PALESTINIAN ON HOROWITZ LIST: Israel doesn't drive US Arab policy

Joseph Massad of Columbia University has been a consistent target of AIPAC and the Horowitz academic police, so I'd be curious to see their reaction to this piece.

He argues what I suspect is true--Israel is hardly the mouse that has conned the lion of successive generations of American leaders to act against our national interests, but instead serves as our "bad cop" in the region, with just enough distance between us that we can claim we can't control them.

Ironically, if this is the case, Israel faces a severe risk: as soon as they no longer serve our purposes, we can turn on them just as we did Saddam, Noriega, and any number of other clients.

I suspect the recent Harvard article on AIPAC is part of a shift like that. "Yes, we screwed up in Iraq, but the Jews made us do it," seems to be the implication.


KEY EXCERPTS:

March 25 / 26, 2006

It's US Policy That Inflames the Arab World

Blaming the Israel Lobby


By JOSEPH MASSAD

[snip]

The underlying argument has been simple and has been told time and again by Washington's regime allies in the Arab world, pro-US liberal and Arab intellectuals, conservative and liberal US intellectuals and former politicians, and even leftist Arab and American activists who support Palestinian rights, namely, that absent the pro- Israel lobby, America would at worst no longer contribute to the oppression of Arabs and Palestinians and at best it would be the Arabs' and the Palestinians' best ally and friend.


[snip]


Let me start with the premise of the argument, namely its effect of shifting the blame for US policies from the United States onto Israel and its US lobby. According to this logic, it is not the United States that should be held directly responsible for all its imperial policies in the Arab world and the Middle East at large since World War II, rather it is Israel and its lobby who have pushed it to launch policies that are detrimental to its own national interest and are only beneficial to Israel. Establishing and supporting Arab and other Middle East dictatorships, arming and training their militaries, setting up their secret police apparatuses and training them in effective torture methods and counter-insurgency to be used against their own citizens should be blamed, according to the logic of these studies, on Israel and its US lobby.

[snip]

The United States has had a consistent policy since World War II of fighting all regimes across the Third World who insist on controlling their national resources, whether it be land, oil, or other valuable minerals. This extends from Iran in 1953 to Guatemala in 1954 to the rest of Latin America all the way to present-day Venezuela. Africa has fared much worse in the last four decades, as have many countries in Asia. Why would the United States support nationalist regimes in the Arab world who would nationalise natural resources and stop their pillage by American capital absent the pro-Israel lobby also remains a mystery unexplained by these studies. Finally, the United States government has opposed and overthrown or tried to overthrow any regime that seeks real and tangible independence in the Third World and is especially galled by those regimes that pursue such policies through democratic elections.

The overthrow of regimes from Arbenz to Goulart to Mossadegh and Allende and the ongoing attempts to overthrow Chavez are prominent examples, as is the overthrow of nationalist regimes like Sukarno's and Nkrumah's. The terror unleashed on populations who challenged the US-installed friendly regimes from El Salvador and Nicaragua to Zaire to Chile and Indonesia resulted in the killing of hundreds of thousands, if not millions by repressive police and militaries trained for these important tasks by the US. This is aside from direct US invasions of South East Asian and Central American countries that killed untold millions for decades.

Why would the US and its repressive agencies stop invading Arab countries, or stop supporting the repressive police forces of dictatorial Arab regimes and why would the US stop setting up shadow governments inside its embassies in Arab capitals to run these countries' affairs (in some cases the US shadow government runs the Arab country in question down to the smallest detail with the Arab government in question reduced to executing orders) if the pro-Israel lobby did not exist is never broached by these studies let alone explained.

FULL TEXT:

http://counterpunch.com/massad03252006.html


israel palestine lobby AIPAC joseph massad oil david horowitz academic freedom the Professors The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt