Dear Collegues and Friends,
The Grenoble Center for the Advanced
Study of American Institutions and
Social Movements has received mail
on the formation of the new right-wing
alliance between the "Christian
Coalition" and "Zionists" in the United
States today.
Religious ideologies, it would appear,
have once again surfaced to build
the selfless "esprit de corps,"
which is so useful for mobilizing imperialist
conquests. One historic episode
of this sort of "altruism" took place on May
26, 1637, when Capitans John Mason
and John Underhill led an attack against
the Pequot Indian nation and burned
alive Pequot men, women, and children,
killing between 400 and 700 in less
than an hour. "God," the Puritan
commander reported, "laughed his
Enemies and the Enemies of his People to
Scorn, making them as a fiery Oven....
Thus did the Lord judge among the
Heathen, filling the Place with
dead Bodies."
Sixty years later these Puritans
were killing one another as "witches," and
eventually the entire project based
on the "irrefutable truth of "God's
Chosen People" was doomed, as religious
zeal waned and out-marriages occurred
in greater and greater numbers.
But, in the short term, the religious zeal
had served its purpose --the Indian
land had been conquered, and sold, and
resold, eventually causing the original
"esprit de corps" to give way to possissive
individualism, and occasionally
to social class consciousness.
What we find below are three elements
of a contemproary debate on the role
of religious dogma, which we have
inherited in our early part of the
21st-century. Too often economic
imparatives are pushed into the
background, and ideology/theology
seems to take on a life if its own, while
contradictions abound.
If we read carefully the three essays below, we can witness the effects ideology has on the very ability to perceive of reality itself.
The theme of the following discussions
is Zionism and Anti-Semitism, with Professor Mitzman (item A) defending
his belief that anti-Zionism = anti-Semitism, while Professor Ollman (in
item B) argues just the oppsite, that Zionism = anti-Semitism, and the
third item is an article by Uri Avnery (item C) which analyses the short-
and long-term significances the recent political victories won by the new
alliance between "Christian Coalition" fundamentalists and "Zionists" in
the United States.
Sincerely,
Francis Feeley
Professor of American Studies/Director
of Research
___________________________________
A.
from Arthur Mitzman
March 3, 2003
Dear Francis,
As usual, one must begin with a disclaimer: No one is more opposed to the
present war plans of the Bush administration nor more hostile to the hegemony
of global neoliberalism than I am. Moreover, I am
fully aware that what Israeli governments
have been perpetrating in the occupied territories in defense of their
colonies is contrary both to civilized morality and to numerous resolutions
of the security council. I have long
been a proponent of an Israeli dismanteling
the colonies and recognition of a viable Palestinian state.
At the same time, it is becoming clear to me that many leftists are now
falling for what the old German Marxists called "Narrensozialismus", the
Socialism of Fools: anti-semitism, or, under its new guise, anti-Zionism.
Less important than the name is
the political function. Before World War I, Bebel and Kautsky fought against
populist-tinted antisemitism behind a socialist mask because they realized
that in pointing the finger at "Jewish
bankers" it gave the masses a convenient
scapegoat and distracted attention from the real power of German nationalist
capitalism and imperialism. The Russian Marxists were similarly aware that
the Czarist regime used peasant populist antisemitism to deflect hostility
from its own decrepit tyranny. In other words, antisemitism played into
the hands of the worst enemies of the European peoples, their own oppressive
elites. This
scapegoat function reached its insane
apogee in Nazi genocide. In the Arab countries, alas, opposition from the
organized left has always been too weak, and from the inception of the
state of Israel, the rulers of every Arab
state encouraged "anti-Zionism"
as a lightning rod for popular discontent which might otherwise bring them
down. The antisemitism then encouraged (and now too, as in the case of
the official toleration of a hugely
popular TV version of the "Protocols
of the Elders of Zion" in Egypt) was so powerful that the vast majority
of Middle Eastern Jews fled to Israel. The present conflict between the
Israeli state and the Palestinians, whatever the merits of the case for
a Palestinian state, has revived this scapegoat function of Jew hatred,
though at the present, most Arab rulers are so aware that it can easily
backfire, by leading to yet another military defeat,
that they tend to handle the issue
more circumspectly. Into this situation jump today's left antiglobalists,
backing the Palestinian cause in the name of international solidarity with
oppressed peoples, as their elders earlier
backed the Vietnamese against U.S. imperialism.
In doing so, however, they are losing sight of essential differences. While
the Vietnamese Communists combatted the American army and its local representatives
in their own country, they never sent suicide squads into American cities
to kill as many Americans as they could. If they had, they would have lost
a great deal of international support, and the powerful American resistance
to the war would never have gotten off the ground. But the violent Jew-hatred
of Hamas and the other Islamic fundamentalist groupings leads them to do
just that kind of thing, and in so doing they are aiding the worst enemies
of a Palestinian state in Israel. The intransigent demand of a right to
return for all Palestinian refugees to Israel -- as in the recent Cairo
Declaration, where
anti-globalization arguments are
merged with anti-war and pro-Palestinian arguments -- has a similar effect.
And a boycott of Israeli universities, seat of the remaining voices for
reconciliation between the two peoples,
would be as counter-productive as
a call for an international boycott of American universities during the
Vietnam War.
It is absurd not to realize that the present anxious withdrawal of many
left-wing Israelis from militant opposition to Sharon's tactics has been
provoked by the murderous violence of Palestinian attacks on
Israeli civilians, attacks with
no other apparent aim than to kill as many Jews as possible. It is equally
absurd to ascribe the arrogant imperialism of the Bush government to "Zionist"
influence, simply because Likud
apologists like Perle and Wolfowitz
have been prominent in the war party. The fact that Sharon and the Likud
would like to see themselves as dictating U.S. policy does not mean that
that is the case. Even they must
realize that they are, for the moment,
simply its beneficiaries, to the extent that Sharon's stalemated domestic
policy, like Bush's, needs foreign policy successes as a distraction, and
an invasion of Iraq will end the reign of
the only Arab despot who has sent
scuds into Israeli cities.
The real sources of U.S. aggression have, however, nothing to do with Sharon's
strategy. They lie, on the one hand, in the needs of the U.S. oil barons
-- who occupy much more prominent positions in Washington than the Likudniks
-- to control the Middle Eastern reserves, and on the other, in Bush's
domestic political agenda, which is so far to the right of what most Americans
want, that it can only be carried out in the
shadow of unending terror scares
and imperialist adventures. In this context, to parlay the struggle against
U.S. imperialism into a pro-Palestinian, anti-Zionist struggle is simply
a distraction from the main issue.
To deny that there is a powerful current of Jew-hatred in the Palestinian
resistance to Israel is to blind yourself to an obvious reality. Many of
those defending the Palestinian cause still have the destruction of Israel
on their agenda, and you pander
to them with phrases like "Israeli attack dogs" and "this murderous
Zionist-American bloc", which come over to me like crude adaptations of
Stalinist and Hitleriananti-semitism.
Exaggeration? The new Arab-European
League, which aspires torepresent some 350,000 Moslems in The Netherlands,
openly denies the rightof existence of Israel, which it labels "a Zionist
entity". Naïma
Elmaslouhi, one of its four person
steering group, simply says, "I believe that Israel should disappear."
Asked her opinion of the chant, popular among Moroccan youth in Amsterdam,
"Hamas, Hamas, joden aan het gas" -- "Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas chamber"
-- she replied, "Those are not tactically wise expressions, but I don't
reject them either." ("Dat zijn geen effectieven uitspraken, maar ik keur
die ook niet af.") All this is from last
Saturday's NRC Handelsblad, our
local "quality paper".
In Porto Alegre, progressive Jews, and even Palestinian sympathizers calling
for non-violent civil disobedience as a means of resistance to the Israelis,
were exposed to the depth of this hatred.
According to the Simon Wiesenthal
Foundation, among the expressions of it they encountered at the
ast big meeting were: "Posters calling
for action against 'Nazis, Yankees and Jews: No more chosen peoples!'....
members of thePalestine Social Forum calling the Jews 'the true fundamentalists
who control United States
capitalism and the Iraq war agenda',
and 'who are responsible for the 11 September attacks'. Physical assault
on some 20 Jewish participants holding banners declaring 'Two peoples -
Two states: Peace in the Middle East'. The
booing of a Brazilian speaker who
proposed that Palestinians adopt Gandhi's policy of non-violence."
Until the Palestinians can marginalize their own extremists
and present a
resistance with acceptable methods and realistic demands,
capable of
bringing about peace and justice for BOTH peoples in
Israel/Palestine,
giving them the kind of unconditional support much of the
European left now
accords them is a moral as well as a strategic cul-de-sac.
They are at this
moment no more worthy of support than Sharon. Though they
are undeniably
the weaker antagonist, weakness is no more a guarantee of
progressiveness
than power, as the world has seen in innumerable cases.
This is all obviously not to say that we should not condemn
any proposals
by the nationalist right in Israel for ethnic purification.
To the extent
that the Sharon government moves in the direction of such
proposals, it
should be condemned, as should the entire heavy-handed
military defense of
Israel's colonies in the occupied territories as well as the
cruel policies
of disruption of normal Palestinian life that accompany it.
But a boycott
of Israeli universities or other cultural institutions will
in no way help
such condemnation, it will only hurt those in Israel most
inclined to
support such protests. In any case, anyone who considers him
or herself on
the left cannot but ALSO condemn the kind of terror attacks
on innocent
civilians that have been the most prominent feature of the
Palestinian
"resistance".
I would be grateful to you if you would post this to your list.
Arthur Mitzman
___________________________________
B.
Professor Ollman's reply to Professor
Mitzman :
April 18, 2003
IS ANTI-ZIONISM A NEW FORM OF ANTI-SEMITISM?
By Bertell Ollman
Dear Arthur,
I am sorry it has taken me so long to respond to your criticisms
of my piece on the real reasons
for the Iraq war. Your letter raises
several crucial issues, but I only
have time to go into what I take to be
the most important one - your treatment
of anti-Zionism as a "new guise"
for anti-semitism.
Arthur, have you considered what would happen if the audience you
are addressing came to accept your
logic but not the use you make of it?
According to this logic, one must
be BOTH anti-Zionist and anti-semitic,
or NEITHER. You seem to believe
that faced with this choice all honest
critics of Zionism will simply pack
up their tents and go home. But, given
Zionism's worsening human rights
record in the holy land and one more
cloying appeal for Jewish exceptionalism,
the change could go the other
way. That is, some opponents of
Zionism, who are convinced by your logic
and nothing else, might now add
anti-semitism to their bag of beliefs.
Rather than making fewer anti-Zionists,
you may be making more
anti-semites. Think on it. You must
allow for the possibility that someone
could view Jews as full, voting
members of the species and still strongly
oppose Zionism in all its forms.
Otherwise, you - and the growing number of
Jews who share your position - will
be sowing some of the very dragon teeth
that you say you are trying to uproot.
Anti-semitism has traditionally meant a hatred for all
Jews just because they were Jews,
not because of what they believed or did
- though these were often offered
as rationalizations - but, again, just
because of who they were. This is
not only irrational and unjust but, as we
know, the results can be murderous.
With this history, every Jew but also
every humane and fair-minded non-Jew
must oppose the rise of anti-semitism
with all their might. I have no
doubt that we agree on this. I'm sure, too,
that you will agree that if a Jew
or a group of Jews commit a crime they
should be condemned and even punished
for it. The danger - and the
injustice - arises when non-Jews
blame, as many often have and continue to
do, all Jews for the crimes of the
few. This anti-semitic reaction must be
fought, but if the crime is horrendous
and continuing - as in the case of
Israel's treatment of the Palestinians
(or its role, direct and indirect,
in supporting and promoting Bush's
murderous policies in Iraq) - it isn't
enough to cry out "anti-semite".
No, a more effective response is for innocent Jews to join in -
better still, to take the lead -
in denouncing the crime(s), as Noam
Chomsky, Norman Finklestein, Howard
Zinn, and the orthodox Jews of Naturei
Karta, among many others - including
some Israelis, are doing. If
anti-semitism hasn't already swept
the world in reaction to Israel's
oppression of the Palestinians ,
it is mainly due to the heroic and often
dangerous efforts of these people.
If it is still easy to reject the
view that all Jews
share the responsibility for current Zionist
policies, it is largely because
some Jews have shown that one can be Jewish
and anti-Zionist (for Naturei Karta,
it's just because they are Jewish) at
the same time, and therefore that
anti-Zionism and anti-semitism are not
the same thing.
On the other hand, Jews who react to Israel's horrible
crimes with silence, or rationalizations
of any kind, or painful attempts
to strike a balance between the
oppressor and the oppressed are - whether
they admit it or not - supporters
of the regime and therefore complicit in
its crimes. Oppressive regimes,
after all, have seldom needed more
than passive and mixed support
to carry out their "business". As regards
the topic at hand, along with the
growing number of Jews who openly defend
Israel's inhuman behavior, these
often well meaning Jews also feed the
anti-semitic stereotype that all
Jews are guilty of the crimes of the few
and deserve the hatred that these
crimes evoke.
It should be clear that just because I refuse to identify
anti-Zionism, whatever its particular
form or level of intensity, with
anti-semitism does not mean that
I want to deny that some anti-Zionists are
also anti-semites (just as
I recognize that some anti-semites are also
pro-Zionist - Bush's "moral majority"
is full of them). Zionism, after all,
is a nationalist ideology - with
all the shortcomings we ordinarily
associate with such ideas - that
was only invented about 50 years before
it acquired territorial form and
a set of institutional practices in a part
of Palestine, and is not an
essential part of the Jewish religion, which
has been around much, much longer.
Until relatively recently, few Jews
thought otherwise. Though Zionists
like to claim him as one of their own,
Albert Einstein probably spoke for
most of the Jews of his day when he
said, "My awareness of the essential
nature of Judaism resists the idea of
a Jewish state with borders, an
army, and a measure of temporal power, no
matter how modest. I am afraid of
the inner damage Judaism will sustain --
especially from the development
of a narrow nationalism within our own
ranks, against which we have already
had to fight strongly, even without a
Jewish state". Who can doubt now
that Einstein was right to worry?
At the present time, I suspect that most Jews have rushed to
the defence (whether full or qualified)
of the Israeli government because
they have been convinced by the
false equation of anti-Zionism with
anti-semitism, so that defending
Sharon (whatever his "faults") becomes a
way of fighting anti-semitism .
It is no mystery why Sharon and his
co-rulers would encourage Jews to
make this mistake, but what of Jews who
are critical of his policies but
continue to support his
government because they fear
the rise of anti-semitism? Their
actions couldn't be
more self-defeating. If most of the world hated the
Germans during World War II for
the evil deeds of the Nazis, it was in
large part due to the fact that
most Germans - even those who disagreed
with their government, the
so-called "good Germans" - did not do enough to
oppose the Nazis. The comparison
is far from perfect, but the general point
holds: just as becoming anti-fascist
was the only way the German people
might have spared themselves the
justifiable hatred directed against
fascism, anti-Zionism - especially
on the part of Jews - is, in the current
circumstances, the best defense
we have against becoming victims of a
growing anti-semitism.
___________________________________
C.
Article by Uri Avnery
April 10, 2003
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Fri, 18 Apr 2003 18:11:06
-0400 (EDT)
forwarded by : Andre Gunder Frank
<franka@fiu.edu>
http://www.counterpunch.org/avnery04102003.html
From: ANDRE GUNDER FRANK
Senior Fellow Residence
World History Center One Longfellow
Place
Northeastern University Apt. 3411
270 Holmes Hall Boston, MA 02114
USA
Boston, MA 02115 USA Tel: 617-948
2315
Tel: 617 - 373 4060 Fax: 617-948
2316
Web-page:csf.colorado.edu/agfrank/
e-mail:franka@fiu.edu
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
April 10, 2003
The Night After : The Easier the Victory, the Harder the Peace
By URI AVNERY
It is now fashionable to talk about
"the day after". Let's talk about the
night after.
After the end of hostilities in
Iraq, the world will be faced with two
decisive facts:
First, the immense superiority of
American arms can beat any people in the
world, valiant as it may be.
Second, the small group that initiated
this war--an alliance of Christian
fundamentalists and Jewish neo-conservatives--has
won big, and from now on
it will control Washington almost
without limits.
The combination of these two facts
constitutes a danger to the world, and
especially to the Middle East, the
Arab peoples and the future of Israel.
Because this alliance is the enemy
of peaceful solutions, the enemy of the
Arab governments, the enemy of the
Palestinian people and especially the
enemy of the Israeli peace camp.
It does not dream only about an
American empire, in the style of the Roman
one, but also of an Israeli mini-empire,
under the control of the extreme
right and the settlers. It wants
to change the regimes in all Arab
countries. It will cause permanent
chaos in the region, the consequences of
which it is impossible to foresee.
Its mental world consists of a mixture
of ideological fervor and crass
material interests, an exaggerated
American patriotism and right-wing
Zionism.
That is a dangerous mixture. There
is in it something of the spirit of Ariel
Sharon, a man who has always had
grandiose plans for changing the region,
consisting of a mixture of creative
imagination, unbridled chauvinism and a
primitive faith in brute force.
Who are the winners?
They are the so-called neo-cons,
or neo-conservatives. A compact group,
almost all of whose members are
Jewish. They hold the key positions in the
Bush administration, as well as
in the think-tanks that play an important
role in formulating American policy
and the ed-op pages of the influential
newspapers.
For many years, this was a marginal
group that fostered a right-wing agenda
in all fields. They fought against
abortion, homosexuality, pornography and
drugs. When Binyamin Netanyahu assumed
power in Israel, they offered him
advise on how to fight the Arabs.
Their big moment arrived with the
collapse of the Twin Towers. The American
public and politicians were in a
state of shock, completely disoriented,
unable to understand a world that
had changed overnight. The neo-cons were
the only group with a ready explanation
and a solution. Only nine days after
the outrage, William Kristol (the
son of the group's founder, Irving
Kristol) published an Open Letter
to President Bush, asserting that it was
not enough to annihilate the network
of Osama bin Laden, but that it was
also imperative to "remove Saddam
Hussein from power" and to "retaliate"
against Syria and Iran for supporting
Hizbullah.
Following is a short list of the
main characters. (If it bores you, skip to
the next section).
The Open Letter was published in
the Weekly Standard, founded by Kristol
with the money of ultra-right press
mogul Rupert Murdoch, who donated $ 10
million to the cause. It was signed
by 41 leading neo-cons, including Norman
Podhoretz, a Jewish former leftist
who has become an extreme right-wing
icon, editor of the prestigious
Encounter magazine, and his wife, Midge
Decter, also a writer, Frank Gaffney
of the Center for Security Studies,
Robert Kagan, also of the Weekly
Standard, Charles Krauthammer of the
Washington Post, and, of course,
Richard Perle.
Perle is a central character in
this play. Until recently he was the
chairman of the Defense Policy Board
of the Defense Department, which also
includes Eliot Cohen and Devon Cross.
Perle is a director of the Jerusalem
Post, now owned by extreme right-wing
Zionists. In the past he was an aide
to Senator Henry Jackson, who led
the fight against the Soviet Union on
behalf of the Jews who wanted to
leave. He is a leading member of the
influential right-wing American
Enterprise Institute. Lately he was obliged
to resign from his Defense Department
position, when it became known that a
private corporation had promised
to pay him almost a million dollars for he
benefit of his influence in the
administration.
That Open Letter was, in effect,
the beginning of the Iraq war. It was
eagerly received by the Bush administration,
with members of the group
already firmly established in some
of its leading positions. Paul Wolfowitz,
the father of the war, is No. 2
in the Defense Department, where another
friend of Perle's, Douglas Feith,
heads the Pentagon Planning Board. John
Bolton is State Department Undersecretary.
Eliot Abrams, responsible for the
Middle East in the National Security
Council, was connected with the
Iran-Contra-Israel scandal. The
main hero of the scandal, Oliver North, sits
in the Jewish Institute for National
Security Affairs, together with Michael
Ledeen, another hero of the scandal.
Headvocates total war not only against
Iraq, but also against Israel's
other enemies, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and
the Palestinian Authority. Dov Zakheim
is comptroller for the Defense
Department.
Most of these people , together
with Vice-President Dick Cheney and Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, are associated
with the "Project for the New
American Century", which published
a White Paper in 2002, with the aim 'to
preserve and enhance this 'American
peace'"--meaning American control of the
world.
Meyrav Wurmser (Meyrav is a chic
new Israeli first name) is Director of the
Center for Middle East Policy at
the Hudson Institute. She also writes for
the Jerusalem Post and is co-founder
of the Middle East Media Research
Institute that is, according to
the London Guardian, connected with Israeli
Army Intelligence. MEMRI feeds the
media and politicians with highly
selective quotations from extreme
Arab publications. Meyrav's husband, Davis
Wurmser, is at Perle's American
Enterprise Institute, heading Middle East
Studies. Mention should also be
made of the Washington Institute for Near
East Policy of our old acquaintance,
Dennis Ross, who for years was in
charge of the "peace process" in
the Middle East.
In all the important papers there
are people close to the group, such as
William Safire, a man hypnotized
by Sharon, in the New York Times and
Charles Krauthammer in the Washington
Post. Another Perle friend, Robert
Bartley, is the editor of the Wall
Street Journal.
If the speeches of Bush and Cheney
often sound as if they came from the lips
of Sharon, one of the reasons may
be that their speechwriters, Joseph
Shattan, Mathew Scully and John
McConnell, are neo-cons, as is Cheneys
Chief-of-Staff, Lewis Libby.
The immense influence of this largely
Jewish group stems from its close
alliance with the extreme right-wing
Christian fundamentalists, who nowadays
control Bush's Republican party.
The founding fathers were Jerry Falwell of
the Moral Majority, who once got
a jet plane as a present from Menachem
Begin, and Pat Robertson of the
Christian Coalition and the Christian
Broadcasting Network, which help
to finance the Christian Embassy in
Jerusalem of J.W. van der Hoeven,
an outfit that supports the settlers and
their right-wing allies.
Common to both groups is their adherence
to the fanatical ideology of the
extreme right in Israel. They see
the Iraq war as a struggle between the
Children of Light (America and Israel)
and the Children of Darkness (the
Arabs and Muslims).
By the way, none of these facts
are secret. They have been published lately
in dozens of articles, both in American
and world media. The members of the
group are proud of them.
The Zionist general.
The man who symbolizes this victory
is General Jay Garner, who has just been
appointed chief of the civilian
administration in Iraq.
He is no anonymous general who has
been picked accidentally. Garner is the
ideological partner of Paul Wolfowitz
and the neo-cons.
Two years ago he signed, together
with 26 other officers, a petition
organized by the Jewish Institute
for National Security Affairs, lauding the
Israeli Army for "remarkable restraint
in the face of lethal violence
orchestrated by the leadership of
the Palestinian Authority," which is
certainly news to the Israeli peace
forces. He also stated that "a strong
Israel is an asset that American
military planners and political leaders can
rely on."
In the first Gulf War he praised
the performance of the Patriot missiles,
which had failed miserably. After
leaving the army in 1997, he became, not
surprisingly, a defense contractor
specializing in missiles. It was alleged
that he landed non-competitive Pentagon
contracts. This year he obtained a
defense contract for $ 1.5 billion,
as well as a contract for building
Patriot systems in Israel.
Therefore, there can be no better
candidate for the job of chief of the
civilian administration in Iraq,
especially at a time when contracts for
billions of dollars for reconstruction
have to be handed out, to be paid for
by Iraqi oil.
A new Balfour declaration.
The ideology of this group, that
calls for an American world-empire as well
as for a Greater Israel, reminds
one of bygone days.
The Balfour declaration of 1917,
that promised the Jews a homeland in
Palestine, had two parents. The
mother was Christian Zionism (among whose
adherents were illustrious statesmen
like Lord Palmerston and Lord
Shaftesbury, long before the foundation
of the Zionist movement), the father
was British imperialism. The Zionist
idea allowed the British to crowd out
their French competitors and take
possession of Palestine, which was needed
to safeguard the Suez Canal and
the shorter sea route to India.
Now the same thing is happening
again. Last year Richard Perle organized a
briefing in which a speaker proposed
war not only on Iraq, but on Saudi
Arabia and Egypt as well, in order
to secure the world's oil heartland.
Iraq, he asserted, was only the
pivot. One of the justifications for this
design is the need to defend Israel.
To bet on our life?
Seemingly, all this is good for
Israel. America controls the world, we
control America. Never before have
Jews exerted such an immense influence on
the center of world power.
But this tendency troubles me. We
are like a gambler, who bets all his money
and his future on one horse. A good
horse, a horse with no current
competitor, but still one horse.
The neo-cons will cause a long period
of chaos in the Arab and Muslim world.
The Iraqi war has already shown
that their understanding of Arab realities
is shaky. Their political assumptions
did not stand the test, only brute
force saved their undertaking.
Some day the Americans will go home,
but we shall remain here. We have to
live with the Arab peoples. Chaos
in the Arab world endangers our future.
Wolfowitz and Co. may dream about
a democratic, liberal, Zionist and
America-loving Middle East, but
the result of their adventures may well turn
out to be a fanatical and fundamentalist
region that will threaten our very
existence.
The partnership of the neo-cons
and the Christian fundamentalists may
engender counter-forces in Washington.
And if Bush is defeated in the next
election, like his father after
his victory in the first Gulf War, this
whole gang will be thrown out.
The Bible tells us about the kings
of Judea, who relied on the then world
power, Egypt. They did not appreciate
the rise of forces in the east,
Assyria and Babylon. An Assyrian
general told the king of Judea: "Behold,
thou trustest upon the staff of
this bruised reed, upon Egypt, on which if a
man lean, it will go into his hand
and pierce it." (II kings 18, 21).
Bush and his gang of neo-cons is
not a bruised reed. Far from it, he is now
a very strong reed. But should we
bet our whole future on this?
------
Uri Avnery is an Israeli journalist.
*****************