Israel and America: Allied in Racism
A supporter of then-U.S. President Donald Trump holds a Confederate flag outside the Senate chamber after breaching the U.S. Capitol in Washington, DC, during the riot on Jan. 6, 2021. (PHOTO BY SAUL LOEB/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES)1111111111
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, March/April 2021, pp. 16-17
History’s Shadows
By Walter L. Hixson
LET’S JUST BE HONEST about it: one reason the United States and Israel get along so well is because they are both racist countries.
The machinations of AIPAC and the broader Israel lobby play a massive role in the daily operation of U.S.-Israeli relations, no doubt about that, but underlying the special relationship is a bedrock of shared racism—the deeply rooted marginalization and often violent repression directed at the darker-skinned “other” in each society.
Israel is more blatant about its racism, to be sure, and unlike the United States, the Zionist state embraced de jure ethnic supremacy through passage in 2018 of the Jewish nation-state law. Yet as recent events have shown, the United States is not to be outdone when it comes to de facto racial discrimination. In some ways, you might even say on the basis of the nation-state law, which officially stamped Israel as a Jewish state rather than a democracy, as well as Netanyahu’s many blatant appeals, that Israel at least is more open about its racism than is the United States.
It is going to take journalists followed by historians a long time to sort through the record to gain full command of the sordid history that has unfolded in the United States in the very recent past. It is safe to say, however, that racism has played a powerful role in the rise of the reactionary right-wing in the country. Donald Trump, of course, claimed to be the least racist person in the world, just as every impeachable utterance he made was actually “perfect,” but it is clear that racism is deeply implicated in the Trump cult of personality—which 74,223,744 Americans willingly embraced in the 2020 election, the most votes for any presidential candidate in American history not named Joe Biden.
Trump, it will be recalled, built his national following in part by challenging the legitimacy of the first Black president in American history, Barack Obama, whom he falsely claimed was not even an American citizen. Much of what transpired under Trump was a racist reaction to the United States having gone so far as to elect and reelect an African American president. Masses of American white supremacists simply could not abide or take in stride the empowerment of an African American leader. The Trump presidency was thus a reactionary response to the racial progress that Obama personified. Tellingly, Trump literally tried to undo virtually everything that the Black man, who broke into the White House, had done.
Trump got his start with the “birther” Big Lie, then vilified Muslims, separated Hispanic families at the border, all of it culminating with the Big Lie about the election followed by the wrenching events at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. There, as many people have pointed out because it was so blatantly obvious, the massive American security state allowed a mob of overwhelmingly white reactionary zealots to storm the Capitol armed with zip ties, Confederate flags, and nooses. Just a few months earlier, the overwhelmingly peaceful Black Lives Matter protests prompted arrests and U.S.-military backed repression in Washington, DC. On June 1, 2020, Trump—like the slave masters of old—had wielded the whip with one hand and held the Bible in the other, as the anti-racist activists were put back in their place.
Israel regularly engages in much worse racial repression, gunning down unarmed Gaza and West Bank protesters; assassinating more people than any country in the world; and in general, acting as a rogue state rather than the “sole democracy” of the Middle East that its propaganda so often touts. The United States chooses to enable and massively aid this reactionary little country of nine million people and, moreover, even to solicit police training from it. Israeli specialists schooled many American police forces in the methods so conspicuously on display against George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and scores of other African Americans—and so conspicuously not on display against the Capitol-sieging, overwhelmingly white mob.
LIBERAL ENABLERS OF ISRAELI RACISM
Israeli soldiers detain a Palestinian during a protest against the prevention of Palestinian farmers from ploughing their lands seized by Jewish settlers, in the village of Aqraba, east of Nablus in the occupied West Bank, on Jan. 13, 2021. (PHOTO BY JAAFAR ASHTIYEH/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES)
Reactionary racists are one thing—most are poorly educated, which makes them easy prey for a demagogue like Trump—but what about American liberal support for Israeli racism? Instead of condemnation, congressional liberals line up with conservatives in support of the annual billions of dollars in allocations that enable Israel to be an even more violent, reactionary and racist society.
What sense does it make to condemn American racism on the Senate floor, as passionately and rightfully as Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ), to cite a prominent example, has often done, yet in that same forum repeatedly proclaim virtually unconditional support for the apartheid-state of Israel? The answer is it makes no sense at all. Here, of course, is where AIPAC and the broader Israel lobby do their work to keep liberals like President Joe Biden, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Senator Booker and scores of other liberal Zionists firmly in tow.
So, as we take up the badly needed work of combating racism at home—of putting back under their rocks the reptilian forces that Trump has lured into the open with his demagoguery—it is also crucial to call out the liberals, as well as the conservatives and the far right, for their unquestioning support for Israeli apartheid. Liberals were rightfully outraged that so many Republicans enabled Trump as he methodically tore down our democracy. The same craven Republicans then refused on the evening immediately after the siege of the Capitol to acknowledge Biden’s electoral victory. Such anti-democratic hypocrisy leaves a permanent stain on the record of those Republican enablers and it deserves no-uncertain condemnation. But condemning racism while at the same time kowtowing to the Israel lobby by arming and enabling a racist apartheid state is the liberal hypocrisy shared by many Democrats in Congress as well as Biden.
Liberals and reformers should act on the knowledge that racial justice is a universal and not merely a national human right. Efforts to make Black Lives Matter will be more effective if they acknowledge that brown lives in Palestine and throughout the world matter just as much.
History’s Shadows, a regular column by contributing editor Walter L. Hixson, seeks to place various aspects of Middle East politics and diplomacy in historical perspective. Hixson is the author of Architects of Repression:How Israel and Its Lobby Put Racism, Violence and Injustice at the Center of U.S. Middle East Policy and Israel’s Armor: The Israel Lobby and the First Generation of the Palestine Conflict (available from Middle East Books and More), along with several other books and journal articles. He has been a professor of history for 36 years, achieving the rank of distinguished professor.
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