Living and working in Israel for nearly a decade, I was often confused. An expression often repeated to me, both by Arabs and Jews, in many contexts, but especially in the context of international politics was: "The fish always stinks from the head."
What this usually meant was that any analysis focused on the pawns, rather than on the movers of pawns upon the Grand Chessboard of global affairs, cannot hope to affect its malodorous process. What this means currently, I perceive, is that if U.S. citizens truly wish to affect political trends in the Middle East, we must transform U.S. foreign policy.
Following, a little history in support of this point. These are my own lecture notes and I shall be happy to provide scholarly and other references upon request).
Imperialism Unravels in the Middle East
During the mid 1800s, the modernizing forces unleashed by Western capitalism were transforming the very populations it exploited -- Islamic peoples in particular. Sherif Hussein of Mecca viewed the British promise of autonomy in exchange for his and his fellow Arabs' aid in defeating the Ottoman Empire during World War I as an opportunity to create a modern Arabia, not an ancient one. The West, however, desired neither. The Versailles Treaty, and subsequently the League of Nations crafted by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, divided Arabia into a set of geo-political states designed to undermine, not enhance, Arabic yearnings for political independence. Arabs were preferred as feudal subjects rather than as participants in Western democracy.
Arab citizens took their, however contrived, new nations quite seriously, however. They began reconstructing them according to their own criteria. When Abdel Gamal Nasser, the charismatic premier of Egypt, raised the banner of pan-Arabism during the 1950s, calling for all Arabs to rise up and depose Western overlords, he received strong affirmation throughout the Arabic world. In response, the United States wrested control of the Middle-East from its European allies, arguing that more than profits were at stake: a united, anti-Imperialist Arabia led by Nasser could shift the balance of power in the Cold-War to Stalin's advantage.
Thus began a new kind of colonialism. Since before WW I, European governors had ruled native populations throughout the Middle East, India, and Africa through tightly controlled native surrogates. These became easy targets for sophisticated revolutionaries. U.S. neo-colonialism operated more subtly and more repressively. Throughout Latin America U.S. intelligence operatives recruited and trained native cadres, aided them to depose elected leaders, and then allowed them wide latitude so long as they delivered the profits and services demanded of them. In most cases, most spectacularly in Guatemala, these regimes operated with unprecedented cruelty. In the Middle East, this process took the form of a partnership between the CIA and the religiously extremist, militant Wahabi tribes of Saudi Arabia.
The CIA-Wahabi Partnership
Saudi Arabia, the only Post WWI Arabic nation left essentially unaffected by the European reconstruction of the Middle East was a barren, brutally hot desert peninsula with no natural resources deemed worth exploiting. In addition, it was populated by a group of fanatical Bedouin tribes: the Wahabis. These zealots had formed a militant confederation during the 1700s which the Turks suppressed only at considerable cost. The Wahabis varied in ritual and custom to some degree but remained unified in their commitment to Jihad -- the ruthless cleansing from Islam of religious infidelity. They despised other Post World War I Arabs, unimpressed by their anti-Western nationalist aims, which Wahabis viewed as thinly disguised forms of anti-traditional modernism, hence un-Islamic and unacceptable. When oil was discovered in Saudi Arabia during the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt's Administration established a fragile liaison with King Ibn Saud and the Wahabis (the Saud family "ruled" Saudi Arabia only at sufferance of the tribes) in order to facilitate creation of The Arabian-American Oil Company. Gradually, FDR realized that this liaison could have benefits beyond economic venturism.
Aware of the Wahabis' hatred of the West, but also of their hunger to usurp the same Arab nationalist movements that the United States found threatening, Roosevelt proposed an arrangement based on the pragmatic Middle-Eastern aphorism: "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." When the Office of Strategic Services (OSS -- precursor to the CIA) was created, one of its first duties involved nurturing a U.S.-Wahabi partnership. A few decades later the CIA replaced the OSS and used the partnership to undermine Nasser's influence in the Arabic world. This they accomplished by recruiting the fanatical but weak Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt, and converting it into a force capable of crippling Nasser from within his own country. The Israelis army, working closely with the CIA, applied the coup-de-grace to his aspirations during The Six Days War in the summer of 1967.
Al Qaeda and Hamas became outgrowths of the CIA-Wahabi partnership: the former focused upon spreading its influence throughout the Islamic world, the latter upon harassing Israel. At the same time, the CIA continued to nurture Israel as a collaborator in the undermining of Arabic nationalism, one result being that Israel's own intelligence service apparently channeled funds to Hamas even while being attacked by its operatives.
Israel and the Palestinians .
To understand how such a thing is even imaginable, it is necessary to understand that prior to Israel's service to the United States in removing Nasser, Israel had watched its status with United States policy makers steadily diminish. Many in the State Deparment and on the Senate Foreign Relations Council felt that the raw deal Arabs had received from the British following WWI required redress. Others were openly Anti-Semitic. Serious discussions took place in the Knesset, the Israeli house of government, concerning how to cope with the loss of U.S. support. For a period, the situation appeared hopeless. Truly desperate measures were debated among high ranking Israelis. Assisting the United States in deposing Nasser reversed Israel's fortunes and brought it decisively into the Western fold.
Since 1967, in spite of strong sentiment among many Israeli citizens in favor of establishing rapport with their neighbors, no political candidate in Israel advocating such policy in defiance of U.S. wishes has achieved stature. Nor have businesses attempting to build upon Arabs as suppliers of labor or raw materials, or as potential customers been able to flourish in opposition to U.S. disapproval. Israel has been economically supported by the United States, but Israeli efforts to establish trade relations of its own in Europe, Asia, Africa and South America have been blocked time after time -- except as regards the sale of weapons. Whether Israeli policies toward Arabs might have taken a different course had maintaining U.S. support not played a determining factor is certainly a legitimate question. Whether Israelis policies should have taken a different course may turn out to be the far more crucial issue.
Had Israel absorbed rather than rebuffed Palestinian citizens expelled in 1948, the small nation would have taken on great risk. At his most powerful, Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leader Yassir Arafat could not protect his people from the strong influence of Hamas. Hamas required Palestinians to operate as mercenaries, not as a small nation finally occupying a niche of its own. Fully aware of this fact, respected Israeli figures argued that the risk involved in absorbing Palestinians must be taken nevetheless, not only for moral reasons, but in hopes of assuring Israel's long term survival. Their voices are now systematically drowned out and in one notable case, it is suspected, may have been silenced by assassination. The Palestinians, on the other hand, have possessed almost no power to resist the fate prescribed for them by more powerful forces than their own internal leadership. They have been among the most victimized people on earth - by Israel, certainly, but not only by Israel
The Islamic Fundamentalist Movement
The CIA-Wahabi partnership swiftly expanded into a sophisticated, high-tech, opportunistic and highly formidable mafia-like network of organizations committed to undermining weak nationalist regimes throughout the Islamic world. During the late 1970s it mobilized and strengthened extremist organizations in Pakistan, creating the Taliban movement which forced the withdrawal of the Soviet Union from Afghanistan.
In 1979, the Ayatollah Khomeini wrested control of Iran from the latest in a succession of U.S. puppet dictators and orchestrated the kidnapping of key U.S. officials stationed there. Iran instantly became the new champion of Arab nationalism and pan-Arabism. Hezbollah was created in Lebanon to assist the PLO in its campaign for acknowledgement and nationhood, and to bring Lebanon, the most Westernized Arabic nation, into the Islamic fold. The fact that Iran was Shiite while the vast majority of the Islamic world was Sunni, and that these two branches of Islam had traditionally been in conflict, weighed far less heavily in the modern Middle East than Iran's accomplishment at having defied Western imperialism.
Underestimation of Khomeini caused the United States huge embarrassment. In spite of misgivings within the State Department, the CIA-Wahabi partnership was already showing signs of unraveling. What had been a partnership controlled by the United States was becoming an Islamic Fundamentalist Movement (IFM) operating independently of CIA control. Nevertheless, U.S. policy makers decided to continue the partnership as the best means of sabotaging Iran's rapidly growing influence. This effort was not unsuccessful. Iran's momentum was slowed. The IMF, mainly through Hamas (the nature of Syria's involvement with Hezbollah and Hamas is unclear) undermined Hezbollah's efforts to bond with the PLO in Lebanon. For a decade the decision to utilize rather than disband the CIA-IFM partnership seemed vindicated.
During the 1990s, this arrangement crumbled as the IFM attacked one U.S. installation after another, both abroad and on U.S. soil. On September 11, 2001, it seemed to most observers tragically clear that CIA miscalculations in "handling" the Middle-East were far more serious than the State Department or the public had imagined. Most analysts concluded that the U.S. had lost (if it ever had) control of the IFM, whose independence now accelerated dramatically.
This trend clearly threatened the modernizing nationalist Islamic world as well as the United States. It seemed to many knowledgeable observers that with the cold war threat of communism ended, U.S. officials must finally abandon their outmoded policy of discouraging Islamic independence. It was now time aggressively to seek rapprochement with Arabic nations. History had shown that they and other Third World peoples wished above all to share in the fruits of capitalism, not to undermine it. With neo-colonialism demonstrably a failed policy, it seemed patently irrational for the U.S. to continue to undermine Third World efforts to grow and develop -- not only in the Middle East, but throughout Africa, Asia and Latin America as well.
As subsequent events soon proved, U.S. foreign policy defied this logic in favor of a Machiavellian paradigm justified by Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations analysis, and other Neoconservative writings. This paradigm envisions a world of nation-sized tribes, each driven by its own brand of absolutism and each bent on conflict and conquest. The continued control of the world by Western nations, in particular by the United States is essential not only for their own citizens' survival, but for the survival of all civilization on the planet. Whether the policies resulting from this paradigm turn out to be rational, however ruthless they are, or merely ruthless, and very likely self-destructive, remains to be seen.
The current behavior of Israel in response to the apparent kidnapping of its soldiers by Lebanese forces appears rational only within the above context. Certainly the old Israeli rationale that destroying their harassers' home-base dissolves their support and hence nullifies them as a threat, no longer applies. If Hamas and Hezbollah begin to act in concert, as seems all too likely, Israel's tormenters can operate from almost anywhere in the world. On the other hand, the politicization of Lebanon could serve U.S. interests well.
Christian Lebanese have long been regarded in the Middle East as more Western than Eastern in style and culture. Many are also quite wealthy, owning residences around the world and using Beirut as only an occasional address. One of the most beautiful countries in the world, Lebanon is called the Switzerland of the Middle East. Like the Swiss, Christian Lebanese have engaged little in global politics. Only once, during the late 1950s, were U.S. Marines required to bolster a Westernized regime challenged by Islamic reformers. A more politicized Christian Lebanon, one allowing the United States to base military operations there, and openly willing to oppress the PLO and reject Hezbollah, would constitute a major Neo-con coup. It was, after all, Christians who forced Palestinian refugees since 1948 into the South of Lebanon, denying them aid and comfort, and it was Christian militia who slaughtered PLO refugees at Sabra and Shatilla -- fully aided and abetted by Ariel Sharon's troops.
Such a plan might also have the effect of bringing Hezbollah and Hamas together in another "The enemy of my enemy is my friend" arrangement. Should Iran, until recently the most rapidly modernizing Arabic state, the state best positioned and eager to initiate business ventures with India, China and Europe, move toward the IFM, this too would seem to serve Neocon interests well. It would reinforce the Clash of Civilizations paradigm and enhance U.S. control of a Western coalition operating within it. For Israel, it may well mean constant harassment, steady hemorrhaging, and if not death a condition of terrible misery for many years to cme.
Americans would be amazed at how many Israeli soldiers have long viewed Arabian foes as pawns to the same degree that they themselves are pawns in a game designed by the Great Powers. Most of my own close friends in Israel feel that their leaders have made bad choices, nevertheless. Resisting the CIA during the last half-century, we feel, would have been wiser, however dangerous for Israel, than facilitating its goal of helping to create "balagan" (chaos, in Hebrew) in the Middle East.
This is not to exonerate Israelis, merely to describe their situation. The treatment of Palestinians, by many parties, constitutes unspeakable injustice. If Israelis' complicity in this injustice has been coerced to a significant degree, and if resisting this coercion carried risks, Israelis could still have refused. Observers need not find them faultless because coerced, only acknowledge the coercion even as full blame is assigned. More to the point, should the coercion end, there is considerable reason to predict Israel to operate differently than in the past. This constitutes small consolation to her victims, but is a most significant fact in terms of anticipating what a world free of U.S. manipulation might look like.
In short, the fish stinks not from the torso or the tail, but from the head. The head, the primary force that still drives Israel, is the government that claims to represent us.