Israel, A Beachhead in the Middle East: From European Colony to US Power Projection Platform

252 Pages·2019·2.207 MB·English

by  Stephen Gowans

S I S R A E L
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G
O A BEACHHEAD IN THE MIDDLE EAST
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S From European Colony to US Power Projection Platform
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One US military leader has called Israel “the intelligence equivalent of five R
CIAs.” An Israeli cabinet minister likens his country to “the equivalent
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of a dozen US aircraft carriers.” The Jerusalem Post defines the country as the
executive of a “superior Western military force that” protects “America’s inter- E
ests in the region.” Similarly, Arab leaders have called it “a club the United States
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uses against the Arabs,” and “a poisoned dagger implanted in the heart of the
Arab nation.”
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Stephen Gowans shows how this came about. In addition to scrutinizing the B
goals of Zionist theoreticians such as Theodore Herzl, he examines the actions E
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of settlers in Palestine from the beginning of the colony through the creation C
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of a Zionist state and the numerous Settler-Native Wars. At each stage he
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exposes how the policies of the “Great Powers” and particularly the United E
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States made this possible.
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Challenging the specious argument that Israel controls US foreign policy, I
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he traces how Israel has been increasingly armed to suppress the powerful
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national liberation movements in the region and integrated into the US empire H
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as a pro-imperialist Sparta of the Middle East.
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Stephen Gowans is an independent political analyst whose principal interest is in L
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who influences formulation of foreign policy in the United States. He runs the What’s
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Left blog and is the author of Washington’s Long War on Syria and Patriots, Traitors A
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and Empires, The Story of Korea’s Struggle for Freedom.
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$24.95
STEPHEN GOWANS
www.barakabooks.com isbn 978-1-77186-183-0
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Israel, a Beachhead In the MIddle east
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Other BOOks By stephen GOwans
Washington’s Long War on Syria (Baraka Books, 2017)
Patriots, Traitors, and Empires. The Story of Korea’s Struggle for Freedom (Baraka
Books, 2018)
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Stephen Gowans
Israel, a Beachhead
In the MIddle east
From European Colony
to US Power Projection Platform
Montréal
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by
any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publisher.
© Baraka Books
IsBn 978-1-77186-183-0 pbk; 978-1-77186-193-9 epub; 978-1-77186-194-6 pdf;
978-1-77186-195-3 mobi/pocket
Cover photo: iStock
Book Design by Folio infographie
Editing and proofreading: Barbara Rudnicka, Robin Philpot
Legal Deposit, 2nd quarter 2019
Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec
Library and Archives Canada
Published by Baraka Books of Montreal
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We acknowledge the support from the Société de développement des entreprises cul-
turelles (SODEC) and the Government of Quebec tax credit for book publishing admin-
istered by SODEC.
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cOntents
Introduction 9
chapter One Anti-Semitism 17
chapter twO Zionism 31
chapter three Nakba 43
chapter FOur Imperialism 57
chapter FIVe Division 69
chapter sIx Nasserism 81
chapter seVen Naksa 101
chapter eIGht Progress 127
chapter nIne Saddam 139
chapter ten Syria 151
chapter eleVen Settlers 165
chapter twelVe Iran 179
Conclusion Diversion 205
Bibliography 215
Notes 219
Index 241
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IntrOductIOn
“The United States has vital strategic interests in the Middle
East, and it is imperative that we have a reliable ally whom
we can trust, one who shares our goals and values. Israel is
the only state in the Middle East that fits that bill.”
Jesse Helms, Chairman of the Senate
Committee on Foreign Relations, 1995-2001
Israel is the West’s outpost in the Middle East.
Benjamin Netanyahu, 1993.1
Since the French Revolution, the political Left has embraced the view
that human nature is benevolent and capable of progress toward per-
fection, that the roots of humanity’s problems are to be found in its social
institutions and not in individuals, and that embodied in the future is the
promise of prosperity and relief from dehumanizing toil, freedom from
superstition, religion and mythology, and growing social, political and
economic equality.
The political Right, by contrast, prefers the status quo or a return to a
presumed glorious past, favors hierarchy over equality, promotes religion
and mythology over reason, and embraces the conviction that human
beings are afflicted by inherent and immutable weaknesses, and that the
potential for human progress is, therefore, limited.
For the Jews, two signal events in the history of the political Left were
significant: the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution. The French
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Israel, a Beachhead In the MIddle east
Revolution, committed to the ideals of human progress, reason and
expanded (but by no means universal) equality, emancipated the Jews in
France. The Jacobin Maximilien Robespierre insisted on the repeal of all
discriminatory laws against the Jewish community. “How can you blame
the Jews for the persecutions they have suffered in certain countries?” he
asked. “These are, on the contrary, national crimes that we must expiate
by restoring to them the imprescriptible rights of man of which no human
authority can deprive them…Let us give them back their happiness…and
their virtue by restoring their dignity as men and citizens.”2
The Russian Revolution, which overthrew the Tsarist monarchy—an
institution that had treated the Jews as sub-humans, and engineered
countless anti-Jewish riots (pogroms)—emancipated the Jews of the
Russian Empire. The Tsar’s secret police had used anti-Semitism as a
weapon against the advancing political Left, relying on the Black
Hundreds, an ultranationalist organization—Nazis avant la lettre—to
shore up flagging support of the Romanov monarchy. Lenin, the Bolshevik
leader, commented: “If in a country as cultured as England…it was neces-
sary to behead one crowned brigand in order to teach [subsequent] kings
to be ‘constitutional’ monarchs, then in Russia it is necessary to behead
at least one hundred Romanovs to teach their successors not to organize
Black Hundred murders and Jewish pogroms.”3
Jews were vastly over-represented in the movement for equality inaug-
urated by the French Revolution and extended by the Bolsheviks. They were
drawn to the political Left’s commitment to freedom from discrimination
and its vision of a future of social, political and economic equality.
Political Zionism, a movement to reconstruct ‘the glorious past’ of
Jewish nationhood in Palestine, is a movement of the political Right.
Zionism, today, is concretely expressed in the state of Israel, the recrea-
tion of an antique Jewish state on land that Old Testament mythology
defines as promised to the Jews by their deity.
The father of political Zionism, Theodore Herzl, a non-religious nine-
teenth century Austrian Jew, was clearly a partisan of the political Right.
He saw anti-Semitism, not as a social institution that could be changed,
but as a largely incorrigible part of the nature of non-Jews that was resist-
ant to change. In his view, and in the view of Zionists today, anti-Semitism
is inhered in human nature—permanent and ineradicable. The only solu-
tion to the presumed immutability of anti-Semitism, according to Herzl
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