"Progressives", spare us

[Originally posted at NOW Lebanon]

What exactly is it about those who describe themselves as “progressives” that sends me into such snarls of revulsion?

It isn’t just the California campus accent I hear every time I read it – the kind that throws half a dozen question marks into every sentence (“My name is Karen? and I find it really offensive? when you’re insensitive about somebody’s voice like that?”).

Nor is it that I depart significantly from the typical “progressive” in politics itself. When MJ Rosenberg writes that, “For progressives like me […] there is no choice but to vote for Obama”, I don’t at all disagree with his conclusion.

No, what I think piques me most is the profound insult the word implies about my (and your) intelligence. “Excuse me,” I want to say, “but I’ll decide what’s ‘progressive’ by myself, thank you.”

After all, is there a political person on earth who doesn’t believe their stance or ideology offers humanity a better alternative? Hitler sincerely believed that ridding the world of Jews was doing the rest of us a great service. Lenin thought that establishing a totalitarian police state was a supremely virtuous act. American Christian fundamentalists, messianic Jewish settlers and Lebanon’s very own Islamists all believe that they alone hold the secrets to progess, or Progress.

In their own, milder way, the “progressives” are every bit as tribal as the violent fanatics. And they are equally blind to the ironies incurred at their own expense. George Galloway was undoubtedly correct when he described Israel’s Operation Cast Lead as a “crime” and “massacre” - words that would presumably outrage many a right-thinking “progressive” New York Times reader. And George W. Bush was also undoubtedly correct when he said in 2005 that the Syrian regime “[uses] murder as a tool of policy” - something that Max Blumenthal, “progressive” par excellence, couldn’t bring himself to write until 12,000 dead Syrians later.

“Progressivism”, then, need not always be the friend of progress. Such reflections, however, are unavailable to the morally certain “progressive”, who deals not in honest self-examination but in smug self-congratulation.

Does Obama actually have any thoughts of his own?

[Originally posted at NOW Lebanon]

It’s remarkable how often US President Obama manages to argue all sides of a given debate simultaneously while never disclosing an inkling of what his own thoughts or convictions may be.

Sunday’s speech to the leading component of the Israel Lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), was exemplary in this respect. While claiming that “we all prefer to resolve [the issue of Iran’s nuclear program] diplomatically” and denouncing the recent “loose talk of war,” he was quick to add that Israel had a “sovereign right to make its own decisions about what is required to meet its security needs” and that Washington’s policy was “to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon [using] force [if] necessary.”

In other words, we don’t believe that Israel should bomb Iran, but we do believe that they can do as they please, up to and including bombing Iran. Not since he vetoed the Security Council resolution condemning the same settlements he condemned in Cairo has Obama shown such a magnificent facility with doublethink.

Precisely because it made such little sense, reactions to the speech varied wildly. American liberals were delighted: “Obama Sticks It To Bibi at AIPAC!” tweeted MJ Rosenberg, Senior Foreign Policy Fellow at the left-leaning Media Matters Action Network. Zionists were disappointed, with Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post describing it as “preposterous […] dead wrong […] extraordinary and in many ways devastating.” And yet, Palestinians too were unhappy: “We could not believe that an American president is out there proving that he is good for Israel,” said senior PLO official Hanan Ashrawi, adding, “Shielding Israel from accountability is certainly not in the service of peace.”

Indeed, Obama curiously made no mention of a “sacrosanct” Palestinian “sovereign right” to security; nor did he assert that Palestine “must always have the ability to defend itself, by itself, against any threat;” and nor was there any mention of “the unbreakable bonds” between America and Palestine. These rights, and these privileges, appear to be the exclusive property of the Israelis. Such are the methods by which America designates itself the “honest broker” of the “peace process.”

Remind me again why anyone in the Arab world is looking forward to this man’s reelection?

Christian Zionists urge Americans to "Vote Israel"

As I hope and trust you have all been following, a disagreement has kindled in recent months among a number of American commentators on the affairs of a certain traditional ally of their government's in the eastern Mediterranean. This inflammation concerns the use by some of the term 'Israel Firster' to accuse an American of putting the interests of the Israeli state before those of his own.

I didn't at first feel much impelled to join either side of the argument, having reservations both ways and also thinking that I could probably argue the case both ways too. On the one hand, it would be idle to deny that the Israel Lobby continues to command a peculiar influence on Capitol Hill, and that when America vetoes Security Council resolutions condemning things that it officially opposes (like West Bank settlements) and condoning things that it officially supports (like Palestinian statehood), then this influence ipso facto both supersedes and compromises American (and humanitarian) policy interests. On the other hand, the powers of the Lobby are easily overstated, and the 'Israel Firster' formulation has an uncomfortable echo of its kindred 'neocon', a catch-all slur for anyone who advocates anything but the sheerest isolationism in foreign policy. In his Huffington Post piece, 'Why the Term "Israel First" Matters', the populariser of the term MJ Rosenberg came right out and said that "I don't think we should lose even one soldier in a war against a country that does not directly threaten the American people". Jeffrey Goldberg therefore wasn't at all far off when he defined the term ironically as one "used by [the left] to describe American Jews with whom it disagrees on American Middle East policy".

However, Goldberg and his friends went on to forfeit any claim they could have had to the moral high ground by reaching for the greasiest and most overplayed card in their deck. Just as one can't these days utter a word about, say, the stoning of adulterers in Afghanistan without being accused of 'Islamophobia', so it seems one can't express the smallest reservations about the rising tides of Israeli religious-nationalism without being denounced as an 'anti-Semite'. While being careful to clarify that those who use the term need not necessarily be anti-Semites ("they might just be ignorant"), Goldberg later wrote about the "straight line from Lindbergh to 'Israel-Firster'" and described it as a "neo-Nazi-derived anti-Semitic slur". Whatever the facts may be about the phrase's ugly history, this was a straightforward, self-pitying argument-from-injured-feelings that didn't so much as attempt to address the original points made by Rosenberg et al.

In any case, it is now no longer possible to deny that, at the very least, there do exist some groups who explicitly advocate for putting Israel 'first'. On Tuesday, the Christian Zionist outfit, Christians United for Israel, circulated a petition titled "Defend America - Vote Israel", encouraging American voters to elect precisely whichever candidate is most supportive of the Israeli government. The petition invites the signatory to assert that "When I cast my vote, I'll be looking for a candidate who affirms that one of the best ways to defend America is to stand with Israel." Below is a screenshot of the petition (click to enlarge):

As well as closing the case on 'Israel Firster', this CUFI petition also highlights what Goldberg and his co-ideologues (along with far too many Arabs) don't or won't admit, which is that the Israel Lobby is emphatically not a 'Jewish' lobby. From Jerry Falwell to Pat Robertson to CUFI's John Hagee, some of the most towering constituents of the Lobby (not to mention the most egregious apologists for Israeli aggression and expansionism) have been Christian fundamentalists, who wish to facilitate the Jewish conquest of the biblical Eretz Yisrael only to propitiate the second coming of Christ, at which point the Jews will face a choice between conversion and extermination. How 'anti-Semitic' is it to oppose that outcome?

Only Gulf Arabs can deliver a Palestinian state

President Obama’s promise to veto the Palestinian bid for United Nations membership this week was as predictable as it was despicable. Nobody pretends that Security Council recognition can bring tangible relief from the humiliation of life under occupation – still less anything like ‘a lasting peace’ – but even if its significance were to be chiefly ‘symbolic’ (the journalistic mot du jour), that doesn’t seem good reason in itself to oppose it. To recognise the right of Palestinians to a sovereign state on the territories captured from them in 1967 would be a first step in redressing the defining injustice of the post-WWII era, as well as restoring a modicum of dignity to a people who for three generations have known only betrayal and abuse. It would, in other words, have been a matter of elementary moral principle. But if Obama has shown one trait since assuming the Presidency it is an appalling lack of principle. He’s already used his veto, after all, to kill a Security Council resolution merely condemning settlement construction – this despite his saying in Cairo in 2009 that, “The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements”. When Netanyahu refused to extend a 90-day pause in the expropriation of Palestinian land - a pause that was anyway never honoured to begin with – Obama didn’t just fail to punish him. He spinelessly arranged, along with his promiscuously unprincipled Secretary of State, for a sordid bribe of $3 billion to be slipped inside Netanyahu’s palm, only to have the spoilt brat slam the door in his face. Apparently not yet insulted enough, in his most recent speech on the Middle East in May of this year, Obama became the first American president to publicly refer to Israel as a “Jewish state”, thus simultaneously erasing what the Israeli historian Ilan Pappé called the ‘forgotten Palestinians’ - the 1.2 million Arab citizens of Israel itself - as well as undermining the Israeli moderate majority who understand that a “Jewish state” cannot also be a democratic one, and who have every intention of living in the latter as opposed to the former. He has, in short, presided over the most ardently Zionist American administration on either side of the aisle in recent history (who now remembers a furious George H. W. Bush withholding $10 billion in loan guarantees from the Irgun thug Yitzhak Shamir in response to renewed settlement expansion?). 

As a Westerner living in the Arab world, the question I get asked perhaps more than any other when the subject of Israel comes up is why – why does the American government continue to so unshakeably and unashamedly stand by a regime that colonises its neighbours’ lands and persecutes its ethnic minorities and has a consistent and meticulously-documented record of launching merciless assaults on civilian infrastructure both inside and outside its borders that often, if not always, implicate it in war crimes and crimes against humanity? As resolutely as one must combat all stupid and loathsome innuendo about clandestine ‘Jewish cabals’ usurping world government, for every answer I suggest to them (historic Cold War alliance; supposed shared ‘Judeo-Christian values’; common Islamist enemy; mistaken view of Israel as democracy; misplaced belief in Israeli ‘purity of arms’; etc.) it remains a simple fact that a well-financed and well-organised group of Israel’s supporters continues to command substantial influence over American policy. The Israel Lobby (it’s emphatically not the ‘Jewish lobby’, since a sizeable chunk of its constituents are in fact messianic Christians, who see in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine a portent of the Second Coming of Christ) doesn’t have quite the stranglehold on the Pentagon imagined by some of its critics – for instance, in their 2007 book The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, Professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt write that for “fifteen years, Israel and the lobby have pushed the United States to [use] military force to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities” (p. 282), and yet it was not to Iran but Iraq that the Bush administration turned its guns when the ‘war on terror’ was declared – but at least so far as the Holy Land is concerned, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and its affiliates are capable of making life very difficult for anyone in Washington who takes a line other than their own (see, for example, this piece by MJ Rosenberg, the foreign policy writer who has worked for both AIPAC and the US Senate). Put simply, the strategic benefits of siding with ‘the lobby’ are many, while the costs are as good as nil.

Which raises the question of why there is no equal and opposite ‘Arab lobby’ feared and revered in the same way. After all, the application of Arab ‘leverage’ on Washington is not without historical precedent. In 1973, after the Nixon administration bolstered the Israeli military during the October War, the Organisation of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries placed an oil embargo on the USA and implemented production cuts that swiftly quadrupled the global crude price and ended up costing America “some $48.5 billion in 1974 alone (equal to roughly $140 billion in 2000 prices), due to higher petroleum costs and an estimated 2 percent reduction in GDP” (Mearsheimer and Walt, p. 54). 

The embargo was eventually called off (at the request of Anwar Sadat), but its effects were sufficiently punitive that, nine years later, the mere threat of its resumption was enough to prompt action. In Robert Fisk’s Pity the Nation, he describes how, when it became apparent that Israel’s steamrolling of Lebanon in 1982 was to be taken as far as Beirut,

King Fahd of Saudi Arabia warned that his country would withdraw all its investments from the United States at once and impose oil sanctions against the West within hours if the Israeli army was not brought under control. Reagan was at last made aware of the gravity of the crisis and Haig – who has always denied that he gave Israel a ‘green light’ – resigned. (pp. 268-29)

Sure enough, a ceasefire was obtained - even if, in the end, Reagan was unable to prevent Menachim Begin from his carpet bombing of Beirut. 

Next year, Obama will seek re-election in a contest that everybody agrees will be decided by economic credentials. If Saudi – or any of the oleaginous Gulf states, for that matter – had any interest in securing a Palestinian state at the UN, mightn’t they seek to exploit this nontrivial fact? Brent Crude prices have already breached the $100 mark again for the first time since the vertiginous days of 2008. Isn’t it possible that the prospect of a nudge in the upward direction might give Obama some pause for thought? Even if it’s true that the ‘oil weapon’ would no longer be as destructive today as it was in ’73, there are other potential arrows in the Arab quiver. How keen would Obama be, for example, on Saudi dumping its nearly $500 billion holdings of US debt two months after the country lost its AAA credit rating? To what extent would he be pleased to hear that, say, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, whose assets have been conservatively estimated at $340 billion, was exiting its American real estate and equity positions (including the 5% of Citigroup it generously bought at the height of the credit crisis) to pursue new opportunities in, I don’t know, China? 

As it happens, some influential Gulf Arabs have caught on to the simple force of such considerations, and have hinted at a resurgence of the Arab lobby of bygone days. Turki al-Faisal, a Saudi prince and former ambassador to the US, wrote in June in an op-ed in the Washington Post that 

In September, the kingdom will use its considerable diplomatic might to support the Palestinians in their quest for international recognition. American leaders have long called Israel an “indispensable” ally. They will soon learn that there are other players in the region — not least the Arab street — who are as, if not more, “indispensable.”

As he elaborated:

There will be disastrous consequences for U.S.-Saudi relations if the United States vetoes U.N. recognition of a Palestinian state. It would mark a nadir in the decades-long relationship as well as irrevocably damage the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and America’s reputation among Arab nations. The ideological distance between the Muslim world and the West in general would widen — and opportunities for friendship and cooperation between the two could vanish.

This was a theme repeated in a New York Times op-ed earlier this month, in which al-Faisal warned that a veto at the UN would mean that 

Saudi Arabia would no longer be able to cooperate with America in the same way it historically has. With most of the Arab world in upheaval, the “special relationship” between Saudi Arabia and the United States would increasingly be seen as toxic by the vast majority of Arabs and Muslims, who demand justice for the Palestinian people.

How did we get to here? If it’s nauseating to be lectured on “justice” by a senior emissary of a monarchical Wahhabi police state that is itself crushing the democratic aspirations of Bahrainis this very minute (we can be sure that if the Palestinians were Shia, there would be no lofty talk from Riyadh about their “quest” for freedom), then it’s a mark of how contemptible the 2009 Nobel Peace Laureate’s handling of ‘the Conflict’ has been that such an unsavoury character can appear genuinely courageous and principled next to him. For Christ’s sake, you know you’ve lost your way when you make the Saudis look good. Yet as long as Obama continues to consign the ‘peace process’ to the cemetery, it will remain the case that only Gulf Arabs have the power to deliver a Palestinian state. May they do so with all speed.