← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · albion
Thread ID: 20946 | Posts: 2 | Started: 2005-11-08
2005-11-08 12:00 | User Profile
[B]November 7, 2005[/B]
[URL="http://www.counterpunch.org/halper11072005.html"]http://www.counterpunch.org/halper11072005.html[/URL]
[SIZE=2][COLOR=#990000][B][I]"What are You Doing? What Have You Become?"
[/I][/B]
[/COLOR][/SIZE][B]Israel as an Extension of American Empire [/B]
[SIZE=3]By JEFF HALPER[/SIZE]
[COLOR=#990000][SIZE=6]T[/SIZE][/COLOR][SIZE=2]here are many tragic and self-destructive features of the Occupation for Israel itself. Although the country was founded on the "original sin" of exclusivity and the expulsion of the refugees, it nevertheless had (has?) the potential to develop into a normal, even progressive society. Many of the socialist principles that accompanied the Zionist program led in those directions. Israel always talked of democracy, even extending citizenship to its Arab population in 1948, even though the underlying concept of a "Jewish democracy," coupled with a deep-based fear of demographics only exacerbated by the Occupation, has emptied that of much of its content. It constituted itself as a welfare state, only to see that largely dismantled as the Israel-Palestine conflict gave dominance to the right whose agenda, together with expansion, was anti-socialist and pro-privatization. Israel became a member of the Socialist International and engaged in constructive development work in Africa, Asia and Latin America, but its need for military strength, coupled with a self-serving "alliance" with the US, has led to become a major arms dealer on a global scale, a subverter of progressive civil society elements throughout the developing world.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=2]One of the tragic developments related to this rightward shift of Israeli politics and social policies -- even defining Israel's view of itself in the world -- is its emergence as a center for the global right-wing, a constellation of nefarious ideologies, groups and forces that seek nothing less than American-Christian hegemony over the entire world. In a unique and, again, tragic confluence of historical processes, the rise of an aggressive neo-con ideology and militaristic foreign policy, centered in the US but not limited to it, coincides with the emergence of the Israeli rights and an expansionist Israel. "Coincides" might understate the case: in fact, the rise of a religious right in the West owes much of its impetus to Zionism and Israel, while Israel is able to pursue its Occupation only because of its willingness to serve Western (mainly US) imperial interests including acting as a galvanizing center for global neo-con forces. What follows is a brief survey of those forces and their interplay with Israel.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=2]Israel as a Center of Neo-Con Ideology and Mobilization. Many of the founders of neo-conservatism in the 1970s and most of its prominent advocates today are Jewish. This is not an irrelevant fact, nor is it "anti-Semitic" to say so. Neo-conservatism emerged not of traditional anti-New Deal Republican conservatism, which was largely WASP and Middle Western in its roots, but out the Roosevelt's New Deal itself, which resonated with Eastern European Jewish immigrants, many of whom were working class and attracted to socialism and communism. From there they and their children gravitated to the New Left and then to liberalism (Irving Kristol has described a neo-con as "a liberal mugged by reality.") The Jewish magazine Commentary, a publication of Jewish liberals who were indeed mugged by the Sixties, became the fountain and mouthpiece of neo-conservatism as it emerged and entered into power politics during the Reagan Administration (when Jeane Kirkpatrick became the leading non-Jewish luminary).[/SIZE]
[SIZE=2]Just a glance at some of the most prominent neo-cons Commentary founder and editor Norman Podhoretz; Irving Kristol, former Commentary editor and founder of The Public Interest; Elliot Abrams, head of the Middle East Desk of the National Security Council and Podhoretz's son-in-law; Douglas Feith, Undersecretary of Defense and one of the architects of the occupation of Iraq; Paul Wolfowitz, former Deputy Secretary of Defense now heading the World Bank; Richard Perle, former Chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board; William Kristol, son of Irving, co-founder of the Project for a New American Century; Daniel Pipes, Middle East Studies professor and founder of the notorious CampusWatch; Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post columnist; Dov Zakheim, former Comptroller of the Separtment of Defense; David Wurmser, Cheney's chief Middle East advisor; Kenneth Adelman, a hawkish arms control expert and senior Pentagon official; just to name a few points up a Jewish connection that is hard to understate.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=2]Israel, of course, has long been of prime concern to these pillars of the American Jewish community, who now enjoy the political clout to integrate that issue seamlessly into the neo-con doctrine and thereby into the very fabric of American foreign policy and military strategy. It is a measure of how Jews have assimilated into American life, how they identity completely with the United States of which they see Israel as an extension, the "only democracy in the Middle East." In the "clash of civilizations" paradigm that defines the neo-con approach, the United States has embarked on a pre-emptive crusade to generate a "global democratic revolution" regime change to usher in governments more reflective of US values and thus more in tune with American interests all under American (corporate) tutelage. American Empire in a truly New American Century. Israel, then, fits neatly into the equation in three ways. First, it represents just that kind of American underling the US holds up as its model (and how Israel benefits from American largesse should help persuade other regimes); second, it possesses the military capacity and political readiness to further American interests; and third, it is located in the Middle East, the primary "theater" of the Crusade, where it is engaged with America's declared arch-enemy, "radical Islam." A strong Israel, then, represents a strong America.[/SIZE]
2005-11-08 16:33 | User Profile
Sorry Albion but I disgree with you, the way that those people control America and the way that we are killing so many civilians in our overseas wars of conquest, which is the same thing that the the state of Isreael is doing in Palestine, makes me believe that the US is the "extension" of the Zionist state of Israel.