“I don’t particularly buy the argument that Israel is an enormous asset to the United States.”

NOVANEWS

In an otherwise excellent interview with the Socialist Worker, Ali Abunimah says: “I don’t particularly buy the argument that Israel is an enormous asset to the United States. I think Israel is, in many respects, a burden and an obstacle to smooth U.S. control of the region.” The first claim is unfair. The capitalist imperialist yahood of Israel do more than their fair share of work confirming the antisemitic caricature of Jewish capitalists. They make plenty of money for themselves, plenty of money for the American upper class, and plenty of money for capitalist elites generally. The second claim is fair. Israel is a “burden” and “obstacle” to “smooth…control.” Without question, Israel’s presence makes US control of the region rough and uneven. And so?

As I’ve told Ali repeatedly, the US doesn’t want “smooth…control” of the region. Why would the US want stability? Because that’s what US government declassified documents say, or because that’s what the snake-oil peddler Obama says? Obama also claims to want a two-state settlement, purportedly on or close to the ’67 lines, yet American administrations time-after-time have proven unable to deliver an institutionalized resolution. The conclusion drawn by a rational person is that the US government — for a medley of reasons — prefers process to peace, much like the Israeli government benefits more from a drawn-out peace process than an institutionalized final settlement. What should a rational person conclude about a US policy-making apparatus filled with bureaucrats and politicians muttering cant about stability while they OK billions of dollars of weapons shipments yearly to one of the more militarized regions on earth? One should conclude that stability is code. Code for what?

Policy-making is very confusing when one tries to read the coffee grounds of policy-maker’s public utterances to try to divine their meaning. It’s less confusing when one starts from the fundamental interests of the primary entities that determine who will serve the four-year term as CEO of America Inc.: corporations and wealthy individuals. (Yes many of those individuals are Jewish but Jewish people just like other wealthy people under capitalism have one main interest: making money, and then making more)

Is there a link between the lack of “smooth control” of the region and the profit-making strategies of American corporations? Could the arms and oil companies that compose the spine of American accumulation in the post-’67 era, the financial services firms that get fat on liquidity flowing through the system – do they make money off war in the Middle East?

putting broken record in the player

The US wants instability. Not in Saudi Arabia or the remainder of the Gulf Cooperation Council. Not in Israel proper. And not in Egypt. But elsewhere. Why? Simple. Instability slides inexorably to war. During wars, the price per/barrel of oil rises. The oil-producing states use that oil revenue to buy weapons and invest in US securities, whether treasury bonds that fund the debt that is the result of a trillion-dollar American military budget tied into the post-WWII system of military Keynesianism, or into stock purchasing to keep asset prices high. The gas price at the pump also rises. Since people of all incomes need gas for transportation, rising gas prices work as an indirect tax extracted from the Western working class, and with that cash the petro-carbon companies make the best possible investments: they buy presidents, who have a tendency to…make wars in the Middle East. Of course, wars need two sides, and with Israel in the mix, there will always be another war.

The argument about Israel hindering American imperialism reduces, when shorn of the verbiage, to the notion that somehow the corporations that fund the presidents that are elected on war-mongering platforms don’t know what their interests are. Ali would rather just blame the Zionists, which in an odd methodological twist assumes that Jewish capitalists function in a fundamentally different way than non-Jewish capitalists. I am not sure what follows, and it seems like a long way around the bend to avoid coming to terms with the nature of the world in which we live, a world whose interpretive tumblers are keyed to the word class.

Does Abunimah think that the American liberals and realists who might soak up the rhetoric about Israel no longer serving American accumulation will ever support a one-state settlement? And if not, why warp one’s entire cognitive apparatus to appeal to people who will never, ever, ever support your goals? The BDS movement calls for solidarity, not from governments, but from people. It assumes that Palestinian liberation will never go through Washington. It wants horizontal relations of support – most relevantly, from trade unions. The spirit is thoroughly anarchist, anti-systemic: an injury to one is an injury to all. The core message is one of responsibility. The people carrying out BDS in Europe and America are largely leftists. So what spirit of struggle, of shared responsibility, of a shared commitment to social change, to structural transformation, is inculcated by fobbing off responsibility for American intervention in the Middle East onto Israel and creating an analytical firewall between support for Israel and American imperialism?

We know what the enemy thinks: he was in Oslo several days ago, blabbering about cultural Marxists and Muslims, killing children, and spouting pro-Zionist pro-Israel racist balderdash. He made the nature of the cleavages and rifts between us and them, and the alliances and partnerships, ideological affinities and profit-making strategies, between Israeli, European, and American elites and their shock-troops amongst the right-populists and right-parties on the ground and amidst the AstroTurf, clear in the clearest possible way. He also exemplified the drift to racism and violent destruction within liberal capitalist societies. When our enemy is so clear about his tactics, his strategies, his vision, and the world he wishes to see, and is meticulous about aligning those things,  we do ourselves no favors by muddling our own vision with muddied analysis.

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