I came across this little tidbit in my dead-trees this morning:
People at the school who knew Abdulmutallab said he was not openly extremist, though he expressed anger over Israel’s actions against Palestinians in Gaza.
Abdulmutallab, of course, is the Nigerian student who tried to blow up Northwest 253 into Detroit on Christmas Day, and the school where people knew him was the Sana Institute for the Arabic Language, which he attended during one month of his three or four month stay in Yemen this past fall.
Now, if this were an isolated instance I'd probably not think anything more of it. But it's not isolated. Last summer, while teaching English to foreign students, I asked a Saudi kid to remember where he was and what he was doing when he learned about a disaster. The disaster he chose?
Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli invasion of Gaza.
More on the flip...
A lot of the reporting on Abdulmutallab has focused on trying to identify a moment when he "flipped," that is, when he chose to seek out and join a terrorist network. The New York Times has speculated it happened while he was a student at University College London, but there are plenty of anomalies in the very article offering the speculation. First, in the three years he lived in London he never came to the attention of Britain's counter-terrorism authorities; in fact, a British security official is quoted that he had "never shown up on the radar screen." Furthermore,
Friends, relatives, a teacher and fellow Muslim students say they cannot point to a trigger moment in recent years in which an amiable and privileged young man, devout if also disaffected, aspired to mass murder.
They suspect, the Times reports, the trigger came "in the Islamic hothouse of London." But the only evidence for that suspicion is that he was a devout Muslim and involved in British Muslim organizations in the immediate aftermath of the Tube bombings, and that he had visited -- three times in three years -- the London Muslim Center in Whitechapel.
The people who knew him in Sana, however, were quite clear about what had radicalized him: Israel's brutal bombardment and invasion of Gaza in December 2008.
The United States is currently involved in a global conflict with an Islamic terrorist network, and Abdulmutallab's attack on Christmas Day was only the most recent one by that network directed against civilians on US soil. Thankfully, it failed.
While the Christmas bombing raises legitimate questions about the security systems put in place by the US government and its allies to prevent assaults on the air travel system, we also need to think about the broader question of what drives people to commit these kinds of attacks. It is in response to that latter question, I believe, that the analysis of Mearsheimer and Walt becomes relevant.
People undoubtedly recall that in March 2006 the political scientists John Mearsheimer (University of Chicago) and Stephen Walt (Harvard) published in the London Review of Books an article entitled "The Israel Lobby" (subsequently expanded into a book, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy). The article and book became controversial, ostensibly due to Mearsheimer and Walt's contention that pro-Israel lobbying groups in the United States, such as AIPAC, the ADL, and MAJO, actually influence legislation and foreign policy. Critics saw them as reiterating old antisemitic tropes of an international Jewish conspiracy, though a careful reading of the article and book demonstrate nothing other than a straightforward political science reading of how interest groups organize political pressure to accomplish their objectives.
What I'm more concerned about here, though, are some underlying premises in the Mearsheimer and Walt article. They frame their argument around the question of whether an alliance with Israel is a net asset to US foreign policy:
One might argue that Israel was an asset during the Cold War. By serving as America’s proxy after 1967, it helped contain Soviet expansion in the region and inflicted humiliating defeats on Soviet clients like Egypt and Syria. It occasionally helped protect other US allies (like King Hussein of Jordan) and its military prowess forced Moscow to spend more on backing its own client states. It also provided useful intelligence about Soviet capabilities.
Backing Israel was not cheap, however, and it complicated America’s relations with the Arab world. For example, the decision to give $2.2 billion in emergency military aid during the October War triggered an Opec oil embargo that inflicted considerable damage on Western economies. For all that, Israel’s armed forces were not in a position to protect US interests in the region. The US could not, for example, rely on Israel when the Iranian Revolution in 1979 raised concerns about the security of oil supplies, and had to create its own Rapid Deployment Force instead.
The first Gulf War revealed the extent to which Israel was becoming a strategic burden. The US could not use Israeli bases without rupturing the anti-Iraq coalition, and had to divert resources (e.g. Patriot missile batteries) to prevent Tel Aviv doing anything that might harm the alliance against Saddam Hussein. History repeated itself in 2003: although Israel was eager for the US to attack Iraq, Bush could not ask it to help without triggering Arab opposition. So Israel stayed on the sidelines once again.
So, while an alliance with Israel may have helped the US in its strategic conflict with the Soviet Union, following the Soviet collapse the US-Israel alliance interfered with the US's ability to solidify effective alliances with Arab countries.
Mearsheimer and Walt continue, however, and here they get to the point that interests me in this diary:
Israel is a liability in the war on terror and the broader effort to deal with rogue states.
‘Terrorism’ is not a single adversary, but a tactic employed by a wide array of political groups. The terrorist organisations that threaten Israel do not threaten the United States, except when it intervenes against them (as in Lebanon in 1982). Moreover, Palestinian terrorism is not random violence directed against Israel or ‘the West’; it is largely a response to Israel’s prolonged campaign to colonise the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
More important, saying that Israel and the US are united by a shared terrorist threat has the causal relationship backwards: the US has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel, not the other way around. Support for Israel is not the only source of anti-American terrorism, but it is an important one, and it makes winning the war on terror more difficult. There is no question that many al-Qaida leaders, including Osama bin Laden, are motivated by Israel’s presence in Jerusalem and the plight of the Palestinians. Unconditional support for Israel makes it easier for extremists to rally popular support and to attract recruits.
That last line bears repeating:
Unconditional [US] support for Israel makes it easier for extremists to rally popular support and to attract recruits.
That statement becomes eerily predictive in light of the Christmas Day bombing attempt.
My dead trees had a piece of good news today from Israel, for those of us who are interested in universal human rights:
Israel’s Supreme Court ordered the military yesterday to allow Palestinians to travel on the part of a major highway that runs through the West Bank, handing Palestinians their biggest victory yet against Israel’s practice of reserving some roads for Jews.
That same news, however, makes it very hard on those who have tried to argue that the apartheid comparison has no place in discussions of Israel policy on the West Bank. That road was closed to Palestinians and open only to Jews for seven years. Until the Israeli authorities opened an "alternative route" in 2007, Palestinians in the region served by the road had to travel dirt roads to get to Ramallah, the effective Palestinian capital city. Even the alternative route, approved by Israeli authorities for Palestinians, doubled the travel time needed to get to Ramallah.
The good news is that the Israeli judicial system chose to strike down the apartheid practice, for now. The bad news is that the apartheid system was allowed to exist for as long as it did.
In more bad news, Israel continues to thumb its nose at the US and Palestinian insistence that it actually abide by the freeze in new settlement construction it has agreed to, and never honored, for over a decade now.
Under the Obama administration, the US has taken small steps towards a more even-handed approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Christmas Day bombing makes clear that those steps have been far too small and far too hesitant. Israel receives all kinds of special privileges from the US. Yet it continues to be an intransigent peace partner, it continues to routinely violate basic Palestinian human rights.
It's time for the US to cut off Israel, let it survive on its own devices. We'll be doing ourselves a favor, we'll make Arab-Israeli peace more likely, and we'll strike a severe blow at one of al Qaeda's most successful recruiting tools.