[Peace-discuss] Kolko on Israel

[Morton K. Brussel]

There's much arguable and unsubstantiated in this piece, but it is an  
interesting scenario Kolko provides, and may even be true. Kolko is an  
original thinker/historian.  --mkb

Israel: A Stalemated Action of History

August 26, 2009

By Gabriel Kolko
Source: CounterPunch

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In late 1949 I worked on a boat taking Jews from Marseilles to Haifa,  
Israel. Jews from Arab nations were in the front of the boat,  
Europeans in the rear. I was regarded by many of the Europeans as some  
sort of freak because I had a United States passport and so could stay  
in the land of milk and honey. One man wanted me to marry his daughter  
- which meant he too could live in the land of milk and honey. My  
Hebrew became quite respectable but the experience was radicalizing  
or, I should say, kept me radical, and I have stayed that way.

Later I learned from someone who ran a displaced persons camp in  
Germany that the large majority of Jews wanted to go anywhere but  
Palestine. They were compelled to state Palestine or else risk  
receiving no aid. I understood very early that there was much amiss in  
the countless Arab villages and homes I saw destroyed, and that the  
entire Zionist project - regardless of the often venal nature of the  
Arab opposition to it - was a dangerous sham.

The result of the creation of a state called Israel was abysmal. Jews  
from Poland have nothing in common with Germans and neither has  
anything to do with those from the Arab world. It is nationality, not  
religion, that counts most. Jews in Israel, especially the Germans,  
largely ghettoized themselves by their place of origin during the  
first generation, when a militarized culture produced the mixed new  
breed called sabras - an essentially anti-intellectual personality far  
different from the one the early Zionists, who were mostly socialists  
who preached the nobility of labor, expected to emerge. The large  
majority of Israelis are not in the least Jewish in the cultural  
sense, are scarcely socialist in any sense, and daily life and the way  
people live is no different in Israel than it is in Chicago or  
Amsterdam. There is simply no rational reason that justifies the  
state's creation.

The outcome is a small state with a military ethos that pervades all  
aspects of Israel's culture, its politics and, above all, its response  
to the existence of Arabs in its midst and at its borders. From its  
inception, the ideology of the early Zionists - of Labor Zionism as  
well as the rightist Revisionism that Vladimir Jabotinsky produced -  
embodied a commitment to violence, erroneously called self-defense,  
and a virtual hysteria. As a transcendent idea, Zionism has no  
validity because the national differences between Jews are overwhelming.

What Zionism confirmed, if any confirmation were needed, is that  
accidents are more important in shaping history than is all too often  
allowed. Here was the intellectual café, which existed in key cities -  
Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century or the Lower East Side of  
New York before World War I - filled with immensely creative people  
full of ideas and longing for a golden era to come. Ideas - good, bad,  
and indifferent - flourished. In this heady atmosphere, Zionism was  
born.

But Zionism has produced a Sparta that traumatized an already  
artificially divided region partitioned after the collapse of the  
Ottoman Empire during World War I led to the Versailles Treaty and the  
creation of the modern Middle East. The state of Israel has always  
relied on military solutions to political and sociological problems  
with the Arabs. The result is constant mobilization.

Even more troublesome for peace and stability in the vast Middle East,  
Zionism has always been symbiotic on some great power for the security  
of its national project, realized in a state called Israel. Before  
1939 it was the British; during the 1950s it was France. Israel has  
survived since the late 1960s on the influx of US arms and money, and  
this has allowed it to encourage its fears of annihilation - a fate  
its possession of nuclear weapons makes most unlikely. But Israel also  
has an importance far beyond the fantasies of a few confused literati.  
Today its significance for American foreign policy is far greater  
because the Soviet Union no longer exists and the Middle East provokes  
the fear so essential to mobilizing Congress and the US public. "The  
best hopes and the worst fears of the planet are invested in that  
relatively small patch of earth" - as George Tenet, the former head of  
the CIA, put it in his memoir - and so understanding how and why that  
patch came into being, and the grave limits of the martial course it  
is following, has a very great, even transcendent value.

In July 2003 Foreign Minister Shalom predicted that Iran would have  
nuclear bomb capability by 2006. It did not have nuclear weapons in  
2006, though in fact a successful strike by conventional missiles on  
Dimona, Israel's nuclear facility, would radioactivate a good part of  
Israel - and both Iran and Syria have such missiles. Defense Minister  
Ehud Barak, during Vice-President Dick Cheney's visit in late March  
2008, stated that "Iran's weapons program threatens not only the  
stability of the region, but of the whole world," and he did not rule  
out a war with it. By spring 2008 Israel was also very concerned about  
the growing ascendancy of Hizbollah in Lebanon and its greatly  
increased firepower - mainly in the form of rockets capable of  
striking much of Israel. It regards Hizbollah as a tool of Iran, and  
its focus on Iran concerns its control over Hizbollah as well as its  
ability to challenge Israel's nuclear monopoly. But there can be no  
doubt that Hizbollah's strength has only grown since Israel attacked  
it in Lebanon in the summer of 2006. Israel now has an enemy that can  
inflict immense damage on it, probably resulting in highly skilled  
Jews migrating far faster than they already are at present - even now,  
more Jews are leaving Israel than migrating to it.

The existence of Israel is scarcely the only reason American policy in  
the region is as bad as it is. After all, it did not take Zionism to  
encourage Washington to seek the elimination of British influence in  
the region, and today no one can tell how long the US will remain  
mired in the affairs of the Middle East. But Israel is now a vital  
factor. While the extent of its role can be debated, without it the  
politics of the entire Middle East would be different - troubled but  
very different.

At least equally nefarious in the long run, Israel's existence has  
radicalized - but in a negative sense - the Arab world, distracting it  
from natural class differences that often overcome religious and  
tribal ties. It has fanned Arab nationalism abysmally and given it a  
transcendent negative identity.

I am very realistic - and pessimistic - about an eventual negotiated  
solution to the crisis that has surrounded Palestine and Israel. Given  
the magnitude of the changes needed, the present situation justifies  
the most dismal conclusions. After all, the Arabs that live under  
Israeli control will quite soon outnumber the Jewish population,  
leaving a de facto Jewish state in which Jews are a minority! This  
fact is becoming deeply troublesome within Israeli politics today,  
causing former expansionists to reverse their position and leading to  
more and more internal controversy. Nor will there ever be an  
administration in Washington ready to do diplomatically what none has  
ever dared do since 1947, namely compel Israel to make an equitable  
peace with the Arabs.

Neither a one- nor two-state solution will come to pass. But the  
Jewish population is very likely to decline, and if it falls  
sufficiently then demography may prove to be a crucial factor. The  
ratio of Jews to Arabs would then become highly significant. The Jews  
in Israel are highly skilled and many have gotten out, migrating  
abroad. The Israeli military is the most powerful in the region  
because it has been deluged with American equipment, which it has  
learned to service. But US forces need repairmen to service the very  
same equipment, more than ever because recruitment into the American  
military is now lower than it has been in a quarter-century (not to  
mention its astronomical suicide rate), and skilled Israelis can take  
jobs with America's armed forces that they are eminently qualified to  
fill. Moreover, Iran and the other Arab states will eventually develop  
or acquire nuclear weapons, making Israel incredibly insecure for its  
highly mobile Jewish population - one exhausted by regular service in  
compulsory reserves. And as already suggested, destroying Dimona with  
conventional missiles or mortars would be a cheap way to radioactivate  
a good part of Israel. Even worse, Osama bin Laden, or someone like  
him, may acquire a nuclear device, and one nuclear bomb detonated in  
or near Israel will effectively destroy what is a tiny area. Whoever  
destroys Israel will be proclaimed a hero in the Arab world. To those  
with skills, the answer is clear: get out. And getting out they are.

There are also Orthodox Jews in Israel but Israeli mass culture is now  
virtually indistinguishable from consumerism anywhere - in many  
crucial respects, there is more Judaism in parts of Brooklyn or  
Toronto than in most of Israel. The Orthodox too may be ready to leave  
behind the insecurity and troubles confronting those who live in a  
nation that is, after all, a part of a highly unstable region.

Sober and quite rational Israelis exist, of course, and I cite them  
often enough, but American policy will be determined by factors having  
nothing to do with them. Unfortunately, rational Israelis are an all  
too small minority.



Gabriel Kolko is the leading historian of modern warfare. He is the  
author of the classic Century of War: Politics, Conflicts and Society  
Since 1914, Another Century of War? and The Age of War: the US  
Confronts the World and After Socialism. He has also written the best  
history of the Vietnam War, Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, the US and the  
Modern Historical Experience. His latest book is World in Crisis, from  
which this essay has been excerpted.


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