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by Peter A. Belmont / 2010-04-27
© 2010 Peter Belmont
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Stephen Maher, in his ’US hegemony, not “the lobby,” behind complicity with Israel’ (The Electronic Intifada, 27 April 2010), claims that US policy arises from the need for a strong military ally and not due to coercion by “the lobby”.
This is not a new argument and is not inconsistent with a general theory of US policy which I advanced here.
However, it fails to answer the question brought to the fore by President Obama’s remarks about settlements, namely, why does the US allow the violations of international law, especially the wall and the settlements?
I believe that US hegemony does not depend upon, and is disserved by, Israel’s human rights violations, including but by no means limited to the settlements and wall in the occupied territories.
So the question should be transformed: even if US hegemony and not “the lobby” explains US’s broad policy of support for Israel, what is there in the US’s search for hegemony which explains US support for Israel’s worst human rights violations?
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President Obama has gone out of his way to chastise Israel on the subject of the settlements, asking Israel to freeze new building of settlements in the occupied territories. He also spoke hopefully to the Arab and Muslim worlds about peace. And he also said, and this was most interesting, that the settlements (and US support for Israel generally) was becoming costly to the US in terms of foreign policy and war-fighting. His generals have agreed.
Why did he say these things? If the US needs Israel’s settlements for some purpose of US policy, why would he talk that way? But if, conversely, as I hope and also believe, the settlements are harmful to some US interests without being beneficial to any other US interests, why does the US permit them?
Even considering the “US National Interest” to be a forever evolving abstraction arrived at by a balancing of economic and political interests, how can this national interest be deemed to require or to support something which hurts the US without also helping it?
Is the US afraid that it will lose its so-called “battleship in the Middle East” if it tries to force Israel to remove the settlements or the settlers?
This fear is hard to credit. There is no longer a USSR for Israel to turn to as an alternative “sugar daddy” and protector. If China were to begin building an extensive world-wide network of military bases of the sort that the US maintains, surely it would begin in the far East, not in the Mediterranean. On the other hand, perhaps Israel is thinking of China as a new sponsor. Maybe Israel imagines a Chinese UNSC veto replacing the USA veto if the USA gets too uppity.
But as matters stand, wouldn’t the US be better off to have easy and untroubled relations with the Arab and Muslim countries (and their peoples) by curbing Israel’s worst excesses, and especially the illegalities of its wall and settlements in occupied territories, than by encouraging and permitting these things?
As I see it, and I’d welcome opposing views, the US can maintain its military empire and fight its wars for as long as it wants to do so without Israel’s settlements and without Israel’s current (2010) program of re-expulsions of Palestinians and horrible blockade of Gaza. The money America pours into Israel (and Egypt) should pay for whatever help Israel offers.
The US is now squarely in the unenviable position of having stated that peace (and a mere freeze on settlements, not removal of all settlers as the law would appear to require) is in the US national interest. To fail to force Israel to comply with US desires leaves the US either looking like a liar (about its interests), powerless as to Israel, or powerless as to powers (various lobbies, including “the lobby”) which compel US foreign policy in ways even a president cannot fight. No one or combination of these three possibilities can be attractive to President Obama or to the US generally.
And what of the future? If the US should allow Israel to complete (in 2010) the ethnic cleansing of Palestine which it began in 1947-50, will the US then allow Israel to fight further wars and to expand further into Arab territories, presumably in search of further water and further land? Will this, too, somehow be found to be in the US National Interest? Will there never be an end?
Lastly, a word of caution to “the lobby”. If “the lobby” is not the cause (or, perhaps not even any smallest part of the cause) of the US’s pro-Israel hard-line policy, then “the lobby” is merely a self-deluded charade, and a charade very dangerous to Jews because if US policy ever does change (upon a showing that US support for Israel has badly damaged US interests), “the lobby” will be blamed for what went before and will have no means to challenge such blame, given its self-congratulation (and evident power) over the years.
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