Does the tail wag the dog?

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Does the tail wag the dog?
Israel and imperialism

by Pete Brown,
in the May 2003 issue of Communist Voice

Excerpts:

Does the tail wag the dog? This is the issue posed by a variety of bourgeois opponents of Israel who claim that support for Israel is supposedly bad for American imperialism. They assert that Israel, the little tail attached to the great USA dog, actually controls and manipulates the dog. They especially blame Israel for the war against Iraq, asserting that the Israeli zionists used American dupes to do their fighting for them. Different people are giving this view, and it has some influence in the anti-war movement and among activists, distracting from an anti-imperialist critique of Israel. This view gets sustenance from an unspoken anti-Semitism promoted by anti-progressive right-wing trends, and it promotes allegiance to US imperialism as the supposedly "good" alternative to Israeli aggression in the Middle East.

... A different version of this theme was provided by Congressman James Moran (Democrat of Virginia). At a March 3 anti-war forum Moran, responding to a question from the audience, blamed Jewish religious leaders for the war, saying "If it were not for the strong support of the Jewish community for this war with Iraq, we would not be doing this. " Later, under criticism for the anti-Semitic tone of this remark, Moran apologized and retracted it. But it is useful to go into this further because his remark does reflect the view of many people, and it needs to be refuted.

There's nothing wrong with asserting that Israel and US imperialism have a close coincidence of interests. ... It's also true that American policies in the Mideast prop up Israel. Indeed it's hard to imagine Israel surviving without American financial and military aid. In that sense it's certainly true that Israel uses the US.

But Moran's comment veered into anti-Semitism when he singled out Jewish religious leaders as the source of US imperialist aggression. The real cause of the attack on Iraq is the campaign of the entire American bourgeoisie for its imperialist interests. Even if the Jewish community were completely united behind the war, this by itself would not determine major US foreign policy. And as a matter of fact, the Jewish community was sharply divided about the war, just as Americans in general were. ... Public opinion polls showed just about identical numbers supporting the war among both Americans as a whole and Jewish Americans.

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The Arab bourgeoisie and governments put forward a bourgeois nationalist view of the struggle against Israeli oppression. They may denounce Israel sharply and present this as anti-imperialist, but they are concerned to continue to curry favor with imperialism. They want the US to lean away from Israel and support them. Thus they cover over US imperialist aggression in the Mideast and excuse it as caused by Israeli "control" of the US. Supposedly the US has no interest in attacking Iraq, it is simply being "used" by the Israelis. Unfortunately this view has some influence among activists in the anti-war and pro-Palestinian movements. Many of these activists are anti-U. S. imperialist, but some are influenced by this bourgeois nationalist view.

Pinning the crimes of US imperialism solely onto Israel and "the Jewish lobby" has an anti-Semitic tenor to it, and the spokesmen for Arab bourgeois nationalism are sometimes charged with this. But they haughtily deny the charge by claiming "It's impossible for me, an Arab, to be anti-Semitic; I'm Semitic myself!" Ridiculous word-chopping like this does not really answer the charge.

This does not mean that everyone charged with harboring anti-Jewish prejudices by the zionists and their supporters actually does. Pro-zionist groups make a habit of trying to tar any critic of Israel with the anti-Semitic brush to try and deflect criticism of Israel. They know that, especially since the Nazi Holocaust, this is a very sensitive subject. But it's certainly possible to condemn the oppressive behavior of the state of Israel without promoting hatred for the Jewish people as an ethnic/religious group.

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The main motive for war against Iraq could not have been to protect Israel. More likely prospects for US protection were the pro-U. S. , oil-rich, reactionary emirates of Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrein, etc. as well as Saudi Arabia, from possible takeover by Saddam Hussein. And at the same time the US was protecting these regimes, it was also using Iraq as an example of what happens when you don't toe the line for U. S. imperialism. The "protection" was also a threat against the regimes and the people in these countries to stay away from radical Islamism, radical Arab nationalism, or any anti-imperialist political trends.

The main motive for the war was for the US to remain the overall superpower, the arbiter between all of the conflicting interests in the Mideast. Saddam Hussein aspired to take over this place in the Persian Gulf region, but the US crushed his regime, and so the US remains the major imperialist power broker, a position it took over from Britain following World War II. <>

See the whole article at http://www.communistvoice.org/31cTailWagDog.html.