, Pakistanis may ask, Why didn’t this crying shame provoke the governor’s ire – as well as a thousand other instances of victimization of the poor and disenfranchised?

This murder is unfortunate: no reasonable person could disagree with that. Any death outside the law – and not a few inside the law – is unfortunate and a shame. Yet, should we see this murder only as the expression of growing religious fanaticism in Pakistan? One discordant fact to consider is that the slain governor had faced the ire of the Barelvi ‘ulama (religious scholars), who support the popular Sufism of shrine-worship, have worked with the government against hard-line Islamists, and, themselves have been repeated targets of terrorist attacks.

It betrays extreme naiveté by Pakistan’s English columnists to examine the governor’s murder in isolation, abstracted from the context and the history of betrayals and conflicts that have bedeviled Pakistan especially over the last decade. To say this is not to excuse the governor’s murder but that is the only path to understanding why it happened, and why the assassin is being lauded by wide swathes of Pakistanis as a hero.

Scan issues of the New York Times or any US newspaper for a story on Pakistan in the years immediately preceding September 2001 and – luckily for Pakistanis then – your pickings will be slim. Those were ‘normal times,’ in a manner of speaking. On January 4 and 5, however, Salman Taseer’s murder was splashed as a banner head by the web edition of the NYT. US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, described his murder as a “great loss.” The US ambassador in Pakistan, Cameron Munter, echoing his boss, lauded Taseer as “a champion of tolerance.” Now, the NYT has published an op-ed by the slain governor’s daughter. In another ill-advised move, Pope Benedict called on Pakistan to repeal its anti-blasphemy law. It would appear that the slain governor was in the good graces of the Empire.

The times are not ‘normal’ when the murder of an appointed and figurehead provincial governor in Pakistan resonates so loudly in American media and draws attention from the US Secretary of State and the Pope. Pakistan’s plunge into abnormal times began shortly after September 11, 2001, when the country’s military rulers backed by its elites decided to join America’s war against the Taliban.

At first, Pakistan’s military government offered air bases and land and air passage to the US military; this was only the thin end of the wedge. A country that had so wantonly surrenders such vital portions of its sovereignty would scarcely hesitate to barter the rest of it – at the right price. And so more deals were made, inflicting horrible wounds on the people of Pakistan that cry out for justice.

Pakistan’s elites have never been too greedy when dealing with the Empire. At the rate of a billion US dollars a year, they were quickly cajoled into fighting the Afghan resistance operating out of Pakistan; they opened Pakistan and its institutions to infiltration by the CIA and American mercenaries; and many venal vendors of opinion were mobilized to demonize the Afghan resistance and their sympathizers inside Pakistan.

Under US prodding, Pakistan’s rulers have divided the country’s population into ‘moderates’ and ‘extremists,’ – America’s ‘good’ and ‘bad’ guys – depending on whether they supported or opposed the US occupation of Afghanistan. As the Afghan and Pakistani resistance – inside Pakistan – have come under savage attacks from the US and Pakistan military, they too have responded with fury targeting the country’s security infrastructure but also – unfortunately – many civilians.

Sadly, Pakistan’s decision to join America’s war was predictable. Soon after its creation, the Pakistani state fell into the lap of lumpen elites – landlords, military officers and bureaucrats – picked by the British and trained for several generations in traditions of subservience to their white masters. Instead of building on indigenous strength, these denatured elites bought their survival by cultivating economic, military and cultural dependence on the United States. Like many former European colonies, Pakistan is not yet free. Only the forms of foreign control, always working through domestic tyrannies, have changed: and the foreign hand that wields the whip now is in American rather than British hands.

The struggle of Pakistanis for their country has just barely begun. It is part of a larger Islamicate struggle nearly all of whose constituent parts face the same problem: they labor under elites who have tied their systems of knavery to foreign exploiters and to one great power in particular.

For most of its more than sixty years, Pakistan has been ruled by predatory elites who, in order to ingratiate their masters, have tried to mimic their manners, to hate what they hate, and to pretend to love what they love. So permeated are these elites with self-inflicted degradation, their multitudinous factions wrangle among themselves to undersell their country, and to place a lower value on the lives and honor of their own people.

Wikileaks has now offers a peek into how Pakistan’s rulers pander to their masters. In August 2008, commenting on the subject of US drone attacks against Pakistanis, the current prime minister assured his American interlocutors, “I don’t care if they [the Americans] do it as long as they get the right people [the resistance]. We’ll protest in the National Assembly and then ignore it.” The military dictator who preceded him had boasted in his autobiography that his government had garnered US dollars 50 million by capturing and selling Pakistanis to secret US agencies.

Pakistan’s suborned English media pretend that the murder of the Punjab governor is an isolated act. Their myopia blinds them to the war into which Pakistan’s elites have dragged the country, as they batten their foreign bank accounts, their jets warming their engines to fly them off to foreign destinations should Pakistan become too hot for them to carry on their game of deceit and treachery.

Still, the murder of the Punjab governor was unnecessary: it was also contrary to the best traditions of Muslim history. The governor had acted unwisely in denouncing the blasphemy law, but that did not make him guilty of blasphemy. If his intent was to start a campaign to have the law repealed, the public protests had sent out a clear signal to the government that such a move would be unacceptable, even dangerous. It was certain to plunge the country into further chaos. Also, the President could have acted more wisely and settled the matter by reprimanding Salman Taseer or, better, retiring him from the office of governor.

In better times, Muslim judges in Spain often forgave Christians who blasphemed the Prophet by declaring that they were insane or drunk when they blasphemed. They were awarded the death punishment only when they blasphemed repeatedly, demonstrating both sanity and intent to use blasphemy to challenge Muslim rule. Pakistan’s Supreme Court should urge the lower courts to look more carefully into cases of blasphemy to rule out malicious intent by those who bring such charges. It would not dishonor the Prophet to forgive a poor Christian woman of blasphemy – if that is what she had done in a fit of anger. It is what the Prophet would have done himself.

In order to firmly secure its existence – as firmly as that is possible for any state – a settler state has to overcome three challenges. It has to solve the native problem; break away from its mother country; and gain the recognition of neighboring states and peoples. It can be shown that Israel has not met any of these conditions.

Consider Israel’s native problem. In 1948, in the months before and after its creation, Israel appeared to have solved its native problem in one fell swoop. It had expelled 80 percent of the Palestinians from the territories it had conquered. In addition, with the rapid influx of Arab Jews, Palestinians were soon reduced to less than ten percent of Israel’s population.

So, had Israel licked its native problem for good? Not really.

The Palestinians inside Israel pushed back with a high natural rate of growth in their numbers. As a result, despite the continuing influx of Jewish immigrants, the Palestinian share in Israel’s population has grown to above 20 percent. Increasingly, Jews in Israel see Israeli Arabs as a threat to their Jewish state. Some are advocating a fresh round of ethnic cleansing. Others are calling for a new partition to exclude areas with Arab majorities.

The Palestinians expelled from Israel in 1948 did not go away either. Most of them set up camp in areas around Israel – the West Bank, Gaza, southern Lebanon and Jordan. In 1967, when Israel conquered Gaza and the West Bank, it could expel a much smaller fraction of the Palestinians from these territories. In consequence, with more than a million additional Palestinians under its control, Israeli had recreated its native problem.

Israel’s native problem has grown worse since 1967. Already, the Palestinians equal or outnumber Israeli Jews between the Sea and the Jordan River. In the years ahead, moreover, the Palestinian share will continue to rise.

Having run out of solutions – such as rising net immigration of Jews and ethnic cleansing – Israel has been implementing draconian measures to handle its native problem. With Egyptian collaboration, it maintains a medieval siege over Gaza; it neutralizes the Palestinians in the West Bank with the apartheid wall, expansion of settlements, settler-only roads, intimidation and humiliation of Palestinians, and military control over the Jordan Valley.

However, these remedies are creating new problems. They lend support to charges that Israel is an apartheid society not a democracy. As a result, slowly but steadily, Western publics are throwing their support behind the campaign to divest from, boycott and impose sanctions on Israel.

Has Israel broken away from dependence on its mother country/countries?

In the absence of a natural mother country, Zionism worked with surrogates. Quite a few of them. Indeed, there is not a Western country – including Russia in its previous incarnation as Soviet Union – that has not served as a surrogate mother country to the Jewish colonial project.

The Jewish settlers in Palestine lost the support of Britain – their leading surrogate mother – in the early years of World War II, but retained it long enough to create their own state. Over the next few years Israel took on several new surrogates, not counting the Jewish diaspora: including the Soviet Union, France, Germany and the United States. Starting in the late 1950s, however, the United States became the leading mother country to Israel. This was the result of a powerful dynamic largely directed by Israel and the Jewish lobby in the United States.

Over the years, the United States has subsidized Israel, armed it, allowed it to acquire nuclear weapons, and gave it immunity from the sanction of international laws. Under the protection of the United States, Israel quickly gained hegemony over the Middle East: it became a law unto itself.

Still Israel is not an autonomous state.

It could not sustain its current military posture without the annual military grant of some three billion dollars from the United States and the tax-free donations from American Jews. More importantly, without the US veto at the United Nations, Israel could not continue its occupation of the West Bank and the Golan Heights, its siege of Gaza, its pre-emptive wars against its neighbors, and its policy of assassinations against Arabs. In short, without US-backed immunity, Israel would become a pariah state.

Arguably, this dependence does not place Israel at risk, since it is primarily an artifact of the Israel lobby in the United States. Over time, however, as the damage that Israel causes to US interests filters to the American electorate, unqualified US support for Israel may be in jeopardy.

Finally, there is the question of gaining the recognition of its neighbors.

Israeli gains on this front are more apparent than real. The Arab regimes that have recognized Israel, or are eager and ready to recognize it, have little legitimacy. Should these regimes collapse, their replacements are likely to resume their early confrontational posture towards Israel.

This is not mere speculation. Under the despotic Shah Iran was friendly to Israel, but after the Islamic Revolution of 1979 Iran became an ideologically committed adversary of Israel. As the powers of the secular generals in Turkey have been clipped, Turkey too has been revising its friendly ties with Israel.

In recent years, Israel has been running into a new problem: the loss of legitimacy with growing segments of civil society in the Western countries.

Driven by the contradictions of an exclusionary settler-state, as Israel has ratcheted its violence against Palestinian and Lebanese civilians, as it has tightened its siege of Gaza, as it deepens its apartheid regime in the West bank, as it threatens to strips Arab Israelis of their rights, it has slowly called forth a new form opposition to its policies.

Angry at the complicity of their governments in Israeli crimes, segments of civil society in Europe, Canada and the United States have been moving forward with calls for boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel. Increasingly, despite vigorous opposition from the Jewish establishment, this movement has been spreading among academics, students, trade unions, church groups, dissenting Jewish organizations, and human rights activists. Some of them have been organizing convoys, over land and sea, to break the blockade of Gaza.

As the failure of Israel’s colonial project looms larger, its nervous leaders will increasingly seek security in new and more dangerous wars. Increasingly, Israel will become an intolerable threat – if it isn’t already – to the Middle East, the world, and no less to Jews everywhere. Zionism was founded overwhelmingly by secular Jews, but, in order to succeed, it created a new religious myth of Jewish restoration, galvanized messianic tendencies among Western Christians, and created the myth that Israel alone shields the West from a resurgent Islam and Islamicate. It will not be easy putting these genies back in the bottle.

Perhaps, the best chance of unwinding the Zionist colonial project lies with the Jews themselves. Only when liberal segments of the Jewish diaspora are convinced that Zionism endangers Jewish lives, only when they act to countervail the power of the Jewish lobby in leading Western societies, will Israel finally be moved to dismantled its apartheid regime. In the end, the alternative to this orderly dismantling of Zionism is a destructive war in the Middle East that may not be limited to the region. Whatever else happens, it is unlikely that Israel or US interests in the Middle East will survive such a war.

Most importantly, Zionism created a geopolitical realignment of great importance. It brought together two strands of the Western world, previously at odds – Christians and Jews – to join their forces against the Islamicate.

At every stage in its history, Israel has ratcheted its power by unleashing forces, even negative forces, that it has then turned to its advantage. Power, intelligence and luck have played into this.

Israel’s birth radicalized important segments of the Arab world, creating anxiety among Arab Jews about their future. Israel fanned this anxiety, with help from agent provocateurs – but also aided in some cases by myopic Arab policy – to force a Jewish flight from the Arab world. As a result, Israel doubled its Jewish population – and fighting force – within a few years after its creation.

Arab nationalism – if properly harnessed and directed – could end the Jewish state and Western hegemony in the Middle East. Unafraid, Israel took steps to fan this nationalism and used it to push the US to embrace Israel, firmly and openly, as the West’s bulwark against the Arab world. The plan worked, and by the late 1950s, if not earlier, the US was on Israel’s side.

Defeating the Arab nationalists too carried a risk. By eliminating the threat of Arab nationalism, Israel risked losing its strategic value to the US. Considering the payoff, Israel was eager to defeat the Arab nationalists. As for the risk, the Jewish lobby in the US, energized by Israel’s victory, ensured that US could only draw Israel tighter to its bosom.

A weak civil society in the Arab states also helped Israel. Although the mantle of resistance passed to the Islamists after 1967, they could not displace any of the discredited Arab regimes. US and Israel too gave a boost to these regimes. With US prodding, Israel returned a demilitarized Sinai to bring Egypt on its side. In return, Egypt switched sides.

In time, most of the Arab regimes would serve as Israel’s first line of defense against the Islamists. This was a self-reinforcing arrangement. As US-friendly Arab regimes lost legitimacy and became more repressive, they could only survive by drawing closer to the US and Israel.

At this point, luck too favored Israel, as it often has in the past. In 1979, Iran, the second pillar of US hegemony in the region, fell to Islamists who openly opposed US presence in the region. Instantly, Israel began to promote itself as the rampart against the rising Islamist tide.

In the wake of the Iranian Revolution, the Zionists also made renewed efforts to resurrect the old Western animus against Islam. Next to communism, Islam was now the principal threat to ‘civilization.’ After the Soviet collapse, the Neocons began drumming a new civilizational thesis. War between the West and Islam was inevitable.

Israel’s creation and military successes energized Christian Zionists in the US. In their millennial theology, the ingathering of Jews in Palestine was a precursor to the Second Coming. This theology demanded unconditional support for Israel. Over time, the Christian Zionists became the second organized force – next only to the Jews – that firmly backed Israel.

The end of the Cold War did not dent US commitment to Israel. It should have, since Israel was seen as America’s leading ally against Soviet influence in the region. On the contrary, in the absence of the balancing Soviet presence, pro-Israeli forces tethered the US more firmly then ever to Israeli demands.

Israel now had a free hand in dealing with its foes. It used the Oslo Accords to neuter the PLO and assigned it to police the Palestinian resistance in the West Bank and Gaza. With the PLO neutered, Israel accelerated its colonization of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza.

This was also a signal for Israel to pursue more ambitious goals. In a 1996 document, the Neocons announced their plans to “engage” Hizbullah, Syria and Iran, “as the principal agents of aggression in Lebanon.” Iraq, however, was their first target.

The 9-11 attacks offered the occasion to put these plans into action. Working in concert, Israel and its backers convinced Bush to invade Iraq. There would be more wars to redraw the map of much of Middle East. Israel would emerge from these wars as the undisputed regional hegemon, and, possibly, a world power.

Just when Israel was grasping for the moon, history took a number of ‘wrong’ turns. Iraq became a quagmire for US troops. Iran’s Shi’ite allies Iran gained control over much of Iraq, barring the Kurdish region. Soon, Iran had extended its influence into eastern Afghanistan. Israeli policy had boomeranged.

In a strange reversal, Iran now cast its shadow over much of the Middle East. It mocked Israel, stood up for the Palestinians, showed up the pro-American Arab regimes for what they are, forcing them to openly identify with Israel. In bitterness, some Arab commentators blamed the US for resurrecting the ancient Persian empire.

Now suddenly – so it appears – the US love fest with Israel has run into a spot of trouble. In a reversal of its previous policy, the US is insisting that Israel suspend new settlement construction in East Jerusalem to pave the way for ‘peace’ talks with the Palestinian Authority. For a change, the US is countering Israel’s ‘No’ with tough talk not heard in a while.

On March 9, when the US Vice President was greeted in Tel Aviv with news of new settlements in East Jerusalem, he was furious. Privately, he told Benjamin Netanyahu that Israel’s settlement activity “undermines the security of our troops who are fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. That endangers us, and it endangers regional peace.”

This was not a message right-wing talk artists could shout down. Joe Biden was echoing the message delivered by General Petraeus, commander of US troops in the Middle East, to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the US Armed Services Committee. Hillary Clinton too reiterated this message in her speech to AIPAC.

What has occasioned this open rift between two spouses in a heavenly marriage? There have been tiffs before between them, but never before has a US administration told Israel that its policy endangers American troops or American interests in the Middle East? This talk is serious. It belies decades of rhetoric that has boosted Israel as America’s unsinkable aircraft carrier in the Middle East.

It appears that the past is beginning to catch up with Israel. Adversaries it had long suppressed, forces it had harnessed for its expansionist policy, blowbacks from decisions made in hubris have now converged to limit Israel’s options. Is the Zionist logic that had brought endless successes in the past now working in the opposite direction? Is Israel running out of its fabled resourcefulness?

Israel’s stunning victory in June 1967 had produced two destabilizing results. Having solved its native problem in 1948, Israel had created it anew in 1967 by its decision to retain the West Bank and Gaza. The June War also swelled the ranks of extremist Jews who began to colonize East Jerusalem, West Bank, and Gaza. Unable to drive out the Palestinians, this new round of colonization would turn Israel into an apartheid state.

In the 2000s, international civil society started taking notice. Movements were launched to divest from, boycott and sanction Israel. Activists began to use Western legal systems to prosecute Israelis for war crimes. Israeli leaders visiting Western campuses are now heckled routinely. Slowly, Western publics are turning away from Israel.

In 1982, in a bid to extend Israel’s northern border, Israel invaded and occupied southern Lebanon. The Lebanese Shi’ites responded by creating Hizbullah, a multi-layered grass-roots resistance, the most formidable adversary Israel had ever faced. In 2000, they forced Israel to withdraw unilaterally, and in July 2006 repulsed a fresh Israeli invasion, giving Israel a bloody nose.

No more was Tehran a distant threat for Tel Aviv: it was now positioned right next to Israel’s northern border. Although Hizbullah spoke to the grit and discipline of Lebanese Shi’ites, it could not have grown without Iranian support.

At about the same time, as part of its strategy to defeat the Second Intifada, Israel built the apartheid Wall cutting through the West Bank, and it pulled the Jewish settlements out of Gaza while sealing it from outside contacts. By stopping the suicide-bombers, the Wall gave Israel time to complete the creation of Gaza-like enclaves in the West Bank. In consequence, ‘peace’ talks with Palestinians lost their urgency and were shelved. This made the pro-US Arab regimes a bit nervous: they needed the charade of ‘peace’ talks to shore up what little legitimacy they had with their home audience.

The Egyptian-Israeli siege of Gaza brought Iranian influence to Israel’s southern border. The siege has stopped Hamas from becoming another Hizbullah, but their home made rockets reminded Israel that its native problem had not gone away – that it would continue to haunt them.

In the 1990s, the Zionist logic had spawned al-Qaida, a group that would use terror to lure the US to wage war against the Middle East. After the Cold War, the Zionists too – led by the Neocons – pursued the same goal. Using the absurd thesis of the ‘clash of civilizations,’ they began to promote a Western war against the Islamicate. They urged the US to take out Iran, Syria and Iraq.

This was a departure from Israel’s long-standing war strategy. Israel took US money and weapons, but fought its own wars. This had several advantages. It built Israel’s military strength and prestige; it kept the US military out of Israel’s path to hegemony over the Middle East. Also, American support for Israel might wear thin if they saw their troops dying in Israel’s wars. If Israel was ready to abandon this strategy in the 1990s, that is because it could not take on Iran, Iraq and Syria on its own.

And so the die was cast. When al-Qaida struck on 9-11, Israel saw opportunity. The Zionists began to press full steam for the US to invade Iraq – and succeeded. Few Israelis worried that the chickens would come home to roost. In April 2008, Netanyahu said, “We are benefiting from…the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq.”

Now, some ten years later, the chickens are coming home to roost. The Iraq War has achieved little for Israel. It removed a defanged Saddam Hussein, but extended Iran’s influence into Iraq and it has brought Iranian proxies to its northern and southern borders. Iran now uses Palestine to undermine pro-US Arab regimes.

More ominously, the US military has now spoken. It has warned that Israeli policy raises tensions in the Middle East and endangers US troops on the ground. It will not be easy for Israel and its backers to shout down US generals with charges of anti-Semitism. That is why so many Zionist commentators look alarmed. One Israeli commentator warns that “Obama and Netanyahu are at point of no return.” Others are saying worse.

It appear unlikely that this ‘flap’ between the US and Israel will blow over soon. If it does not, attacks by Jewish groups – inside and outside Israel – against Obama will become more frequent and nastier. The loyalty of some Americans, both inside and outside the Congress, will be tested. It is hard to predict where this will go.

However, this much should be clear. Even if US-Israeli differences over the Middle East are finessed for now, that will not be the end of it. The pressures that have persuaded the US to insist on a ‘solution’ to the Palestinian problem will persist. The realities that have produced the present ‘flap’ are not going away.

The first dismantling of the Taliban was a cakewalk.

In 2001, the United States quickly and decisively defeated the Taliban, killed, captured or scattered their fighters, and handed over the running of Afghanistan to their rivals, mostly Uzbeks and Tajiks from the Northern Alliance.

Unaware of Pashtoon history, American commentators were pleased at the smashing victory of their military, convinced that they had consigned the Taliban to history’s graveyard.

Instead, the Taliban came back from the dead. Within months of their near-total destruction, they had regained morale, regrouped, organized, trained, and returned to fight what they saw as a foreign occupation of their country. Slowly, tenaciously they continued to build on their gains, and by 2008 they were dreaming of taking back the country they had lost in 2001.

Could this really happen? That only time will tell, but prospects for the Taliban today look better than at any time since November 2001.

In 2001, the United States had captured Afghanistan with the loss of only twelve of its own troops. Last year it lost 316 soldiers, and the British lost another 108. The numbers speak for themselves.

The United States had occupied Afghanistan with 9000 troops. When Obama took office in January 2009, these numbers had climbed to 30,000. In October, US troop strength in Afghanistan had more than doubled. This does not include tens of thousands of foreign contractors and some 200,000 Afghan troops armed and trained by the Americans.

Yet, NATO could not deter the Taliban advance.

That is when President Obama ordered a troop surge. US troop strength will soon reach 100,000. At the same time, the United States is inviting Taliban fighters to defect in return for bribes. In tandem, President Karzai – for the umpteenth time – is offering amnesty to defecting Taliban fighters. So far, there have been no high-ranking defections.

Can the United States defeat these men – returned from the dead – it calls terrorists? It is a vital question. It should be, since the United States claims that if the Taliban come back, Afghanistan will again become a haven for Al-Qaida, their training ground and launching pad for future attacks against Western targets.

How did the Taliban stage this comeback?

Simply, the answer is: by finding strength in their handicaps. If you had compared the defeated Taliban in December 2001 to the Mujahidin in 1980, you would conclude that history had closed its books on them irrevocably.

The Mujahidin brought several advantages to their fight. All Afghan ethnicities opposed the Soviet presence in Afghanistan. They had financial, military and political support from all the Western powers. President Reagan honored them as freedom-fighters. They also had support from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Iran. In addition, tens of thousands of foreign fighters would join the Afghan Mujahidin.

In comparison, Taliban prospects looked quite dismal after their rout in November 2001. Nearly all the factors that favored the Mujahidin worked against the Taliban. Taliban support was confined mostly to one Afghan ethnicity, the Pashtoons. In the United States and its European allies, they faced a more formidable opponent than the Mujahidin did in the Soviet Union.

There was not a single Muslim country that could support the return of the Taliban: the US forbade it. Worst of all, the Pakistani military, partly for lucre and partly under US pressure, threw its forces against the Taliban. Under the circumstances, few Muslim fighters from outside Pakistan have joined the Taliban.

Their goose was cooked: or so it seemed.

Nevertheless, the Taliban defied these odds, and now, some eight years later, they have taken positions in nearly every Afghan province, with shadow governments in most of them. Is it possible to reverse the gains that Taliban have made in the face of nearly impossible odds?

What can the US do to weaken the Taliban? They have few vulnerabilities because the United States has been so effective in denying them any help from external sources. They have built their gains almost exclusively on their own strengths: and these are harder to take away.

What then are some of these strengths? Unlike the Mujahidin, the Afghan resistance against the United States is less fractious. The Taliban make up the bulk of the resistance. Other groups – led by Haqqani and Hekmatyaar – are much smaller. The Afghan resistance has a central leadership that the Mujahidin never had.

Unlike the Mujahidin, the Taliban do not have the technology to knock out the helicopters, drones or jets that attack them from the air. On the ground, however, they have technology the Mujahidin did not have. They have acquired suicide vests and, more importantly, improvised explosive devices (IEDs) developed by the resistance in Iraq. Indeed, the Taliban claim to have improved upon the IEDs they acquired from Iraq.

Notwithstanding their apparent lack of sophistication, the Taliban leadership have proved to be savvy in their use of videos, CDs, FM radio stations, and the internet to publicize their gains, build morale, and mobilize recruits.

Despite the satellites, drones, spies on the ground, and prize money for their capture, much of the Taliban leadership has evaded capture. In particular, Mulla Omar remains a ghost. He has not been seen or interviewed since 2001. Yet he remains in touch with his commanders through human couriers.

Afghanistan’s corrupt government is another Taliban asset. They have spawned a tiny class of Afghan nouveau riche battened by drug money, government contracts and cronyism. President Karzai implicates the US occupation in the blatant corruption of his own government.

It appears that there is little that the United States can do to neutralize these elusive advantages. Instead, it tries to blame and shift the burden of the war on Pakistan. It continues to pressure and bribe Pakistan’s rulers to mount full-scale military operations against the Taliban support network in Pakistan.

More and more, Pakistan’s military leaders have been caving under these pressures, escalating their wars against their own population. This has provoked a backlash. A new faction of the Taliban has emerged to launch deadly attacks against military and civilian targets in Pakistan. These attacks are destabilizing Pakistan. In turn, the US uses these attacks to push Pakistani rulers into greater capitulation to its demands.

In addition, President Obama has dramatically escalated drone attacks against the Taliban support network in Pakistan. In tandem, Pakistan too has been launching more massive air and ground attacks against their hideouts. However, none of this has deterred the escalating Taliban attacks against NATO and Afghan forces.

No one suggests that the Taliban can match the credentials of America’s freedom fighters in the late eighteenth century. The latter were committed to the proposition that all men are created equal, barring a few rarely mentioned exceptions. The Taliban are zealots and misogynists, but only a tad more so than the Mujahidin whom the West embraced as freedom fighters.

The West celebrated the Mujahidin’s victory over the Soviets. The same people, fighting under a different name, have now pushed the United States into a costly stalemate. Will the US prolong this stalemate, and push Pakistan too over the brink? Or will it accept the fait accompli the Taliban have created for them, accept its losses, and save itself from greater embarrassment in the future?

Once or twice, the United States has retreated from unwinnable wars and survived. It is likely that the ‘surge’ is primarily a political move to try to pass off the retreat from Afghanistan as another ‘mission accomplished.’ Let’s hope that this stratagem works somehow, because the alternative is likely to be much worse for all parties involved in this unwinnable war.

During the Cold War, the USA and USSR were arch rivals, each the antipodes of the other. For some four decades, they battled each other for ‘survival’ and global hegemony, staring down at each other with nuclear tipped missiles, ready at the push of a button to consummate mutually assured destruction. What parallels could there possibly exist between such irreconcilable antagonists?

Dismissively, the skeptic might retort that their similarities start and end with the first two letters in their names. The USA won and the USSR lost the Cold War. With all four of the letters in its name, the USSR is dead and gone. Its successor state, Russia, now ranks a distant second behind the USA in military power, a position it retains only by virtue of its nuclear arsenal. Measured in international dollars, the Russian economy ranked eighth in the world in 2009, trailing behind its former client, India.

On the other hand, the USA still believes it can ride roughshod over much of the world like a Colossus. It came close to doing this for a few years after the collapse of communism. In the years since its occupation of Iraq, that image has been deflated quite a bit. Haven’t the events of the last decade – the growing challenge to its hegemony in Latin America, the economic rise of India and China, and the recovery of Russia from its collapse of the previous decade – downsized the Colossus of the 1990s? Indeed, the near collapse of its economy in 2008 appears to have brought the Colossus down on its knees.

Coming back to the question of parallels, we can begin by pointing out that USA is in exactly the same place, quite literally, where the USSR once was. In Afghanistan. The USSR was in Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989: the USA has been there since November 2001.

Isn’t this the oddest of coincidences? And a bit ominous too – since, only a year after it withdrew its 100,000 troops from Afghanistan, the USSR collapsed.

Of course, no one expects the USA to collapse, whether it leaves Afghanistan or stays there. Unlike the Soviets who left Afghanistan after ten years of a bruising occupation, the United States is not in a mood to leave anytime soon. If necessary, claim some American politicians and generals, their troops could stay there for decades.

What is it that has drawn great powers – three over the past two centuries – into Afghanistan, but makes it so hard for them to leave in dignity?

Britain, USSR and USA have gone to Afghanistan for different reasons. Britain went into Afghanistan repeatedly to create a buffer state, to distance its Indian colony from Russia. The Soviet troops entered to shore up a fraternal communist regime, but if things had gone well, they would have walked through Afghanistan into the warm waters of the Indian Ocean. It is hard to say why exactly the USA landed its troops in Afghanistan. Was it to kill or capture Osama bin Laden? Or was that only an excuse for stationing its troops in Iran’s backyard, close to the Caspian oil fields, just south of Russia and China, and looking into Pakistan with an eye to rolling back its nuclear program?

Vital questions, but answering them will take us away from the subject of this essay – the question of parallels between the USA and the USSR.

Afghanistan points us towards a more troubling parallel. Some people have argued that by ramping up the arms race, President Ronald Reagan accelerated the collapse of the Soviet Union. Irresistibly, the Soviet leaders took the bait since their prestige depended on their ability to match the USA militarily. With a smaller economy, and a slowdown in growth that had started in the 1970s, the arms race made matters worse. As growth continued to decline, the ensuing stagnation in living standards bred popular discontent. When economic reforms failed to spur growth, disillusionment infected the leadership of the communist party. Collapse came quick: the system had lost its defenders.

Is it outlandish to suggest that the USA has been traveling down a similar road since 2001? For sure, no one thinks that the United States is on the road to collapse. Nevertheless, increasingly one gets the impression that its recent military adventurism is hastening its descent to the second spot – behind China – in the global hierarchy of economic and military power.

The dramatic collapse of the USSR in 1990 gave a new impetus to American ambitions. It encouraged feelings, not only on the right, that this unipolar moment in American history should be made irreversible. In particular, the neoconservatives argued more vigorously than before for a military build-up and a more muscular display of US military power everywhere, but especially in the Middle East.

Since the neoconservatives were embedded in the Republican Party, they had to cool their heels for eight years, from 1992 to 2000, during the presidency of Bill Clinton. When the Republicans returned to power in 2000, the neoconservatives quickly seized key positions in the administration of George W. Bush, especially in the office of the Vice-President and the Department of Defense.

In September 2000, the Neoconservatives had written that they would have to wait for ‘some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor’ to launch their unilateralist policies to deepen their global hegemony.¹ They did not have to wait long. On September 11, 2001, Al-Qaida, a small group of non-state actors – terrorists, in common parlance – obliged by attacking the Twin Towers and Pentagon, killing close to 3000 Americans.

At the press of a button, the well-laid neoconservative plans for endless war were put into motion. They called it the Global War On Terror.

The GWOT was insanely ambitious. It was launched with an ultimatum to all weaker non-Western nations: You are with us or against us. To execute this war, the US would mobilize, expand and use its global military forces to threaten, attack and invade ‘unfriendly’ countries. Neither international nor domestic laws would stand in its way. Various US agencies would kidnap, imprison without trial, torture and assassinate anyone resisting or suspected of resisting its policies. The goal was to immobilize resistance to American hegemony with fear – with state terror.

A comprehensive accounting of the costs to the USA of this reckless policy of unilateralism will not be available for a while, but we do have some partial and tentative estimates. At the end of 2008, the direct budgetary costs of the GWOT were expected to reach $758 billion.² In March 2008, Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz estimated that the indirect budgetary costs of GWOT – of restoring depleted military hardware and materiel and support for veterans of the wars – would add up to $1.5 trillion. “All told,” they wrote, “the bill for the Iraq war is likely to top $3 trillion. And that is a conservative estimate.”³ Add to that the rapidly escalating costs of the AfPak War that is being ramped up even now, nine years after the Afghan War was declared to be a success.

The US wars in the Islamicate impose other painful costs, perhaps more debilitating than the budgetary expenses. We are referring to the human toll of these wars, the erosion of liberties it has produced inside the United States, and the manner in which it is undermining the economic leadership of the United States. The United States military has kept its military deaths low, at 5340 in January 2010, with greatly improved body armor, armor plated troop carriers, and a war fought remotely from the air, which saves American lives by sacrificing those of civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen.⁴ In terms of the near-sighted calculus of US politicians, the low US military deaths make these wars attractive. They forget, however, that high civilian deaths in the countries they attack or invade make their wars unwinnable by fuelling resistance.

The figures for Americans wounded and traumatized by wars are much higher. As of July 2009, according to official statistics, 34,592 American soldiers were wounded in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.⁵ A much greater number of veterans of these wars are suffering from post traumatic stress disorder(PTSD). In November 2007, according to one official source, there were a “minimum of 300,000 psychological casualties” from the war in Iraq alone. The lifetime cost of treating them is estimated at $660 billion.⁶

The economic damage of the wars can be gauged by the speed with which China has been narrowing its lag behind, or even moving ahead of, the United States since 2001. During much of the last decade, the US has concentrated a huge portion of its resources, policy focus, and media attention on fighting multiple wars; it has borrowed from China and Saudi Arabia to finance these wars; its economy suffered a near-collapse in 2008; and it has done little to repair its infrastructure, reduce its dependence on oil, or fix its expensive health-care system. During the same years, China, free form the burden of wars, has directed its policy focus and resources to developing its infrastructure, green energy, manufactures, exports, higher education, and securing access to raw materials globally.

The damage to America’s moral standing is not less worrisome. The United States stands accused before the world of engaging in a war of aggression against Iraq, waging an undeclared war against Pakistan, and sanctioning torture, kidnappings, assassinations, and imprisonment without trial. “Fifteen years ago,” writes Kishore Mahbubani, a former diplomat from Singapore, “if anyone had suggested that Western countries would endorse or allow the use of torture, they would have been dismissed out of hand.” After 2001, torture became routine. In 2005, Irene Khan, the head of Amnesty International, said, “Guantanamo is the gulag of our times.”⁷ One year after he took office, Obama has not ended these human rights violations. Indeed, he has chosen assassinations as a major instrument of his war against the Taliban in Pakistan.

What did it cost al-Qaida to produce this avalanche of misdirected and self-damaging actions by the United States? The sum total of investments the leadership of al-Qaida made in its attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon is trifling, as these things go – the lives of 19 men and an investment of between $400,000 and $500,000 in flight training, airline tickets, lodging in Western capitals, box cutters, etc.⁸ That is roughly equal to the cost of deploying one US soldier in Iraq for one year.⁹

Had the leaders of al-Qaida anticipated this dramatic payoff from their paltry investment? Was 9-11 part of a strategy to lure the world’s most powerful military machine to place their boots on Muslim lands, where the Jihadists would successively engage and defeat them, and eventually drive the United States out of the Islamicate? Indeed, this was the strategy al-Qaida adopted towards the end of the 1990s. Challenged by their failure to defeat the ‘near enemy,’ the Egyptian and Algerian governments allied to the United States, al-Qaida decided to carry its war to the United States, the ‘far enemy,’ which they saw as the ‘head of the serpent.’¹⁰

Recently, Eric Margolis offered a succinct account of al-Qaida’s strategy. Osama bin Laden, he writes, “would oust the modern ‘Crusaders’ by luring the US and its allies into a series of small, debilitating, hugely expensive wars to bleed and slowly bankrupt the US economy, which he called America’s Achilles’ heel.”¹¹

If this had not been their strategy, al-Qaida would quickly appropriate it as its own, after watching America’s frenetic response to the attacks of 9-11. The neoconservatives had been waiting for the men with box cutters, ready to launch their well-laid plans to redraw the map of the Middle East. If the United States could so easily be provoked into invading Muslim countries, Osama bin Laden – not the US President – would decide when and where the United States would be fighting wars in the Islamicate.

Indeed, al-Qaida has provoked the United States into attacking an ever-lengthening list of Muslim countries.

Nine years after it had been ‘won,’ the United States is escalating its war in Afghanistan. Some eight years after its ‘cakewalk’ through Iraq, it is just beginning to draw down its forces there. In addition, different factions of the US military are “involved in combat operations in Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, West Africa, North Africa and the Philippines. A new US base at Djibouti is launching raids into Yemen, Somalia and northern Kenya. US forces aided the failed Ethiopian invasion of Somalia in 2006.”¹¹ If indeed, it was al-Qaida strategy to lure American troops into the Islamicate, who can deny that they have done quite well. Irresistibly, the US has walked into one al-Qaida trap after another.

While the US is engaged in the “sequential destruction of Muslim nations” – to borrow a troubling phrase from Liaquat Ali Khan – China is making economic gains in the very countries that US occupies, attacks or threatens to attack.¹² Over the past decade, China has continued to make economic gains in Iran, Sudan, Venezuela, Syria and Afghanistan, while the United States occupies, sanctions or launches military attacks against these countries.

Two years back, China acquired rights to one of the world’s largest deposits of copper in Afghanistan. In a report in the New York Times in December 2009, Michael Wines writes perceptively about the symbolism of this investment, “While the United States spends hundreds of billions of dollars fighting the Taliban and al-Qaida here, China is securing raw material for its voracious economy. The world’s superpower is focused on security. Its fastest rising competitor concentrates on commerce.”¹³

A similar picture emerges from Iraq. US oil companies are not getting the oil deals they wanted, production-sharing agreements instead of service contracts. In this area too, a partnership between a British and Chinese oil company walked away with a contract to develop Rumaila, one of the world’s largest oil fields. Two US companies signed a contract for the much smaller oil field of West Qurna.¹⁴

Surely, the Chinese must be saying, al-Qaida is its best ally – although accidental and unacknowledged – in the contest to displace the United States from its leadership of the global economy. It is difficult at this stage to assess the long-term significance of al-Qaida for the Islamicate – its strategy has brought great suffering to Muslim populations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan – but the gains it has brought to China are clear. The siren song of terrorism has lured the United States into one trap after another, to ramp up its military expenditure, to finance its escalating wars by borrowing from its chief economic rival, to deplete its moral capital in the international community, and to shred its own safeguards against state tyranny. China cannot acknowledge the gifts it has received from al-Qaida, but privately, perhaps, the Chinese leadership must be toasting these windfall gains.

Instead of rising up to deal with the economic challenges stemming from the rapid rise of India, China, and Brazil; instead of investing in programs to develop alternative energy; instead of developing a network of high-speed trains; instead of reversing the decline in its K-12 schooling; the Christian right and the neoconservative cabal pushed the United States into a vast quagmire, stretching from one end of the Islamicate to another. All this, while China has continued to challenge US dominance in a growing array of economic activities.

In the 1980s, the United States outspent the USSR into economic ruin. Since 2001, al-Qaida with its paltry investments in men and money has been drawing the United States into wars that are accelerating its economic decline. At least for now, China is the chief beneficiary of the perverse mechanism that forces the United States into embracing wars against the Islamicate as the panacea to its problems, when in fact they have been having the opposite effect.

It was Euripides who first wrote, “Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.” Is that what happens to the leaders of a country who doggedly follow a course – as the Soviets did during the 1980s and 1990s – that points in the direction of decline or worse, ruin. In principle, democracies have the capacity to replace such ruinous leadership. Yet, it would appear that the disastrous military policies inaugurated under President Bush are not going to be discarded under President Obama, his Democratic successor. Is it likely that both parties in the United States are captives of a political system that – at least on the question of Islam and the Islamicate – are dominated by a powerful conglomerate of pro-Israeli forces, led by Jewish Americans but with a strong following of Christian Zionists?

If Americans wish to see a reversal in their ruinous policy towards the Islamicate they will have to make some honest and courageous efforts to countervail the influence of the pro-Israeli forces in their body politic. The time for this too is running out. This will not happen by electing a candidate who dazzles them with his rhetoric of change. They will also have to elect a President and Congress with the spine to stand up to the pro-Israeli forces in the United States.

1. Project for the New American Century, Rebuilding America’s defenses (Washington DC: Project for the New American Century, September 2000): 63.
2. Anthony Cordesman, The uncertain costs of the global war on terror (Washington DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, August 2007).
3. Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz, The Iraq war will cost us $3 trillion, and much more, Washington Post (August 8, 2008).
4. US Department of Defense, Defense casualty report, 2010.
5. Anne Leland and Mary-Jana Oboroceanu, American war and military operations casualties: Lists and casualties (Congressional Research Service, September 2009):12.
6. Bob Roehr, High rate of PTSD in returning Iraq war veterans, Medscape Today (November 6, 2007).
7. Kishore Mahbubani, The new Asian hemisphere: The irresistible shift of global power to the East (Public Affairs Books, 2008): 165-66.
8. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States: Executive Summary.
9. Tom Engelhardt, What progress in Iraq really means, The Nation (April 13, 2007).
10. Fawaz Gerges, The far enemy: Why Jihad went global (Cambridge University Press, 2005): 21, 24-26.
11. Eric Margolis, Osama: 10. The US: 0, LewRockwell.com (January 12, 2010).
12. Liaquat Ali Khan, Now Pakistan, CounterPunch.Org (October 21, 2009).
13. Michael Wines, China willing to spend big on Afghanistan commerce, New York Times (December 30, 2009).
14. Timothy Williams, Oil Companies Look to the Future in Iraq, The New York Times (November 30, 2009).

He who knows himself and others
Here will also see,
That the East and West, like brothers,
Parted ne’er shall be.
— Goethe¹

In no other major civilization do self-regard, self-congratulation and denigration of the ‘Other’ run as deep, nor have these tendencies infected as many aspects of their thinking, laws, and policy, as they have in Western Europe and its overseas extensions.² These tendencies reached their apogee during the nineteenth century, retreated briefly after World War II, but have been staging a come back since the end of the Cold War.

For several decades now, critics have studied these Western tendencies under the rubric of Eurocentrism, a complex of ideas, attitudes, and policies, which treat Europe – when it is convenient – as a geographical, racial and cultural unity, but places Western Europe and its overseas extensions at the center of world history since 1000 CE.³

Unlike the garden variety of ethnocentrism, Eurocentrism emerged as an ideological project – shaped by Europe’s intellectual elites – in the service of Europe’s rising expansionist states, starting in the sixteenth century. It makes sweeping claims of European superiority in all spheres of civilization. In this worldview, only Europeans have created history over the past three thousand years, beginning with the ancient Greeks. In various accounts, this centrality is ascribed to race, culture, religion and geography.

The central organizing principle of Eurocentrism is the division of the world into unequal moieties: us and them, self and the Other. All those qualities that Western thinkers believe are emblems or sources of superiority are securely placed in the ‘us’ category; and their opposites are pinned on ‘them.’ The arrogance of this dichotomy is breathtaking.

Once these dichotomies are in place, it becomes quite easy to ‘explain’ Europe’s putative centrality in history. One set of superior characteristics – innate, unchanging, unique – account for the Western lead in all avenues of human endeavor, whether economic, technological, military, scientific or cultural. It is a tautological narrative of history par excellence.

In order to ‘explain’ the history of European superiority, the Eurocentrics first had to manufacture the history of this superiority. They endowed ‘Europe’ with historical depth by appropriating Greece and Rome; this was accomplished by defining Europe as a geographical, racial and cultural unity. In addition, they denied the eastern origins of Greek civilization, and, for the same reason, they passed over the connections of early Christianity to Syria and North Africa. In order to obscure Western Europe’s extensive debt to the Islamicate, they devalued the birth of new cultural formations in western Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, flowing from contacts with the Arabs in Spain, Sicily and the Levant.⁴ Instead, this history was moved forward several centuries to place it in northern Italy, whose cultural flowering – defined as a rebirth – was connected to the ‘direct’ recovery of Greek philosophy, sciences and literature.

The Eurocentrics construct a European history that begins in Greece, migrates westward to Rome, and again to points in Western Europe. In tracing the origins of the Renaissance to Greece, the Eurocentrics show little embarrassment about the fifteen centuries during which the Greek sciences and philosophy – mostly forgotten in ‘Europe’ – were being cultivated in the Middle East.

While they were fabricating a history of the rise of the West, the Eurocentrics were also engaged in denying that the rest of the world had any history. Yes, civilization began in the East but, after these early beginnings, the Asiatics have been immovably stuck in the past, forcing history to move westward in order to make progress. Europe’s most radical thinker of the nineteenth century, Karl Marx, too bought into this myth about static Asiatic societies whose despotism deprived them of the engine of ‘dialectical’ change.

Over the last few decades, this Eurocentric history has increasingly come under challenge from the ‘peoples without history,’ dissenting scholars in the West, and, most importantly, from new facts on the ground – the rise of national liberation movements, the dismantling of Western colonial empires, the socialist revolutions in China and Vietnam, the Iranian revolution, and, increasingly, the rise of several leading centers of economic dynamism in east and south Asia. Despite this challenge, Eurocentrism still controls the commanding heights in the think tanks, media, political discourse and popular prejudices of nearly all Western societies. The weight and momentum of Eurocentric tendencies, powered by the best Western minds over centuries, cannot be overthrown within a few decades.

Cartographic Violence

Eurocentric distortions have not spared cartography, the ‘science’ of map-making.

Europe is relatively small in relation to the great landmasses to the east and south, Asia and Africa. The Eurocentrics might have chosen to argue that Europe has maintained its centrality despite its smaller size, proof of its qualitative lead over the much larger landmasses of Asia and Africa. They chose otherwise. They could not pass up the opportunities that maps presented for appropriating the symbols of superiority in the realm of cartography.

The powerful belong at the top. Eurocentrism demanded that cartography place Europe at the top of the world. This was easily accomplished by orienting the globe so that the North appeared at the top of the globe, or, in the case of maps, at the top of the page. It is always a source of some confusion for my students when I hang the map of the world upside down so that the North goes at the bottom. It is a bit unsettling to learn that there is no logic – nothing natural – about the North-at-the-top globes and maps.

World maps were not everywhere drawn with the North-at-the top orientation. The Muslims in their heyday – when their empires stretched from Spain to Khurasan and India – were making world maps, which placed the South at the top, even though this placed Africa above the central Islimicate lands stretching from the Nile to the Oxus. In their case, perhaps, orientation of the maps did not matter as much, since they always came out at the center.

In addition, Europeans gave currency to world maps that used Mercator’s cylindrical projection. Was this choice accidental? Admittedly, the Mercator map was useful for mariners, since a line connecting two points on this map showed the true direction. But are we to believe that sea captains had an interest in – and the power as well – to impose maps useful to them on the rest of society? More credibly, the Mercator maps were chosen because they greatly exaggerated the size of Europe, making it as large as, or larger than, Africa.

Incredibly, some Mercator maps published in the United States engage in cartographic violence. In order to center the United States on their maps, the publishers are quite happy to tear Asia right down the middle, pushing its two halves to the left and right edges of the map. It matters little that this sundering of Asia greatly diminishes the cartographic value of this truncated map of the world. This quite nicely illustrates the first casualty of Eurocentrism – its disregard for reality, and its willingness to engage in epistemological violence in order to place Europe at the center of the world.

Inverting the Paradigm

Growing up, I knew that ignorance was the chief support behind prejudice. Prejudices, whether religious or ethnic, diminished with education and scholarship. And that is how it should be, I thought. Prejudice is sustained by ignorance. Superior intellects, combined with wide learning, should have little difficulty in clearing the web of lies spun by the powerful. At the time, I little comprehended that superior intellects could also be bought and seduced by temptations of power, money and various forms of tribalism, especially if their culture had not prepared them to resist these blandishments.

It took a few years of familiarity with the Western world to overcome my naïveté about the relationship between tolerance and intellect. My encounters with Western classics and the Western media slowly confirmed me in my worry that groupthink in Western societies ran deeper than in Islamicate societies.

My growing familiarity with the writings of Western Orientalists and, later, the greatest European thinkers of the West – Montesquieu, Kant, Hegel, the Mills, Marx, Weber – inverted the paradigm I had acquired in youth. The prejudices of Western societies had their source at the top – in the best Western intellects – not in popular prejudice. They were supported by reasoning, by learned historical narratives, by monumental efforts at myth-making. Indeed, the leading thinkers fed and supported the prejudice of the populace.

I can still recall my disappointment when I bought Will and Ariel Durant’s compendious eleven-volume set, The Story of Civilization, to discover that they had devoted only one of their eleven volumes to non-European civilizations. Tellingly, this volume carried the title Our Oriental Heritage. In the Durants’ Story, the Orientals make a brief early appearance on the stage of history, in the infancy of human civilization, but having launched the West on its brilliant civilizational trajectory, they graciously make an exit from the stage of world history. This was not an oddity, I later learned. It was nearly the norm, even with modern writers.

Another book I read a few years later, Kenneth Clark’s Civilization, nothwithstanding its title, is exclusively about the art, architecture, philosophy and sciences in Western Europe. Clark succeeds in talking about such things without scarcely a mention of how they might be connected to India, China, the Islamicate, Africa, and the Americas.

Despite my familiarity with Eurocentric biases in Western thought, I still cannot suppress my disappointment at new instances of racism in Western Europe’s best and brightest thinkers. Immanuel Kant divides humans into four ‘races,’ set apart from each other by differences in “natural disposition.” “The negroes of Africa,” he writes, “have by nature no feeling above the trifling.” In support, he recalls David Hume’s challenge to show him a single ‘Negro’ with talents. On hearing of a ‘Negro’ carpenter who berated whites for complaining when their wives abused their liberties, Immanuel Kant remarked that there might be some truth in that observation. Then, spitefully, he added, “…in short, this fellow was quite black from head to foot, a clear proof that what he said was stupid.” To Kant the hierarchy of races is clear. “Humanity,” he asserts,” is at its greatest perfection in the race of the whites. The yellow Indians are far below them and at the lowest point are a part of the American peoples.”⁵

Few of Europe’s most eminent thinkers, especially during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, could escape the siren songs of Eurocentrism. Some Western thinkers even today cannot confront this ugliness. French philosopher and psychoanalyst, Octave Mannoni, boldly claims, “European civilization and its best representatives are not…responsible for colonial racialism; that is the work of petty officials, small traders, and colonials who have toiled much without great success.”⁶ Spare the elites: blame the lumperproletariat!

A leading light of nineteenth century Britain, James Mill, philosopher and historian, wrote a massive five-volume history of India, it appears, with the sole object of demonstrating how deficient the Indians are in governance, the sciences, philosophy, technology and the arts. In short, the Indians were barbaric and quite incapable of managing their own affairs except under enlightened British tutelage. His son, John Stuart Mill, remarked, “The greater part of the world has, properly speaking, no history, because the despotism of custom is complete. This is the case over the whole East (emphasis added).”⁷

How different was the approach of another scientist and historian, Al-Biruni, an Afghan from the eleventh century, who – unlike James Mill – traveled through India for thirteen years, learned Sanskrit, translated Sanskrit works on mathematics, studied Indian society first hand, and invited Indian scholars to Ghazni, in preparation for his two-volume treatise on Indian civilization. His stated intention in his researches on India was to provide his Muslim audience with authentic accounts of its geography, religions, sciences, culture, arts and manners – and, thereby, elevate the quality of their discourse about the Indian peoples. He concluded his treatise with these remarks: “We think now that what we have related in this book will be sufficient for anyone who wants to converse with the Hindus, and to discuss with them questions of religion, science, or literature, on the very basis of their own civilization (emphasis added).”⁸

Modernity: How Western?

In the eighteenth century, when a small number of European thinkers were vigorously making the case for the supremacy of reason in human affairs, they knew – and were often happy to acknowledge – that they were following in the footsteps of Confucius who had preceded them by two millennia.

By the end of the century, however, a stronger and more confident Europe had forgotten its debt to the Chinese or any source outside of Europe. Insistently, they began to claim that reason, science and democracy were exclusive to European. It was a strange claim from thinkers who claimed that knowledge should be based on observation and reason – it should be objective.

In truth, it is hard to imagine how any society, including the most primitive, could have adapted to their ecology without following – at least intuitively – the scientific method. In practical matters, knowledge unsupported by experience would have proved fatal for societies that were exposed more frequently than ours to life-threatening conditions. Moreover, the Arab scientists were not only practicing the scientific method in their studies on optics, chemistry and astronomy, but in the early eleventh century, Ibn al-Haytham, known to the West as Alhazen, had offered a clear theoretical formulation of the scientific method. Roger Bacon, the putative founder of the scientific method had read parts of al-Haytham’s major work, Kitab al-Manazir, in a Latin translation, and summarized it in his own book, Perspectiva.

If democracy is equated with the counting of heads, even the United States – the self-declared bastion of democracy – was counting considerably fewer than half the heads until 1920, when women gained the right to vote. Blacks would not be counted until 1965. On the whole, the counting of heads has come to Europe after centuries of economic progress; it was not the foundation of their progress. Monarchic absolutism was stronger in nearly all of early modern Europe than it was in the Islamicate, whose rulers had only limited control over legislation and, in addition, faced institutionalized opposition from the class of legal scholars.⁹ The nomadic tribes in Africa and Asia had their council of elders, were led by a meritocracy, and, while their egalitarianism often excluded women, it generally went farther than in the stratified societies of Europe. The Indians had local self-government in their panchayats. The Pashtoons had their parliament in the loya jirga. The early Arabs could withhold baya – an oath of loyalty – from an unacceptable new ruler.

If democracy is defined by its substance, by tolerance – respect for differences of religion, color, ethnicity and phsyiognomy – most Enlightenment thinkers limited its application only to members of the white race. Tolerance has not been a particularly visible European virtue. In modern times, but especially since the Age of Enligtenment, Christian intolerance was replaced by a racial intolerance that translated quickly into schemes of genocide or support for slavery in the Americas, Africa and Oceania.

The Ottomans, with their system of millets – which granted a great deal of autonomy to their non-Muslim religious communities – afforded far greater protections to all segments of their subjects. In imposing one set of laws pertaining to the affairs of the family – often of Christian inspiration – modern Western states cannot equal the tolerance of the Islamicate which allowed its non-Muslim communities to order their family affairs according to their own religious laws. Universally condemned by Western writers, the tax imposed by Muslim states on its non-Muslim population was often considered a privilege by the latter since it exempted them from military service. When Western powers forced the Ottomans to grant ‘equality’ to its Christian population, they rioted against this measure in several Ottoman cities.

The rejection of priestly intermediation, starting in the fifteenth century, is commonly regarded as the first blow for modernity: allegedly, it freed the European to read the Bible in the vernacular and deal directly with his God. Islam had accomplished this, in a more radical fashion, in the early seventh century; and who is to say that Europeans were unaware of this Islamic precedent, or that there was no Islamic inspiration behind the Protestant movement.¹⁰ Oddly, however, the rupture with Rome also freed Christianity to be nationalized, to be appropriated by the newly emerging states in Western Europe, who proceeded to establish a national church and doctrine, which then sanctioned religious wars, persecution and, no less, colonization and slavery of non-Europeans. In other words, the freedom of conscience in the early modern West was generally more circumscribed than in the Islamicate, where no Church existed to enforced religious dogma, and Muslims were free to live their lives according to the legal traditions of their choice.

The inspiration for the central idea of orthodox economics – its vigorous opposition to state interventions – came primarily from the Chinese. In his time, Francois Quesnay, the leading light of the French pioneers of this policy – the Physiocrates – was known as the ‘European Confucius.’ The watch-word that summed up Physiocratic political economy, laissez faire, was a direct translation from the Chinese phrase wu wei.¹¹ Adam Smith, the putative Anglo-Saxon founder of classical economics, was a disciple of Quesnay. Few orthodox economists know that the language they speak – though not its intent – was invented by the ancient Chinese.

Since machines defined modernity – for a growing numbers of Europeans starting in the eighteenth century – it may be worth recalling that many of the machines that led the Europeans into modernity – water mills, windmills, the compass, lateen sail, astrolabe, the armillary sphere, the inner mechanisms of the clock, seed drills, mechanized mowers and threshers, iron moldboard plow, printing press, pumps, the rudder, cannons and guns, and many others – had their origins outside Western Europe, in China or the Islamicate.¹² If they originated in Greece, they were refined and improved for many centuries in the Islamicate before they were passed on to western Europe.

One of the arch proponents of Western imperialism, Rudyard Kipling, entrenched in his deeply parochial thinking, could not imagine that the East and West would ever meet. Pity, the news had not reached him that they had been meeting – with the West receiving most of the benefits of these encounters – since ancient times.

1. Edgar A. Bowring, Poems of Goethe (John W. Parker & Son, 1853): 272.
2. E. C. Eze, Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader (Blackwell, 1997); M. Shahid Alam, “Articulating Group Differences: A Variety of Autocentrisms,” Science and Society (Summer 2003): 206-18.
3. For a review of this literature, see Andre Gunder Frank, “East and West,” in: Arno Tausch and Peter Herrmann, eds., The West, Europe and the Muslim World ( Novinka, 2006).
4. As a noun, ‘Islamicate’ seeks to avoid the confusion that arises from using ‘Islam’ when speaking of the world of Muslims, as in Europe and Islam. As an adjective, Islamicate replaces Islamic; the former refers to activities or actions connected to Muslims, differentiating this from the latter which should be used only when referring to activities which flow from the normative principles of Islam.
5. Eze, Race and Enlightenment: 47, 55, 63.
6. Octave Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban: Psychology of Colonization (University of Michigan Press, 1990): 24.
7. John Stuart Mill, Liberty (NuVision, 1859): 60.
8. Alberuni, Alberuni’s India, translated by Edward C. Sachau, and abridge and edited by Ainslie T. Embree (The Norton Library, 1971): 246.
9. Noah Feldman, The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State (Princeton University Press, 2008): 27-35.
10. Charles Lindholm, The Islamic Middle East: An Historical Anthropology (Blackwell, 1996): 13.
11. Hobson, The Eastern Origins: 195-6.
12. Hobson, The Eastern Origins: ch. 9.

On January 12, the New York Times carried an article by David Brooks on Jews and Israel. It so caught my eye, I decided to bring its conservative author to my class on the economic history of the Middle East. I sent my students the link to this article, asked them to read it carefully, and come to the next class prepared to discuss and dissect its contents.

My students recalled various parts of the NYT article but no one could explain its substance. They recalled David Brooks’ focus on the singular intellectual achievements of American Jews, the enviable record of Israeli Jews as innovators and entrepreneurs, the mobility of Israel’s innovators, etc. One student even spoke of what was not in the article or in the history of Jews – centuries of Jewish struggle to create a Jewish state in Palestine.

But they offered no comments about Brooks’ motivation. Why had he decided to brag about Jewish achievements, a temptation normally eschewed by urbane Jews. In my previous class, while discussing Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism, I had discussed how knowledge is suborned by power, how it is perverted by tribalism, and how Western writers had crafted their writings about the Middle East to serve the interests of colonial powers. Not surprisingly, this critique had not yet sunk in.

I coaxed my students, asking them directly to explore if David Brooks had an axe (or more than one) to grind. Was there an elephant in the room they had missed? What was the subtext of the op-ed?

At last, one student moved in the direction of the missing elephant. David Brooks had not mentioned the ‘aid’ that Israel had received from the United States. Did my class know how much? Several eyebrows rose when I informed my students that Israel currently receives close to $3 billion in annual grants from the US, not counting official loan guarantees and tax-deductible contributions by private charities. Since its creation, Israel has received more than $240 billion in grants from the US alone.

We had grasped the elephant’s ear, but what about the rest of it, its head, belly, trunks, tail and tusks. My students did not have a clue – or so it appeared to me.

My students did not understand – or perhaps they did not show it – that no discussion about Israel, especially in the NYT, could be innocent of political motives. Israel is a contested fact, a colonial-settler state, founded on ethnic cleansing, a state of the world’s Jews but not of its Arab population, which continues to marginalize the Palestinians it calls its ‘citizens,’ to dispossess them in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and strangulate them in Gaza. Supported and coddled by the United States and other Western powers, Israel now faces growing protests from diverse segments of Western civil society. Churches, labor unions, professors, students and other activist groups are calling on corporations and governments to divest from, boycott and sanction Israel. As always, but now more than ever, advocates of Israel continue to manufacture myths, opinions, and ‘facts’ that can cover for its crimes against the Palestinians and other Arabs in its neighborhood.

Isn’t that what David Brooks was doing, I asked my class, by painting Jews and Israel in the colors of pure glory?

I saw a few nods of recognition. But one student demurred. ‘Doesn’t everyone glorify his own country. The US too had engaged in ethnic cleansing. What is the difference?”

There are two differences, I submitted. David Brooks is glorifying Israel but he is not Israeli. More to the point, he is glorifying Israel to cover up for Israel’s present and projected crimes against Palestinians. He is covering up for Israeli apartheid that exists here and now.

At this point, many in my class gasped at what they heard. It was a voice dredged from the past. It was a defense of genocide quite frequently advanced in the previous centuries when white settlers were exterminating indigenous peoples in the Americas, Oceania and Africa. “We had done so much better with the land than the natives.” Occasionally, such repugnant ideas from the past, which we think we have buried forever, leak into the public discourse. Perhaps, it is good that they do, to remind us that the past is not dead.

David Brooks starts his article with statistics to show that the Jews “are a famously accomplished group.” Do we need to be convinced of the accomplishments of the Jews? Is there anyone who contests this? So why does Brooks feel the need to support this with statistics? “They make up 0.2 percent of the world population,” he informs us, “but 54 percent of the world chess champions, 27 percent of the Nobel physics laureates and 31 percent of the medicine laureates.” Just in case, these comparisons failed to clinch the point, David Brooks offers more comparative statistics.

Does Brooks wish to rub in the point? Or is he saying: Look at all the great things we have done for you Gentiles. We are indispensable. Don’t you criticize what we do? Don’t you go against us? Or does he feel so personally inadequate, this forces him to seek comfort not in Jewish accomplishments – as he claims – but in Jewish superiority?

Alas, the Jews in Israel have not matched the achievements of the Jews in the Diaspora. The Jewish state contains close to 40 percent of the world’s Jewish population, but very few of the Jewish Nobel laureates are Israelis. Only nine Israelis in sixty-one years have won the Nobel prize. If we exclude the three ‘Peace’ laureates – wouldn’t you, if you knew who they are – that leaves six. Only three of these six were born in Israel, and one was born there while his parents were visiting relatives in Tel Aviv. Hardly a great total. Ireland, with a smaller population, has six Nobel laureates.

David Brooks knows this. “The odd thing,” he writes, “is that Israel has not traditionally been strongest where the Jews in the Diaspora were strongest.” Why has Israel fallen short? Blame it on the Palestinians and the Arabs. “Instead of research and commerce, Israelis were forced to devote their energies to fighting and politics.” Brook’s intent would have been clear even without my italics.

That was in the past, however. Israel is now bubbling over with innovation and entrepreneurship. Tel Aviv is now “one of the world’s foremost entrepreneurial hot spots.” Once again, statistics are offered to establish Israel’s leadership in civilian research and development. Israel’s more ominous leadership in military technology is not mentioned.

Moreover – and this is David Brooks’ point – this technological success “is the fruition of the Zionist dream.” Then follows another piece of chauvinism. Israel was “not founded so stray settlers could sit among thousands of angry Palestinians in Hebron. It was founded so Jews would have a safe place to come together and create things for the world.”

David Brooks disguises Israel’s second round of colonial expansion that began in June 1967 as a diversion from the main goal of Zionism, a distraction created by ‘stray’ settlers in Hebron. The close to half a million Jewish settlers in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, supported, financed, and protected by the world’s fourth most powerful military are minimized as ‘stray’ settlers in Hebron, who are a problem only because they are surrounded by ‘angry’ Palestinians.

Israel was founded – David Brooks asserts, invoking the language of Zionism – so Jews could have a “safe place” and create “things for the world.” Has Israel been a safe place for Jews? Safer than the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, or even the Arab world before the Zionist movement became official in 1917? Plausibly, the answer is: No.

One must also ask, What ‘things’ has Israel created for the world? What ‘things’ has Israel given to the Arab world, other than wars, massacres, ethnic cleansings, occupations, war crimes, and alibis to its rulers to create repressive regimes. What has it given to that other world – the Western world – that Brooks probably has in mind? It has jeopardized their strategic interests in the Islamicate. On more than one occasion, it has brought the United States close to nuclear collision with the Soviet Union. The most valuable ‘things’ that Israelis provide to Western powers, to the United States in particular as an occupying power in Iraq and Afghanistan, are the technology and tactics they have been perfecting while crushing the Palestinian resistance. But David Brooks cannot talk about this.

Then comes the coup de grace. This is the blow aimed close to Brook’s primary target – the Arabs. Jewish and Israeli superiority must finally be placed against the terrible paucity of Arab creativity. Arabs are asked to declare the patents they have registered in the United States. The astronomical gap between Arab and Israeli patents can have only one cause. The Arabs do not have the “tradition of free intellectual exchange and technical creativity (my italics).” In true Orientalist style, blame Arab failures on Arab culture.

Ironically, the two countries Brooks picks to make his point – Egypt and Saudi Arabia – are the closest Arab allies of the United States. The US never wags its finger at the despotic monarchy in Saudi Arabia or the repressive dictatorship that has controlled Egypt for decades. The United States can only strive to bring ‘democracy’ to its enemies.

Yet for all its triumphalism and crude claims of superiority, the NYT op-ed ends on a disappointing note. Israel’s innovators – the sons of Zionist dreamers – bring no commitment to Israel. Just a little instability, and they will vote with their feet. “American Jews used to keep a foothold in Israel in case things got bad here. Now Israelis keep a foothold in the U.S.” As remarkable as it is, Israel’s success is “also highly mobile.”

Is David Brooks the great friend of Israel that he must believe he is? All that any one has to do to destroy Israel’s economy, he writes, is “to foment enough instability so the entrepreneurs decide they had better move to Palo Alto, where many of them [Israelis] already have contacts and homes.”

What sad and strange thinking. Perhaps, this is what happens when a person is imprisoned inside the nightmare that was sold to the Jews as the great Zionist dream. Brooks confirms that this nightmare cannot be saved by Israel’s technological prowess. Apparently, Israel’s greatest success story – its cutting-edge technology companies – are also footloose. They could be heading for the exits at the first sign of instability.

Technological prowess will not save Jewish apartheid – nothing will. But Jews can shore their lives and build a more promising future for themselves by discovering their common humanity with the Arabs, by making amends to the Palestinians, and learning to give back to the Palestinians what they have taken from them over the past nine decades.

The Zionists are prisoners of a bad dream: they must first free themselves, break free from the prison in which they can only play the part of tormentors, if they and especially their Palestinian victims are to live normal lives.

The more a ruling class is able to assimilate the foremost minds of the ruled class, the more stable and dangerous becomes its rule.

– Karl Marx

A few days back, I received a ‘Dear friends’ email from Mr. Najam Sethi, former editor-in-chief of Daily Times, Pakistan, announcing that he, together with several of his colleagues, had resigned from their positions in the newspaper.

In his email, Mr. Sethi thanked his ‘friends’ for their “support and encouragement…in making Daily Times a ‘new voice for a new Pakistan.’” Wistfully, he added, “I hope it will be able to live up to your expectations and mine in time to come.”

I am not sure why Mr. Sethi had chosen me for this dubious honor. Certainly, I did not deserve it. I could not count myself among his ‘friends’ who had given “support and encouragement” to the mission that DT had chosen for itself in Pakistan’s media and politics.

Contrary to its slogan, it was never DT’s mission to be a ‘new voice for a new Pakistan.’ The DT had dredged its voice from the colonial past; it had only altered its pitch and delivery to serve the new US-Zionist overlords. Many of the writers for DT aspire to the office of the native informers of the colonial era. They are heirs to the brown Sahibs, home-grown Orientalists, who see their own world (if it is theirs in any meaningful sense) through the lens created for them by their spiritual mentors, the Western Orientalists.

Pakistanis had failed to seize sovereign control over their country at its birth. In August 1947, the departing British had few worries about losing their colonial assets in Pakistan. They were quite confident that the brown Sahibs, who were succeeding them, would not fail in their duty to protect these assets. Within a few years, these brown Sahibs had strapped the new country to the wheels of the neocolonial order. Without effective resistance from below – from intellectuals, workers, students and peasants – these neocolonial managers have been free to cannibalize their own people as long as they could also keep their masters happy.

This is not a cri de coeur – only a diagnosis of Pakistan’s misery. It is a misery that only Pakistanis can remedy once they make up their minds to terminate the system that has castrated them for more than six decades. The best time to do this was in the first decades after their country’s birth, when the Western imperialist grip was still weak, and, with courage and organization, Pakistanis could have set their newly free country on the course of irreversible independence.

Grievously, Pakistanis had failed at this task. Pakistan’s elites produced few men and women of conscience, who could transcend their class origins to mobilize workers and peasants to fight for their rights. More regrettably, Pakistan’s emerging middle classes have been too busy aping the brown Sahibs, stepping over each other to join the ranks of the corrupt elites. As a result, Pakistan’s elites have grown more predatory, refusing to establish the rule of law in any sphere of society.

Ironically, the enormous success of Edward Said’s Orientalism, his devastating critiquing of the West’s hegemonic discourse on the ‘Orient,’ has deflected attention from the recrudescence of a native Orientalism in much of the Periphery in the last few decades. Its victory in Pakistan is nearly complete, where it has been led by the likes of Ahmad Rashid, Pervez Hoodbhoy, Najam Sethi, Khaled Ahmad, Irfan Hussain, Husain Haqqani, and P. J. Mir. Not a very illustrious lot, but they are the minions of Western embassies and Western-financed NGOs in Pakistan.

In the euphoria of Edward Said’s success, left intellectuals have nearly forgotten that the West’s servant classes in the Periphery produce an indigenous Orientalism. I refer here to the coarser but more pernicious Orientalism of the brown Sahibs, who are free, behind their rhetoric of progress, to denigrate their own history and culture. A few of these native Orientalists are deracinated souls, who put down their own people for failing, as they see it, to keep up with the forward march of history. Most, however, are opportunists, lackeys, or wannabee lackeys, eager to join the native racketeers who manage the Periphery for the benefit of outside powers.

In the closing years of the colonial era, the nationalists had kept a watchful eye on native informers. In recent decades, as their power has grown several fold, this treasonous class has received little attention from left circles. Post-colonial critics continue to produce learned books and essays on the language, structures, tools, intricacies and even the arcana of Orientalism, but they pay scant attention to native Orientalism. These critics prefer to concentrate their firepower on the ‘far enemy,’ the Western protagonists of Orientalism. Perhaps, they imagine that the native Orientalists, the ‘near enemy,’ will vanish once the ‘far enemy’ has been discredited. In truth, the ‘near enemy’ has grown enormously even as the ‘far enemy’ treads more cautiously.

Quite early, writing in the 1950s, Franz Fanon, in The Wretched of the Earth, had sounded the alarm about the treachery latent in the ‘national bourgeoisie’ poised to step into the shoes of the white colonials and settlers in Africa. About this underdeveloped bourgeoisie, he writes, “its mission has nothing to do with transforming the nation; it consists, prosaically, of being the transmission line between the nation and a capitalism, rampant though camouflaged, which today puts on the mask of neocolonialism.”

“Because it is bereft of ideas,” Fanon writes, “because it lives to itself and cuts itself off from the people, undermined by its hereditary incapacity to think in terms of all the problems of the nation as seen from point of view of the whole of that nation, the national middle class will have nothing better to do than to take on the role of manager for Western enterprise, and it will in practice set up its country as the brothel of Europe.”¹ Although Fanon was not writing about Pakistan, no truer words – nothing more prescient – could have been written about the brown Sahibs who have managed US-Zionist interests in Pakistan.

To return to the DT, surely some Pakistani – moved by the instinct of self-preservation – could have produced at least one damning monograph documenting the methods that this new flagship of native Orientalism has employed to advance the strategic interests of the US-Zionist confederates in Pakistan and the Islamicate. Oddly, you are unlikely to find even a few articles that shine the spotlight on the DT’s unabashed advocacy of the US-Zionist agenda in Pakistan.

The DT was launched in April 2002, simultaneously from Lahore and Karachi, just a few months after the United States had invaded and occupied Afghanistan, with indispensable logistic support from Pakistan. Was this timing a mere coincidence? Or was the launching of an aggressively pro-American and pro-Zionist newspaper, led by a team of mostly US-trained editors and columnists, an imperative of the new geopolitics created by the Pakistan’s mercenary embrace of the US-Zionist global war against terrorism?

Coincidence or not, the DT has served its masters with verve. Its pages have carried countless editorials justifying Pakistan’s induction into the US led war against Afghanistan, under the cover of the attacks of September 11. The editors and columnists at DT have routinely excoriated the patriots who have opposed Pakistan’s surrender to US-Zionist demands, as naïve sentimentalists unaware of the tough demands of realpolitik. Endlessly, they have argued that Pakistan – with the world’s sixth largest population, a million-strong military, and an arsenal of nuclear weapons – can save itself only through eager prostration before the demands of foreign powers.

In advocating national surrender, these native Orientalists boldly and unashamedly declared that Pakistan’s elites draw their power from Washington, London and Tel Aviv, not from the will of the people of Pakistan. It is an insult that has since been sinking, slowly but surely, into the national psyche of Pakistanis.

Taking advantage of what appeared to be – after the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 – the irreversible US assault against the sovereignty of Islamicate nations, Pakistan’s ruling elites openly began broaching the need to recognize Israel. Once again, the native Orientalists at DT were leading the charge, arguing that Pakistan could advance its national interests by recognizing Israel. Their rationale was pathetic in its naïveté. Grateful to Pakistan, the brown Sahibs argued, the powerful Zionist lobby would neutralize the Indian lobby’s machinations against Pakistan in the United States. Only determined opposition from nationalists in Pakistan defeated this treacherous move.

When resistance against US occupation of Afghanistan gained momentum, once again the DT was reading its master’s lips. Shut down the madrasas, they demanded; and, without delay, attack the Pakistanis in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) who were supporting the Afghan resistance. Repeated US and Pakistani bombings of the resistance groups in Fata, which has killed thousands of civilians, called forth new Taliban factions that have been attacking military and civilian targets in Pakistan. With barely concealed glee, the DT cheers when the Pakistan military carries its war deeper into the country’s towns and villages.

In 2007, when the lawyers in Pakistan took to the streets to demand the restoration of the Chief Justice sacked by the military dictator, the DT did not support them. Instead, it defended the sacking, and repeatedly made the case for a ‘gradual transition’ to civilian rule in Pakistan. A civilian government, they were afraid, might not be as compliant to US pressures as Pakistan’s military rulers.

When elections became unavoidable, the United States and Pakistan’s generals worked on a plan to bring to power the pro-American Benazir Bhutto, the exiled corrupt leader of the Pakistan People’s Party. At US prodding, President Musharraf passed an ordinance withdrawing all criminal cases against the leadership of the PPP. With luck, the US plan succeeded. The openly pro-American PPP followed General Musharraf into power.

Space allows us to list only a few egregious examples of the Orientalist mindset on display in the pages of the DT. As the paper’s chief native Orientalist, Khaled Ahmad, for several years surveyed the foibles and follies of Pakistan’s Urdu media. He berated the benighted Urdu writers for their naïveté, emotionalism, and foolish advocacy of national interests that collided with realpolitik (read: US-Zionist interests). Ejaz Haider, the paper’s op-ed editor, distinguished himself by writing his endlessly clever political commentaries in the racy street lingo of the United States. Did this make him a darling of the American staff at the US embassy in Islamabad?

Consider one more ‘exhibit’ that captures DT’s servile mentality. In a regular column, oddly titled, ‘Purple Patch,’ the newspaper ladles out wisdom to its readers. This wisdom is dispensed in the form of article-length passages lifted from various ‘great’ writers, who are always of Western provenance. Presumably, the editors at DT still believe, with their long-dead spiritual mentor, Lord Macaulay, that “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.”²

Will the departure of Mr. Sethi and his distinguished colleagues make a difference? I doubt if the owners of DT will have difficulty finding their replacements, voices equally shrill in their advocacy of foreign powers. More than at any other time, growing numbers of Pakistanis have been grooming themselves for service to the Empire, as their predecessors once eagerly sought to serve the British Raj. This groveling by Pakistan’s elites will only change when the people act to change the incentives on offer to the servants of Empire. It will only change when the people of Pakistan can put these mercenaries in the dock, charge them for their crimes against the people and the state, and force them to disgorge their loot.

This will take hard work; and some Pakistanis insist that this hard work is underway. It daily gains momentum, and, at some point, the will of the people will catch up with the craven and corrupt elites who have bartered the vital interests of Pakistan and the Islamicate for personal profit. When the ‘near enemy’ has been decapitated – metaphorically speaking – the ‘far enemy’ too will recede into the mists of history.

1. Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, translated by Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, Inc.): 152, 154.
2. Lord Macaulay (1800-1859) was a British historian and Whig politician, who, while serving on the Supreme Council in India, was instrumental in persuading the British to adopt English as the official language of India. The quote is from the Macaulay’s ‘Minute of 2 February 1835 on Indian Education.’ See Thomas Babington Macaulay, Macaulay, Prose and Poetry, selected by G. M. Young (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957): 721-24, 29.

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).