Israel, US, the same old

Note (28 April 2024): On March 28, I received an email from one of the opinion page editors at The Indian Express asking if I might write an essay on the US vote of abstention in the Security Council on a resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and whether such a vote could be interpreted as a shift in the American position towards Israel. The resolution passed 14-0, with the United States, which is of course a permanent member of the Security Council, casting the only vote of abstention. But the US had, uncharacteristically, not vetoed the resolution, as it had done repeatedly in the past. I submitted my essay a week later but it was published, both in print and online, on April 14 on p. 11 (or see the online edition where it appeared under the title of “The US support for Israel, contrary to opinion, is as strong as ever”). As the online title suggests, I argued that the various opinions that had been voiced suggesting that the US support for Israel was diminishing or might no longer be taken for granted were entirely mistaken and overblown. Events since March 25 and indeed down to the present day have established, as I argued, that the US support for Israel remains, to use the words of Biden and countless number of officials of his administration, “iron-clad”. To think that it might be otherwise, if the US is provoked to breaking-point by Israeli intransigence or arrogance, is to show little understanding of the American establishment’s rigid attachment for Israel. To be sure, some–and some only, let it be clear–of these officials are, in private, anti-Semitic; but their Islamophobic sentiments run still deeper. Similarly, one can be certain that we will continue to hear American officials voice “uneasiness” with Israel’s policies, “discontent” and “dismay” at Israeli arrogance and the impunity with which Israel will continue to ignore the entire world and do what it pleases, and so on. All of American expressions of displeasure are hot air, and just that. A few will object to my remarks with the observation that it is only US restraint that stopped Israel from clobbering Iran. That observation may not be without merit, but to concede that much is not to admit that the US does in fact exercise real restraining power over Israel. One cannot ignore the much larger geopolitical implications of an outright war between Israel and Iran. In any case, the essay below is the slightly longer version of the piece that was published in the Indian Express: as noted above, it is dated only in the sense that other events since in the last few weeks amply demonstrate that the US remains unflinchingly supportive of Israel and therefore complicit in the genocide unfolding in Gaza.

On March 25, during a discussion in the UN Security Council, the United States did something highly unusual:  it abstained from a resolution that had been introduced calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. The United States had vetoed similar resolutions in the past, arguing that it would not permit any step that might impede Israel’s right to self-defense.  When it last exercised its veto power on February 20, the US justified its action with the observation that any call for a ceasefire perforce had to be linked to the release of all Israeli hostages from Palestinian custody.

Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, immediately pronounced the US abstention a “retreat” from the unstinting support that Israel has received from the onset of the present iteration of a conflict that effectively goes back to the founding of Israel in 1948.  As a mark of his displeasure, indeed of his alleged surprise that the US should in any way be signifying a shift in its position of unfettered support towards Israel, Netanyahu cancelled a planned visit by an Israeli delegation to the US to discuss Israel’s imminent invasion of Rafah. Netanyahu and Israel’s military planners have argued that the assault on Rafah is required to eliminate Hamas’s remaining battalions; the United States, importantly, questions not Israel’s right to defend its integrity as a nation-state, but only whether Israel has put into place a comprehensive plan that would guarantee the safety of Palestinian civilians.

Many commentators point to the US vote of abstention, as well as other recent developments such as criticism of Netanyahu by US Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and his call for elections in Israel—angrily dismissed by Netanyahu in a sharply worded rejoinder, “We are not a banana republic—as significant milestones in what is alleged to be an evolving relationship between Israel and the United States.  The diplomatic editor of the highly regarded The Guardian, for instance, described the American decision to abstain as far more than a ruckus over “some words in the text of a UN resolution: it marks another moment in the painful, almost anguished US diplomatic distancing from its chief ally in the Middle East.”

The terrain appears to have shifted quickly and considerably in the last several weeks: having vetoed UN Security Council resolutions thrice, the US was doubtless finding that it, too, was repeatedly being pushed alongside Israel into being part of a miniscule minority.  Indeed, before it abstained from the resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire, the US had introduced its own resolution—only to see it being shot down by China and Russia, which pointed out that the American initiative was more of a condemnation of Hamas rather than a demand for a ceasefire. Tensions have been rising between Israel and the US over the pace and scope of humanitarian aid, especially in the face of the imminent starvation of Palestinians on a large scale. Most recently, the death of seven aid workers from World Central Kitchen in a targeted strike by the Israel Defense Force (IDF) has ratcheted up the American pressure against Israel. 

Might one conclude, then, that something significant has altered in the special relationship that Israel has enjoyed with the US since its founding?  Reportedly, even as these lines are being penned, and following on what has been described as a tense call between Biden and Netanyahu, Israel has finally succumbed to the US pressure to open up new aid routes to Gaza. There is ample reason to think that American frustration with Israeli intransigence has been growing and some suspect that Israel may no longer enjoy unconditional support in the United Nations and more broadly the court of world public opinion. Moreover, the brute fact is that, as an electoral democracy, political parties are subject to the vagaries of shifting political sentiments.  The more “progressive” sections within the Democratic party have been arguing that arms sales to Israel must be tied to the immediate cessation of hostilities and much higher standards of accountability on the part of Israel. University campuses have been rocked by unrest over the Biden administration’s policies; more importantly, both recent polls and Democratic primaries being held in the run-up to the presidential election in November suggest that Biden is in grave danger of losing the support of Arab-American constituencies.

I would argue, however, that analyses which portend a significant shift in the US support of Israel are not merely premature but have failed to capture the pulse that animates the US-Israel relationship. Israel has, previous to this war, been the recipient of over $150 billion in American largesse, or something like $3.8 billion annually; it also has access to advanced American war technologies and weapon systems. If the pro-Palestinian demonstrators have appeared to make a splash on university campuses, it is only because the forces that lobby for both Jewish and Israeli interests have so long dominated the American university system that one barely heard of support for Palestine.  The charge of anti-Semitism remains the most potent weapon that can be deployed on behalf of Israel. The indubitable fact is that Israel is held up, by Democrats and Republicans alike, not merely as the only real friend it has in the Middle East but as the only democracy in the region. It is immaterial to this argument whether Israel is, in fact, a “democracy”:  the fact that some of its citizens have enjoyed liberties ordinarily associated with democratic states cannot obscure the other reality, namely that Israel has been an occupying power for decades and that Palestinians exist in a state of manifest and dire subjugation.

There is another and yet still more vital consideration.  I have elsewhere argued that there is a certain synergy between Israel and the United States as settler-colonial states. A messianic spirit has long informed American self-perception and guided US foreign policy: as every post-World War II American president has declared at one time or the other, the belief that America is “the one indispensable nation” is intrinsic to American exceptionalism. Israel is far from having the gumption of saying the same explicitly about itself, but the state of Israel conducts itself with the supreme confidence that it exercises a moral purchase over the rest of humanity. It does so, of course, on the presumption that the murder of six million Jews gives the Jewish state of Israel a special place in history—and the unconstrained and unquestioned right to oppress others in the name of “self-defense”.  Given this synergy, it is doubtful in the extreme that anything substantive has at all changed in the US-Israel relationship or is even likely to change in the near future.

Israel: A Pitiable, Pathetic, Paper Tiger

Vinay Lal

Israel has long flaunted its military prowess and much of the world has believed it. After all, the small Jewish state, foisted upon the Palestinians by a Europe that could not find a way to accommodate the gifted, liberal, often supremely enlightened, and enterprising Jewish people, defeated a coalition of Palestinian Arabs, Syrians, and Egyptians in 1948-49 and secured its independence. Then, in 1967, in what is called the six-day war, Israel took the wind out of the sails of the Arab states—largely Jordan, Syria, and Egypt—and rightfully claimed a conclusive and momentous victory, even taking the Golan Heights, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Sinai Peninsula into its possession. Though its military triumphs would scarcely be as decisive in more recent decades, and Israel and Hezbollah fought to a standstill in 2006 after a bitter monthlong war, Israel’s military has nonetheless continued to enjoy a reputation as a great disciplined and professional force.  The reputation that Israel enjoys as a no-nonsense state, one that allegedly knows how to deal with terrorists, may be gauged by the fact that its retired generals enjoy sinecures and consultancies in countries such as India.

However, the present conflict between Hamas and Israel shows Israel for what it truly is:  a pitiable, pathetic, paper tiger. Such a description will appear surprising, perhaps somewhat absurd, to most considering that, after Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, Israel at once declared war and in quick order began a relentless attack from the air upon the entire population of Gaza. By the end of 2023 alone, Israel had dropped, according to the Gaza Media Office, 45,000 bombs weighing more than 65,000 tons, or more four times the tonnage of the atomic bomb that eviscerated Hiroshima.  Moreover, less than a month after Hamas went on the offensive, Israel commenced operations on the ground.  By January 24, on the World Bank’s estimate, 45% of the residential buildings in Gaza had been destroyed by the Israel Defense Force (IDF), though The Times of Israel reported, on 30 December 2023, that 70% of the homes in Gaza had been destroyed or damaged.  Now, in early March, that figure is certainly much higher; indeed, as many reports suggest, Gaza is practically uninhabitable.  This appears to be the response of an aggressive, vengeful, muscular nation-state, not a paper tiger.

Let us, nevertheless, consider what Israel’s short-term war aims have been and whether its achievements thus far, as well as it military actions, have been congruent with those war aims. We will not take into consideration the precipitous decline of its international reputation, if only because Israel, to be blunt about it, is largely indifferent to its reputation. It has habitually considered most of the world to be hostile to both the Jewish state and Jews, though of course many who are not sympathetic to the Jewish state do not hold the same views with regards to the Jewish people; more importantly, it is arrogant enough to think that its virtuous righteousness is enough to sustain it in the face of an onslaught from the rest of the world.  We may, thus, confine ourselves to Israel’s stated war objectives, the two principal ones being the rescue of the hostages taken by Hamas (and Islamic Jihad) and the complete annihilation of Hamas.  In early February, Israel reported that it had destroyed 17-18 out of Hamas’ 24 batallions, and Netanyahu has on several occasions boasted that Israel is well on the way to “total victory”.  The BBC reported at the end of February that the Israeli embassy in the UK estimated that it had killed 10,000-12,000 Hamas fighters.  Hamas has not corroborated those figures and the verification of estimates provided by IDF is nearly impossible, all the more so since just who constitutes a “Hamas fighter” is far from clear.  Let us recall that none other than the President of Israel, Isaac Herzog, less than a week into the war, declared at a press conference that “it is an entire nation out there that is responsible”:  if there are no innocent civilians, then one reasonable inference is that, from the Israeli standpoint, every civilian is a potential terrorist—and that, moreover, every civilian is a legitimate target. It is not hard to fathom why Israel can, on this reasoning, conduct a merciless war against civilians with the self-assurance of utter impunity, but let me return to this point later.

Just exactly how fighters are to be distinguished from civilians is but one problem.  Let us now, however, turn to the conduct of the war and assess Israel’s “achievements”.  A few days after the onset of the war, I wrote on the very pages of this blog an article suggesting that, with or without the support of the United States, Israel would exact a terrible vengeance and pulverize Gaza. Of course, to conduct a protracted war, Israel must doubtless rely on a continuing supply of arms and ammunition from the United States. Hamas has similarly been aided with occasional rocket launches fired by Hezbollah, but unlike the state of Israel, which for its size has a formidable army and receives the highest-grade weapons from the US, Hamas has neither any aircraft nor any tanks. The first intifada of 1987-1993 is also known as the “stone intifada” for nothing:  it was waged largely by the young with stones and captured the world’s imagination. The present resistance has gone well beyond stones, even if Hamas has in other ways displayed the ingenuity of the besieged Palestinians, but it is still nevertheless true that the gulf between the military power that Israel has brought to bear upon the Palestinians and the resources that Hamas can wield is enormous.  Hamas is practically a guerilla fighting force and, as countless number of articles have shown, it developed an extraordinary—one might call it, purely from the engineering standpoint, wondrous—system of tunnels which appear to constitute a veritable city.  These tunnels, running for hundreds of miles, were used to ship arms, ferry people from one part of Gaza to another, and much else:  as the Modern War Institute at West Point points out in a report, “Israeli forces have unearthed massive invasion tunnels two and a half miles long, underground manufacturing plants, luxury tunnels with painted walls, tile floors, ceiling fans, and air conditioning, and a complex, layered, labyrinth underneath all areas of Gaza.”

Underground Gaza, as it is sometimes called, was built under the noses of the Israelis. The failures of Israeli military intelligence have obviously been colossal:  what to speak of the fact that Hamas literally blew its way into Israeli settlements, Israel appears to have had little knowledge of the complexity and enormity of Hamas’s tunnel city.  Besides aircraft, sophisticated drone systems, missiles, radar system, the Iron Dome air defense system, tanks, and military intelligence, Israel is also an apparent pioneer in cyberwar, and there is good reason to think that Israel was responsible for the cyberattack that disabled the electricity grid in portions of Iran some weeks ago.  So, considering the vast arsenal that Israel has at its disposal, just what has it achieved of its stated war goals?  First, as I have already suggested above, there is little reason to believe that Hamas has been nearly obliterated. If it has been, one might also ask why north Gaza, where IDF spent three months flattening the landscape and reducing the population into starvation, is seeing renewed fighting.  It is certainly far too early to speak of a decisive military defeat; indeed, a “decisive” military defeat is wholly illusory, unless one is prepared to believe that tens of thousands of Palestinians, moving into the future, will not arise from the graveyard to which Gaza is being reduced and will not be prepared themselves to offer resistance even unto death.  Secondly, five months into the war, Hamas (and, perhaps, Islamic Jihad) continue to hold a hundred Israeli civilians and soldiers captive.  There is little reason to believe that the IDF or Israeli military intelligence even knows where these captives are being held.  Israel’s inability to rescue the hostages is striking, and we can anticipate that Israel’s response is that it is somewhat handicapped in its response since Hamas does not fight a fair war, or, to put it in more dramatic language, Hamas is a despicable terrorist organization that uses civilians as shields. Israel expects victory to be handed down to it on a platter, but its argument is all the more bizarre considering that it has a massively disproportional advantage over Hamas. And this is apart from the question that almost no one has dared to ask: why is that we should not view the thousands of Palestinians held in Israel’s jails as “hostages”.

Thirdly, none of Hamas’s senior political leadership has been apprehended.  Israel declared Hamas’s most important political leader, Yahya Sinwar, a “dead man walking”, but five months into the conflict Sinwar has proven to be adept in keeping even his whereabouts unknown to the outside world.  Israel has eyes and ears on the ground, but its celebrated intelligence has been unable to pick up either Sinwar, Marwan Issa—whose son Muhammad was killed in an IDF strike in late 2023—or Mohammed Deif, the head of the al-Qassam Brigades who has survived repeated assassination attempts and earned the nickname, “the cat with nine lives”. Deif was arrested by the Palestinian National Authority at Israel’s request in May 2000 but escaped several months later; he is believed to be the “mastermind” behind the surprise attack of October 7^th, and the IDF sought to exact vengeance by targeting Deif’s father home with an airstrike which killed three family members, including Deif’s brother.

Having been unable to obliterate Hamas, capture or kill its senior leadership, or rescue the hostages, Israel has set out to criminalize, terrorize, and pulverize Palestinians. That has been the sum of its verifiable achievements:  the widespread infliction of pain, suffering, and death on a largely defenseless population; the elimination of large sectors of the Palestinian intelligentsia, the destruction (in whole or in part) of all twelve of Gaza’s universities, and cultural genocide; the deliberate starvation of the Palestinians as a means of waging war; the forcible and repeated displacement of a people, and most unforgivingly to areas that have falsely been promised as safe havens; and much else that defies the imagination. Israel will say in its defense that it is only doing what every nation-state has a right to do, namely mount self-defense against an enemy that does not recognize the right of Israel to exist. Whether everything Israel has can be done can be forgiven or even grudgingly justified in the name of self-defense is one thing; it is also an ethical and philosophical question whether self-defense allows the wanton and widespread killing of a people.  It is still another question, one those who lend their support to the Palestinian cause, whether Hamas does not bear some responsibility for the death and destruction of the Palestinians. Hamas surely would have known that Israel would exact a deadly even monstrous price from the Palestinians for its savage attack of October 7^th, and that innocents, including children, would shoulder most of the burden of this vengeance.  None of these considerations, however, exculpate Israel.

If Israel is, as I submit, a paper tiger, we have to logically ask what happens to paper tigers. Most readers will be unaware that it was Chairman Mao who first used the term in contemporary times in an interview that he gave to the American journalist, Anna Louis Strong, in August 1946.  “The atom bomb is a paper tiger”, Mao said, “which the U.S. reactionaries use to scare people. It looks terrible, but in fact it isn’t. Of course, the atom bomb is a weapon of mass slaughter, but the outcome of a war is decided by the people, not by one or two new types of weapons. All reactionaries are paper tigers.” That people decide the course of war may sound fanciful, but Mao had in mind the experience of the Chinese people and the history of anti-colonial struggles.  Less than two decades later, the ignominious retreat of America from Vietnam would once again suggest the merit of his view.  Israel is a paper tiger because, having been humiliated by a new type of guerrilla armed force, and unable to subjugate its enemy, it chooses to wage a war against a civilian population; in doing so, it has yet to understand that the story of Palestinian self-determination will eclipse any narrative that Israel may put forward.

Israel and the United States: The Catastrophic Synergy of Two Settler Colonial States

Of all the remarkable and still unfolding geopolitical aspects of the present war in Palestine, what stands out most is the unstinting support given to Israel by the United States from the very moment that the barbaric attack carried out by Hamas in Israel came to the attention of the world.  The US was not alone in unequivocally condemning Hamas, but President Joe Biden, characterizing the terrorist attacks as “pure, unadulterated evil” in a speech delivered on October 10, made it known that the “United States has Israel’s back”:  “We’re with Israel.”  Days later, in an extraordinary demonstration of just how “rock solid” American support of Israel is, Biden took the risk of traveling to Israel. By this time, at least 2,000 Palestinians, the vast majority of them civilians, had also been killed in the relentless, indeed merciless, aerial bombing of Gaza. Biden met with Jewish survivors of Hamas’s attack, holding some of them to his chest in a warm and consoling embrace; but, not surprisingly, he made no pretense of any similar commiseration with Palestinians.  Throughout, the United States vetoed resolutions in the United Nations calling for a cease-fire.  Since Hamas carried out its attack nearly two months ago, some 16,000 Palestinians, the greater majority of them women and children, have perished in a devastating orgy of fire, wrath, and destruction.

Gaza, Bombed Out of Existence: “An Empty Land” in colonialist Thinking, Now a True Wasteland

It is not only with Britain, but with Israel as well, that the United States has long had a “special relationship”.  On 14 May 1948, less than an hour after Israel proclaimed its independence, the US became the first country in the world to recognize Israel as a sovereign state. Ever since, Israel has been backed by American arms, recently to the tune of $3 billion every year, and the two countries have celebrated their ties as an enduring partnership of two democracies allegedly inspired not merely by mutually shared interests but by the love of liberty.  Several commentators have pointed to the great many sources of this unusual relationship.  The US has the world’s second largest Jewish population after Israel, but there are several other, lesser explored, aspects of this relationship, not the least of them being the fact that the modern American university, and nearly every sphere of scientific and humanistic inquiry, has been disproportionately shaped by Jewish intellectuals.

However, in all the vast commentary on the unwavering support that Israel has received from the United States in the last 75 years, the most critical factor has been rarely discussed.  Both Israel and the United States are settler colonial states. Though the idea of “settler colonialism” is now a staple of scholarly discourse, it has made scarcely any inroads into the common understanding of colonialism.  School textbooks down in the United States down to the present day do not use the term “settler colonialism”, and here I will not take up the matter of whether the extermination of American Indians has received even remotely the kind of recognition that it needs.  (“Recognition” barely gets us to the question of “justice”, but that is still more remote a possibility.)  But it behooves us to have at least an elementary sense of how settler colonialism provides another lens on the more general phenomenon of colonialism. The British in India, to take a well-known example of colonialism, absorbed ever greater parts of the country into British India after their initial conquest of Bengal in 1757, and some British families put down roots in India extending over the course of several generations. Though the relationship was often exploitative in the extreme, the British did not seek to exterminate the population and generally did not treat the local population merely as slave labor.

Settler colonialism is an altogether different phenomenon.  It is, in the first instance, predicated on the legal fiction, one that the Europeans boldly even merrily advanced, of terra nullius—that is, the notion that the lands they had encountered were “empty”. These lands were construed as sparsely populated, and that too by those viewed as savages bereft of civilization, and otherwise as unproductive.  Europeans thought nothing of claiming these lands as their own: however, it is not merely when they encountered opposition that they killed the indigenous people, since extermination was but a blood sport. Indigenous populations were nearly wiped out, but many of the natives were also taken into slavery.  Settler colonialists could not countenance even remotely the idea of accommodation and, without exception, settler colonialism resulted in the replacement of Europeans for the indigenous populations.  The other word for this phenomenon is genocide—even if, in the aftermath of the Second World War and especially in the last few decades, the world has settled upon a more capacious understanding of what constitutes “genocide”.

The United States, much like Australia, has evolved from being a settler colonial state into becoming a fundamentally immigrant society, but the periodic recrudescence of virulent white nationalism in both countries suggests that they continue to be guided by the instincts of settler colonialists.  There is but no question that the origins of the modern nation-state of Israel lie precisely in a similar kind of settler colonialism.  The founding of Israel was only made possible by the mass expulsion of Palestinians who term their displacement, and the dispossession of their lands, as nakba. Even as astute, learned, and sensitive a philosopher as Martin Buber was susceptible to the idea that it was given to Jewish settlers alone to make the land productive: “This land recognizes us, for it is fruitful through us: and precisely because it bears fruit for us, it recognizes us.” The land had thus far been unproductive, merely waste land: as Buber opined in an open letter to Mahatma Gandhi on 24 February 1939, “The Jewish farmers have begun to teach their brothers, the Arab farmers, to cultivate the land more intensively.”  Buber had at least the decency, utterly wanting in the present generation of Israeli leaders and their unthinking supporters in the United States, to add that “we do not want to dominate them; we want to serve with them …”

Palestine does not exist: one American, and not merely Israeli, politician after another has pronounced this as an unimpeachable fact over the last several decades. At my own university, the Chancellor, in his first message to the university community days after October 7^th, while deploring the “heinous” attack by Hamas, found himself incapable of even mentioning Palestine. A week after his first message, and that at a time when a few thousand lives in Gaza had already been snuffed out, the Chancellor of UCLA could only muster up enough “courage”, if that is the word for so supine and cowardly a gesture, to say that what was happening in Gaza was “troubling”.  If Palestinians cannot even be named, they certainly do not exist.  The United States and Israel together have woven a dance of death which has been catastrophic for their own countries and will undoubtedly prove to be an unmitigated disaster for the entire world.

First published in the Indian Express (online), 27 November 2023, as “Israel and the United States: The synergy of two settler-colonial states, a disaster for the world“