The Israel lobby’s rapid reactionary force has wasted no time dismissing Mearsheimer and Walt’s brave LRB piece on said lobby. Yet the analysis also draws flak from more progressive quarters. At CounterPunch, Joseph Massad writes from a Chomskyite point of view:
Some would argue that even though Israel attempts to overlap its interests with those of the US, that its lobby is misleading American policy-makers and shifting their position from one of objective assessment of what is truly in America’s best interest and that of Israel’s. The argument runs as follows: US support for Israel causes groups who oppose Israel to hate the US and target it for attacks. It also costs the US friendly media coverage in the Arab world, affects its investment potential in Arab countries, and loses its important allies in the region, or at least weakens these allies. But none of this is true. The United States has been able to be Israel’s biggest backer and financier, its staunchest defender and weapon-supplier while maintaining strategic alliances with most if not all Arab dictatorships, including the Palestinian Authority under both Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas.
Note the change from ‘groups who oppose Israel’ to ‘Arab dictatorships’. Well yes, exactly. Despite being Israel’s sugar daddy, the US has been able to bribe a whole swath of Arab dictatorships with cash and arms. This, however, hardly endears the US to the groups opposing Israel, since the dictatorships (including Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, pre-coup Mauritania, Egypt, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia) are quite unloved by these groups (notably the Muslim Brotherhood and some of its spawns). What is more, thanks in part to the Palestine question, the groups are gaining enough popularity to flush out existing regimes at the ballot box if allowed to, as they should be according to US policy. And yes, Hamas’ triumph over the über-corrupt, US-funded Fatah is a case in point.
Meanwhile, Hitchens writing on Slate is at pains to defuse the charge — which Mearsheimer and Walt nowhere actually make — that Israel produced al-Qaeda:
As for the idea that Israel is the root cause of the emergence of al-Qaida: Where have these two gentlemen been? Bin Laden’s gang emerged from a whole series of tough and reactionary battles in Central and Eastern Asia, from the war for a separate Muslim state in the Philippines to the fighting in Kashmir, the Uighur territories in China, and of course Afghanistan. There are hardly any Palestinians in its ranks, and its communiqués have been notable for how little they say about the Palestinian struggle. Bin Laden does not favor a Palestinian state; he simply regards the whole area of the former British Mandate as a part of the future caliphate. The right of the Palestinians to a state is a just demand in its own right, but anyone who imagines that its emergence would appease — or would have appeased — the forces of jihad is quite simply a fool.
Indeed, but is it not equally inane to conflate the strategic visions of the upper echelons in the radical Salafi movement with whatever drives some kid from Yorkshire to detonate himself on the London tube? The cannon fodder and the chief ideologue need not see eye to eye, as evidenced by al-Zawahiri’s rueful admissions that Israeli occupation is what rouses the rabble. In a July 2005 letter* to al-Zarqawi, he notes:
The Muslim masses — for many reasons, and this is not the place to discuss it — do not rally except against an outside occupying enemy, especially if the enemy is firstly Jewish, and secondly American.
Oh, and Chris? Here is the subsequent sentence:
This, in my limited opinion, is the reason for the popular support that the mujahedeen enjoy in Iraq, by the grace of God.
Massad and Hitchens are right that neither Arab dictatorships nor the cadres of Islamic revolution give a damn about Palestinian statehood. What they conveniently ignore is that both types of actor exploit the popular outrage at Israel for bait and switch. With the former, the switch is continued kleptocracy justified by the need for ‘unity against the Jews’; with the latter, ‘defensive Jihad’ against ‘Jewish-crusader aggression’. As neither wants the conflict resolved, the only question is who stands to benefit more from it in the long run. The answer is probably their mutual enemy, the “moderate Islamists” of the Muslim Brotherhood.
And since neither of these three is to Hitchens’ nor Massad’s liking, might conceivably a reappraisal of this whole problematic be in order? Needless to say, I am not holding my breath.
*) There are some doubts as to the letter’s authenticity, but the same point is made in al-Zawahiri’s book Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner.
Moussaoui wants to die, or more precisely: to be killed by the enemy. From his point of view this is infinitely better than rotting in a prison cell, as to his mind it qualifies as martyrdom (shaheed) even though he took no active part in 9/11; cf. e.g. the ahadith collection of Muslim: Vol. 20, No. 4694-6. These are some of the benefits of shaheed, as per ahadith he probably accepts: