Abstract
A common thread ties these books together. It is the question that motivated the self-described ‘activist-scholar’ Jeff Halper to undertake the prodigious research that became War Against the People: ‘How does Israel get away with it?’
Political scientist Irene Gendzier, a professor emerita at Boston University, grapples with this question as she charts the complexities that led the Truman Administration to adopt a ‘habit of deferral and denial’ when faced with the Nakba atrocities and other Israeli excesses in the late 1940s. For Gaza journalist Mohammed Omer, the question is anything but academic. It haunts his vivid descriptions of the human cost of Israel’s July 2014 bludgeoning of the tiny Gaza Strip. How could the world stand by while Israel was mounting a display of disproportionate force that obliterated entire families and took the lives of more than 500 children?
A significant part of the answer lies in Israel’s budding military capacity, which Gendzier identifies as a crucial element in US support for the new state. As Halper notes, ‘militarism was officially entrenched in Israeli culture and policy making’ in 1948 and by the time of the 2014 onslaught on Gaza, Israel had for seven consecutive years been named the ‘most militarized nation in the world’ by the Global Militarisation Index. Halper describes how Israel in the post 9/11 period has become the valued ‘“go-to” country in the war against terrorism and insurgency’, thanks in large part to the methods it has perfected to sustain its Occupation and its ability to market its weapons and know-how as battlefield tested. Israel fills some critical niches in what Halper calls world capitalism’s ‘global pacification industry’ aimed at those who challenge the hegemonic order, while the Palestinian plight does not register as a priority for the US government and international ruling and corporate classes.
But in the years when US policy-makers were bent on consolidating their control over Middle East oil, the fate of the Arabs of the British Mandate for Palestine – the lands that Zionists claimed as their homeland – appeared to matter a great deal, if only for a brief time. Could the US simultaneously pursue a pro-Zionist policy in the late 1930s and 1940s and strengthen relations with Saudi Arabia, whose ‘oil resources constitute a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history’? 1
What led to President Truman’s swift de facto recognition of Israel after its unilateral declaration of independence on 14 May 1948 is the subject of several scholarly studies, including John Judis’ 2014 Genesis: Truman, American Jews, and the origins of the Arab/Israeli conflict. Judis (and others) emphasise the role played by the well-organised Zionist lobby and its financial support that helped Truman win the White House in 1948.
Gendzier has a different focus in Dying to Forget. She frequently alludes to Zionist mobilisation within the US and ‘Truman’s deference to domestic politics’ which she regards as ‘a factor in the president’s policy statements’. But her main concern is to map out ‘the larger matrix of considerations’ and strategic interests behind US Middle East policy-making: namely, oil and the determination to keep Israel out of the Soviet orbit in the early days of the cold war.
She does so by digging deep into a variety of archival and other sources, some of which – but not all – have been drawn upon by other scholars. Her dense, carefully constructed volume is a guide to the twists and turns of the US foreign policy-making process in the 1940s and the intricacies of competing interests held by oil men, the White House, State Department, CIA, National Security Council and the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff. Gendzier shows an impressive command of far-ranging material as she describes the ‘shifting priorities’ and considerations that led the Truman Administration to abandon ‘its avowed support for consensus between Arab and Jew as the essential prerequisite for a resolution of the conflict in Palestine’. Setting aside considerable internal opposition, including from the CIA which warned that ‘Zionist extremists’ would ‘demand not only all of Palestine but Transjordan as well’, the Administration accepted the November 1947 UN Partition Plan (Resolution 181) that Arabs rejected. Gendzier then details how various government officials assessed the actions carried out by Zionist forces that were at odds with professed US values, including the Deir Yassin massacre and expulsion of Palestinians from their homes, and summarises the internal debate over whether the Administration should back away from partition with its high human cost and instead support a temporary UN trusteeship as the date of Britain’s departure loomed.
She enters new territory with her examination of how and why the US shifted from criticising to acquiescing in the new state’s refusal to agree to defined borders, to a special status for Jerusalem and to the repatriation of refugees, and thus prepared the way for the impunity which Israel operates today. The ‘oil connection’ she unearthed in the papers of Max Ball, director of the Interior Department’s Oil and Gas Division, is an important part of her story. The papers reveal Ball’s exchanges with the representative of the Jewish Agency in the US and other Zionists who argued that US support for Israel would not jeopardise its oil business in Arab countries since they could not do without the US, and that Israel could be exactly the stabilising force in the region which the oil industry needed. She speculates that Ball’s lobbying made oil companies ‘pragmatic’ in their stance towards Israel and was a factor in keeping the US in the partition camp. ‘The choice facing policymakers’, she writes, ‘was not oil versus Israel but rather oil and Israel.’
While intriguing and plausible, Gendzier’s interpretation of the eliding of the interests of oil companies, Zionists and policy-makers in the late 1940s is partly based on conjecture. There is more archival documentation to support her position that, after its rout of Arab armies, ‘Israel was newly appreciated as a state with an experienced and disciplined political class, an impressive military, and a worrisome tendency to turn toward the USSR’, and that it should be made a regional asset of the US. ‘For reasons unrelated to domestic politics’, Gendzier writes, ‘the JCS [Joint Chiefs of Staff] concluded that Israel’s military justified US interest, and such interest merited lowering the pressure on Israel to ensure that it turned away from the USSR and toward the West and the United States.’
It would be a dozen years before Israel began buying arms from the US and nearly two decades before the US replaced France as Israel’s patron-in-chief. But already in 1949 the US government was prepared to ignore UN resolutions and let Israel have its own way where the Palestinians were concerned. As Gendzier ably demonstrates, it was not just the pressure exerted by the pro-Zionist lobby but a recognition of what the altered power dynamics in the region meant for US interests that brought this about.
By the time Halper, an American-born Israeli anthropologist, was writing War Against the People, the US had given Israel over $121 billion in aid, most of it military. The web of military, security and technological connections binding the US and Israel together had become so massive, and the pro-Israel lobby – with Christian Zionists providing significant electoral clout – so relentless in its application of pressure on politicians, policy-makers and the media, that it is difficult to know how the trajectory of US policy towards Israel can be reversed. Halper points out that ‘the arms industry represents the most important special interest pressing for strong US support of the Israeli government’. Its lobbying budget dwarfs that of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), whose conventions are routinely attended by presidents, would-be presidents and congressional leaders. A superpower with more than a thousand military bases and installations around the globe gives nearly half of its military assistance every year to one small nation in the Middle East.
How and why this came to be, how the Israeli military and arms industry functions, how Israel exerts its ‘matrix of control’, and the consequences not just for Palestinians and the Middle East but for people everywhere as Israeli-style ‘securitization’ becomes ‘the enforcement arm of transnational capitalism’ are the themes of this compelling book. Although Israel is its prime focus, the larger ambition of War Against the People is to serve as a kind of activist handbook that can help prepare progressives to confront a system of global pacification being put in place to maintain capitalist hegemony.
Building on work done since the 1980s on Israel’s arms industry, its counter-insurgency expertise and global securitisation profile by Israel Shahak, Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, Steve Goldfield, Stephen Graham and others whom Halper cites in these pages, War Against the People is packed with new information culled from such sources as the Israeli Ministry of Defense, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, websites and publications of high-tech firms and weapons manufacturers, weapons expos, defence journals and the press. So that a non-specialist reader is not overwhelmed by the wealth of material contained in the chapters detailing the technologies and capacities of the weapons and surveillance devices in the Israeli arsenal (including experimental ones tried out on Gaza), Halper provides tables that summarise its core military export technologies, the structure and finances of its five largest arms companies which manufacture 95 per cent of its weapons, and a particularly useful one captioned ‘The Israeli arms and security industry at a glance’.
How is this formidable arsenal being harnessed to promote US hegemonic priorities in ‘the war against the people’ both within Israel/Palestine and globally? Halper summarises the co-operative ventures in which Israel and the US are engaged, and dozens of programmes involving Israel ‘in co-development, co-production, or research with American weapons manufacturers’. From serving the US as a backdoor surrogate in its dealings with other countries, to training in counter-insurgency techniques and militarised policing, to collaborating in intelligence and cyberattacks and techniques to fight the ‘war on terror’, Israel has worked hard to make itself indispensable not just to the US military and ‘homeland security’ establishment but to governments with unruly populations around the world. Israel now carries on a formal arms business with 130 countries and its private security firms and arms dealers operate in many more. So sweeping is the range of countries that rely on Israeli weapons and expertise (sometimes covertly, as in the Middle East) that Halper concludes that the ‘thrust of its security politics drives Israel into a degree of involvement in global security matters that … exceeds in extent, depth and quality the reach of any other country, including the United States’. The result is that more governments are inclined ‘to let Israel get away with it’, including at the UN.
Particularly in the post 9/11 period, the Occupation has served Israel well.
Halper argues that Israel has no incentive to end its military rule over Palestinians because the Occupation is ‘a resource’ that has enabled it to carve out a lucrative niche as the ‘predominate authority on securitization and prolonged pacification’. Here he expands on the analysis he developed during his work with the Israeli Committee against House Demolitions, which he founded and directed for many years. In his meetings with visiting delegations, he would outline Israel’s ‘matrix of control’ – the comprehensive web of military orders, checkpoints, walls and settlements that fragments and isolates Palestinian communities and the all-pervasive surveillance and intelligence technologies and military methods (including ‘targeted killings’ and the routine use of torture) used to suppress ‘terrorism’, to make the population ‘manageable’ and to encourage those who have the means to do so, to leave. War Against the People points towards the globalisation of Palestine, as the Occupation ‘provides a testing ground for the development of weapons, security systems, models of population control and tactics without which Israel would be unable to compete in the international arms and security markets’. For what other country can offer such extensive ‘war on terror’ know-how, security technologies and weapons that ‘are the products of continuous engagement in the real-life, on-the-ground laboratory of the Occupied Palestinian territory’?
For the last decade, the Gaza Strip has functioned as a special kind of lab. Seventy per cent of its 1.8 million people are refugees, many of them caged just miles from their former homes within Israel after the US, for reasons described by Gendzier, decided not to pressure the new state of Israel to permit their return as required by UN Resolution 194. Nearly half are children under the age of 15. For ten years they have been living in what is essentially a 26-mile-long open air prison, under near total lockdown, as an Israeli siege blocks the movement in and out of people and goods. During that time they have endured severely rationed supplies of food, electricity, fuel, clean water and medical treatment, constant surveillance by drones, frequent military incursions and five major military onslaughts involving many of the advanced and experimental weapons detailed in Halper’s book. The most recent such onslaught – Operation Protective Edge – is the subject of Mohammed Omer’s searing book, Shell-shocked.
What was it like to live under a 51-day barrage from F16s, tanks, assault helicopters, missile-firing drones, naval gunships, ground troops and, on at least one occasion, 5-metre long ‘bunker-buster’ missiles, with no place of safety to retreat to? How did Gazans cope when ‘tank shells were falling like hot raindrops’ and lives (sometimes of entire families), schools, hospitals, mosques, apartment buildings, houses and the already fragile water, sewage and electricity infrastructure were being shattered all around them?
What did Israel manage to get away with in July 2014? Omer, a courageous award-winning Gaza journalist, shows us its human toll in a series of harrowing eyewitness commentaries that are written with remarkable restraint. Living with his wife and 3-month-old son in a building shaken by bomb blasts, he brings us face-to-face with people who somehow manage to keep their humanity as they cope with the most inhuman situations.
I saw that for myself when, twenty months after the events described in Shell-shocked, I managed to enter the Gaza Strip. Despite the huge personal losses, despite the ongoing siege, despite the glacially slow pace of reconstruction, despite the lakes of sewage and near absence of clean water to drink, despite an unemployment rate of nearly 50 per cent, I still encountered the personal warmth, generosity and, at times, exuberance that made the Gaza Strip such an engaging place when I first visited it during the heady days of the First Intifada and a dozen subsequent trips.
Omer captures that spirit in his introduction, written in 2015: Despite all this, we’re still here. It’s true: In Gaza we find ways to survive … Our women recycle the spent tank shells that have destroyed our homes into flowerpots … Students return to bombed-out schools determined to complete their education … the resilience of Palestinians is intact, despite being constantly hit hard with daily despair.
That resilience may one day be the undoing of Israel’s ‘security politics’. For the nearly 50-year-old Occupation has, if anything, undermined the security of Israelis and not succeeded in forcing Palestinians to submit to their subjugation.
As Halper writes: There still exists a significant gap between technological power and precision – and the death, destruction and suffering it can certainly cause – and the ability to actually enforce hegemony or achieve pacification. Nowhere is this more evident than in tiny, exposed Gaza. There, for all Israel’s vaunted strength, technological sophistication and long experience in counter-insurgency, it has not succeeded in ‘defeating’ the Palestinians.