This morning on “Morning Joe” and last night on NPR’s “On Point,” an American conversation began about the conflict between our “values” and “interests” in the Middle East. The simple outlines of the discussion are: We have a strong interest in Middle East peace, and Mubarak enforced it for us. But supporting a dictator conflicts with our democratic values.
The desperate tension at the heart of the conversation, which Pat Buchanan managed to sneak into MSNBC this morning, is: the Egyptian people do not want the peace treaty with Israel.
And therefore, the Egyptian people must be tyrannized forever– 85 million people denied human rights, the rights of assembly and free speech, their children’s futures blighted, all to preserve an American interest.
What is not brought up in these conversations– what Pat Buchanan knows and so does the crew on the NPR show last night, Stephen Kinzer, CFR’s Susan Glasser, the NYT’s Nick Kristof, and Harvard’s Nicholas Burns know it, and all are afraid to bring up– is that the peace in the Middle East has come at a terrible price not just for the people of Egypt but for the people of Palestine. Let us remember that the treaty that Sadat signed and Mubarak upheld said that it was to bring self-determination to the Palestinian people, but that principle has been ignored by the U.S. for 30 years. And negotiation and “dialogue” between vastly unequal parties has replaced any idea of fairness, with the unsurprising consequence that the weaker party, the Palestinians, have seen their lands usurped, their grandfathers evicted or shot in their beds, a third of their population forced to live in an open-air prison, and their political culture split in two (between resistance and collaboration).
And the Egyptians people’s understanding of these political realities, which surpasses the understanding of them in the American Establishment, is why they don’t like that peace.
As the Muslim Brotherhood’s Essam Al-Aryan explained to a baffled Robert Siegel the other night on NPR:
The [Egyptian] people are not rushing for war. But it is not our duty to protect Israel from Palestinians. We are not guards for Israel.
Siegel was baffled because he seemed to need to ascribe this feeling to Islamic fundamentalists. But again I remind you: when my bus filled with internationals (organized by Code Pink) left Egypt for Gaza in ’09, the humble construction workers of El-Arish put down their tools to applaud us– out of a noble understanding of human dignity and respect.
This American discussion of values and interests has just begun.
It will not be complete without two components: 1, Realists like Chas Freeman and Steve Walt taking part, to explain that It is absolutely in America’s interest to respect the self-determination of the Egyptian people and the Palestinian people, and 2, Leftwingers like Helena Cobban and Jerry Haber and Medea Benjamin and As’ad AbuKhalil and Noam Sheizaf taking part to tell us what this Israel is that somehow requires, as an American interest, tyranny for all the Arab peoples (and the invasion of Iraq). And that is a rightwing Israel, a racist Israel that destroys the human rights of half the people under its governance because they are not Jewish. Not really an American interest at all.
And this is why I keep saying that the Egyptian revolution is coming here. Because the discussion will not be over without bringing up foundational issues suppressed just as long as the Egyptians have been suppressed:
–Why did the United States decide that the establishment of a Jewish state in the Arab world was in its interest? And I will just inject here that Franklin Roosevelt promised the king of Saudi Arabia before his (FDR’s) death that the Arab peoples would be consulted before the United States did any such thing, and this promise was later nullified. Indeed, the State Department warned Harry Truman that a Jewish state could only be established by force and preserved by force, prophetic words if ever there were any, when you see that Egyptians don’t have the right to assembly or freedom of speech, because of the American interest in Israel.
–Why did Truman overrule his own State Department in siding with the Zionist lobby and siding with Partition? And here I would inject that he was deeply moved by the suffering of Jews in the camps in Europe after the Holocaust, which might be the core, power-politics data point of the Arab-Israeli conflict, a data point that has absolutely nothing to do with the Arab world, but which lives on today as an unexamined American ideal, which is: the belief that the centuries-old Jewish Question of Europe could somehow be resolved in the Middle East… Wrong answer. But still, I admit, an ideal.
–What was the political influence exerted on Truman and every other president since him? What is the Israel lobby? When will Steve Walt and John Mearsheimer, who had to publish their ideas in Europe five years ago, be granted a platform inside the American establishment to explain their views?
And finally, this conversation will not be complete without a full discussion of the Jewish question that I am most interested in:
–How did a messianic and selfish ideology ravish the Jews of eastern Europe and then the United States so that so many of us could accept the oppression of millions of Arab peoples in the name of Jewish self-determination?
I will do a post soon for new readers of this site explaining why the Zionist dream of liberating the Jews captured my tribe, indeed why 100 years ago I believe that I would have been a Zionist.
But it is not 100 years ago; it is now; and today a presumed interest is again seen to trump values, liberal Jewish political values are trumped by the interest in the preservation of a Jewish state. In a word, young leftwing Democrat Max Blumenthal goes to Israel and says WTF!!! this isn’t me and decides to tell that story to an American audience, while older liberal Jews ignore him as they dance around the fire and sing a selfish selfish song of our liberation and refuse to see that that fire is white phosphorus landing on the people of Gaza and the goonsquads’ molotov cocktails landing on the demonstrators in Cairo.
And so the battle in Egypt will necessarily become a battle inside the Jewish community here, inside the Jewish family, inside Jewish history. It is time to work this out; let us grab courage from the freedom fighters in Tahrir Square.
