Right on time for the wave of protests over the anti-Islam film, Gregory Harms has written a book called It’s Not About Religion that argues that the Islamicization of the Middle East is a result of imperialist western interference. The Military Industrial Complex is alive and well and exploiting the Middle East for oil and arms sales. It seeks neither war nor peace but managed instability. The US has two goals: maintaining access to oil and “maintaining a kind of order in the region, one that is basically stable but features low-level tension… enough to conduce to US interests but tense enough to account for its involvement and intervention.”
Harms doesn’t seek to deny “the increase in religious and social conservatism” in Muslim societies. But this is “a phenomenon that has more to do with nonreligious factors including the economy, sustained Western and US intervention, and interstate rivalries…Largely external factors have elicited [the religious] response.
And it’s not as if religion isn’t important for people. For the overwhelming majority of Muslims, religion is “a way of maintaining order, identity and dignity.”
“As the failures of secularism worsened and other Western cultural influences continued to encroach and remind Arabs of those failures, being Muslim—socially, culturally—offered a sense of security and a peace of mind. It helped order a disordered life.”
Having spent some time in Palestine, I agree; the conflict has driven people toward traditional beliefs. The problem with the book is that while it recognizes and even honors that religious impulse in Muslims, it is incurious about a similar impulse among Jews. Jewish nationalism is absent here, except for the idea that Zionism is a servant of empire and an echo of US exceptionalism, and Israel is a colonial client state, from Cold War to the war on terror.
What about the Jewish political soul? Jewish oppression in Europe is mentioned once. The Israel lobby is never mentioned; nor are neoconservatives, the ultraZionists who came chiefly from the Jewish community.
Myself I think that Zionism plays a part in the Islamicization of the Middle East; and that religious yearnings in human beings can be as important as the desire for material resources. There actually is a clash of religious cultures; and the role of enlightened moderns is to help people emerge from these traditional understandings.
Herewith, a counter theory about Islamicization, from my Zio-centric standpoint.
Harms is critical of those who speak for the American interest, but it must be pointed out that these types have long opposed the relationship with Israel as counter productive. In 1948 the American interest types in the State Department sought to prevent the establishment and recognition of Israel because it would cause unending conflict in the region and alienate the oil producers; and Secretary of State George Marshall famously said he would not vote for Harry Truman in ‘48 if he recognized Israel. In 1991 American interest types like Brent Scowcroft and James Baker pushed the Gulf War for the principle that Harms identifies—stability, and American access to oil. But this group was against the 2003 war on Iraq; it would gain us nothing in terms of oil or strategic advantage. And they were plainly right; it was hugely costly to the U.S. in ways I don’t need to enumerate. Today Russia and China have oil concessions in Iraq, and Iraq is working against the U.S. on Iran. Harms cites four people who support the special relationship with Israel: Tom Friedman, Fareed Zakaria, Bernard Lewis and Michael Oren. Is religion really irrelevant to these men’s affinities? No; three are Jewish and Zionist to a greater or lesser degree. Friedman was doing chalk talks about Israel’s victory in ’67 back in high school. Ardent Zionists fought for Truman to recognize Israel in 1948. Neoconservative Zionists pushed for the Iraq war because in the words of Bill Kristol, Israel’s war against terror is our war. American interest types have fought this identification, seeking to separate US and Israeli interests. The 911 Commission said that the special relationship with Israel figured prominently in Khalid Sheikh Muhammed’s thinking. And in recent years, Mike Mullen, Pat Lang, David Petraeus, Anne Marie Slaughter, George Mitchell, Steve Walt, Leon Panetta, and even Joe Biden have said that the occupation doesn’t serve America’s interest. Both George H.W. Bush and Obama called for an end to settlements, and both failed; there’s still an occupation.
As Harms himself observes, Palestine is exceptional: Palestinians are alone in not having a state among the prospective Arab states that were drawn up by France and England in the dying days of the Ottoman Empire. The English empire found the losses outweighed the gains in Palestine; and the American empire has fared no better. But why is Palestine so special? Because of religion. Because of the fervent desire of Jews to return to their “homeland” and create a national home that will be a secure state for Jews.
“The young in Israel, whether Marxist, democrat or chauvinist, are spiritually nourished from the same source of faith… and speak in a stronger voice than materialist dialectics,” Zionist Arthur Koestler explained the impulse in 1949.
Today the “faith” in Israel is stronger than ever, and there are more chauvinists than ever. Jewish chauvinism seems to be the most active component of the Netanyahu coalition, which contains many religious zealots.
Now it may well be that if Harms reduces history to materialist causes, I reduce it to religious ones, but let me offer more of that “faith”-based reading of history. England needed Jewish support in World War I and issued the Balfour Declaration, granting Jews “a national home” in Palestine, because as Koestler and Jonathan Schneer both state, England wanted world Jewry on its side in World War I. “In this critical situation it was believed that Jewish sympathy or the reverse [Jewish sympathy to Germany] would make a substantial difference one way or the other to the Allied Cause,” former prime minister Lloyd George testified. “In particular Jewish sympathy would confirm the support of the American Jewry, and would make it more difficult for Germany to reduce her military commitments and improve her economic position on the Eastern front.” Truman also needed Jewish sympathy in the 1948 campaign, which was one reason that he recognized Israel; just as Obama needs Jewish sympathy today and in that belief has reversed himself on settlements and leaped into platform discussions, embarrassingly, on Jerusalem. While Obama has defied Israel on an Iran war, the effort has required a huge expenditure of time and capital.
Why does a client state have such pull? Because American Jews feel a deep affinity with Israel. Zionism is not a materialist attachment. It was an ardent, self-interested, idealistic ideology, of saving the Jews. That it has worked out to be a racist, confiscatory ideology is not the point; the people who believed it did so out of some deep faith in a theory of social progress that involved segregating Jews in their own land and giving them sovereignty. And the cry Never again, was not cynical; it was a vehement response to one of the greatest atrocities of human history. These are all human passions that have nothing to do with greed.
And what has been the result of this passionate ideology? The unrest the American nationalists said Zionism would produce. The Arab riots, the very first intifadah, in 1936-1939. Zionism played a role in the rise of Arab nationalism and the transformation of Lebanon into a weak and fragmented state, and Jordan into an authoritarian state. Zionism helped preserve the dictatorship in Egypt for 35 years of U.S. subsidy, and the Israel interest still seems to outweigh any other American considerations of Egypt’s leadership, for instance, whether it represents its people. Harms’s response is that the military industrial complex has no interest in self determination, but self determination has benefited capitalism in Vietnam and South America and Central America, former scenes of Cold War interference; and neoliberalism has had no quarrel with democratic forces in South Africa and Kosovo and Egypt and Libya. Why not Palestine? Because of religion.
Of course capitalism is a global force, and Zionism is local, but Zionism has had global consequences, for instance encouraging the war on terror, as Netanyahu did on Meet the Press today. They hate you because of what you stand for, he lectured the U.S., and “we are you… and you are us.” I see an agenda here. After the Cold War, Zionism’s adherents could no longer argue that Israel served the US as a client state or aircraft carrier in the Middle East; indeed, the one condition of Arab support for the US Gulf War in 1991 was that Israel would take no part in the coalition. Then the war on terror gave Israel a crucial spot. As Trita Parsi writes in his book, Treacherous Alliance:
“There was a feeling in Israel that because of the end of the Cold War, relations with the U.S. were cooling and we needed some new glue for the alliance,” Efraim Inbar [of the Begin Sadat Center for Strategic Studies told Parsi]. “and the new glue… was radical Islam. And Iran was radical Islam.”
Ten years later Osama bin Laden attacked the US– in part because of Palestine- and the neocons declared that Israel’s war was our war.
Undoing this belief, that we are joined at the hip in a war on terror, is one of the most important jobs this website is involved in. And tackling that job means taking on religious belief, beliefs that gives a lot of people meaning, a sense of civilizational values and core ideas. Islamophobia is part of it, Christianism is part of it. But Zionism is inherent in the conflict too, and it has a religious root. Just look at Americans for Peace Now, the most leftwing organization in the official Jewish community, made up of “secular” Jews who favor two states– and they are talking about God giving the land to the Jews. Could there be a clearer example of religion invading foreign policy?
As Harms knows, religion is one of the great organizing principles of human society. It causes millions of Muslims to forswear liquor, it causes millions of Catholics to oppose abortion. Were individuals free to make up their own minds, there would surely be fewer Catholics and Muslims who subscribe to these beliefs. Just as absent religious pressure, far fewer Jews would believe that it was worth anyone’s life to preserve a Jewish state in Palestine.
I know that I diminish material impulses in life because I’m not much of a materialist myself (I believe in Maslow’s hierarchy; once I have food and shelter, I hanker for meaning). Undoubtedly many members of the Israel lobby have profited hugely from their work. AIPAC supports a lot of people. But the people who go to AIPAC do so out of deep concern for people they don’t know, people of their own tribe, and thereby honor a religious affiliation. Muslims are capable of the same identification. The great challenge of this era is to show that the human family transcends particular traditional religious identifications, and that we are too crowded together, sharing too many of the same resources, and information sources, to allow such identifications to govern our conduct.
Fareed Zakaria supports special relationship with Israel.
He may do it out of genuine belief or out of absent mindedness or out of fear. Question is what will happen to him if he questioned the approach to Israel. He will most likely meet same fate Olivia Nasr,Sanchez, and other have met at CNN .
In this, as in his previous article, he is merely plagiarizing others :)
Quibbles.
A few peoples that hoped for a state, were promised a state, or even had one, briefly, include the Kurds and the Maronites, both falling in the French/English Mandate zone.
What we call Islamic fundamentalism is indeed a modern thing, but tracing it back to Zionism feels quite unhistoric and un-geographic.
- The cyclical desire for a return to an older or more pristine state of religious faith is not a modern phenom. It occurs in all faiths to a greater or lesser extent. Sure, the modern incarnation of political Islam in the Levant has a relationship to Zionism, but…. absent Zionism, why would anyone suppose that Islamism would therefore not exist?
The demographic core of the Muslim world is not… Arab. Islamic fundamentalism, as expressed today, owes at least as much to local circumstances in Iran, Afghanistan, India/Pakistan, Malaysia, Chechnya and on and on.
One of the driving forces in the Islamist revival is Wahabism. There is no credible link demonstrating that Wahabism’s emergence and spread can be linked to Zionism.
Finally, Islamism was counter-posed against secular nationalism. The very idea of reviving an Arab led Caliphate was in opposition to modern Arab nationalism. So argue if you will, that the fading military/secular/nationalist regimes of Libya, Syria, Iraq, Democratic Yemen, etc. are related to the influence of Zionism. But Islamism? That is what came to the fore after the nationalists turned into a spent force, ideologically bankrupt and resting on foreign helpers and oil money to stay in power.
. “and the new glue… was radical Islam. And Iran was radical Islam.”
What it also means that Israel forever will need continued existence of an enemy to its benefactor. The benefactor has to remain militarily unassailable and economically robust and socially cohesive.It is extremely difficult to maintain these combinations for these are often internally inconsistent. That also means Israel hs to come to an understanding with its neighbors .One can do that when one is powerful not weak. Israel might lose this opportunity for ever if not acted upon sooner than later.
Unfortunately on a moral level this is repugnant and absolute devilish that one country need to maintain a tension that is arising out of occupation,exploitation,slander, bribery, and downright violation of accepted norms of behaviors both at national and international level so that it can pursue the very crimes that it is engaging to.Its ends are its means. Israel is unique that way.
If big oil dictated US foreign policy, we never would have supported Israel.
…”just as absent religious pressure far fewer Jews would believe that it was worth anyone’s life to preserve a Jewish state in Palestine.”
which is why the emergence of organizations such as Jewish Voices for Peace and, yes, online anti-Zionist sites like Mondoweiss are so important – chopping away at the Zionist hold not only on U.S. Jewry but, equally important, on those non-Jews, who, while opposing Israel’s occupation of Palestine, keep out of the fray for fear of being falsely labeled antisemites by Israel’s apologists. Said fear, of course, is significantly reduced if the accused can respond with something like “Me antisemitic? How can that be so, what with so many of those marching alongside me in this protest against Israel, themselves being Jewish?”
“Jewish chauvinism” is a good phrase, but do we really want to dignify it by calling it a religious impulse?
Political soul and religious impulse are not the only forces. I believe in the power of dispassionate structures to generate heated passions.
In particular, it is a truism that Israel – like the U.S. involvement in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan – fostered Islam as a replacement for revolutionary secularism, particularly on the West Bank. Israel funded mosques believing that religion would take the edge off Fatah’s secular power. As we know, it didn’t work. So, Israel is at least partially responsible for investing Islam with the militant potency that secularists like to decry.
PW: Why does a client state have such pull?
As long as the book keeps you thinking of Israel as a client state it’s done its job.
Phil, have you ever heard the terms “British”, “British Government”, “British empire”?
Lloyd George was not an Englishman.
In American English, “Englishman” refers not only to people from England, but people from anywhere in the UK. (Kind of like how UKers refer to Americans as “Yanks” regardless of whether they come from Massachusetts or Texas.)
“Phil, have you ever heard the terms “British”, “British Government”, “British empire”?
Lloyd George was not an Englishman.”
Thanks, RoHa.
someone has to explain this to me some time. like, what is whales?
Whales are big humungous gamblers.
‘Just look at Americans for Peace Now, the most leftwing organization in the official Jewish community, made up of “secular” Jews who favor two states– and they are talking about God giving the land to the Jews. ‘
Tom Paine, in his book The Age Of Reason , says the Bible shouldn’t be accepted as a moral authority because of the atrocities it describes in its’ pages. Just saying.
The term “client state” is a cold war relic. It’s part of a vocabulary that has been cemented securely in place along with “Jewish State”, “settlements”, “a land without a people for a people without a land”… Mythologies die hard.
Ahh…England needed Jewish support in World War I and issued the Balfour Declaration, granting Jews “a national home” in Palestine, because as Koestler and Jonathan Schneer both state, England wanted world Jewry on its side in World War I.
Ahh…It was the other way around.
I have of course seen this meme before—that the Balfour Declaration was an attempt to enlist jewish support for the allies in WWI—but I don’t think I’ve ever seen MRW’s reverse idea that Jewry wanted England on its side and so essentially was the dominant party there.
Regardless, doesn’t this more than flirt a little with Hitler’s grand claim that indeed one of the big reasons German lost in WWI was because of world-wide jewry’s machinations against it?
From my readings—admittedly not directly on the meme issue, and mostly just having to do with Balfour—my sense is that Balfour was just honestly intellectually moved by the jews historic plight and was persuaded by Weizman (sic?) that a homeland in Palestine wasn’t going to hurt anyone.
Be glad to hear cites to contrary stuff for sure….
Sin Nombre,
I was way too clipped. Weizmann, et al, went after Balfour, who did it over objections (don’t know or can’t recall his personal feelings). They did it to get American Jews surrounding Wilson to persuade him to help Britain in the war. The most influential American Jews, however, opposed the idea of a national home in Palestine and subsequently signed a petition to that effect. There was no monolithic Jewish or Zionist group doing the pushing and pulling. But Weizmann and Rothschild and a few others used the idea that they could get American help in a quid pro quo. As Schneer writes: “Thus the view from Whitehall early in 1916: If defeat was not imminent, neither was victory; and the outcome of the war of attrition on the Western Front could not be predicted. The colossal forces in a death-grip across Europe and in Eurasia appeared to have canceled each other out. Only the addition of significant new forces on one side or the other seemed likely to tip the scale. Britain’s willingness, beginning early in 1916, to explore seriously some kind of arrangement with “world Jewry” or “Great Jewry” must be understood in this context.” 1916, which was when Weizmann and Rothschild were setting up the quid pro quo. The US entered the war early in the following year.
My point was that they (W&R, et al) were not standing by idly waiting to be engaged.
my sense is that Balfour was just honestly intellectually moved by the jews historic plight and was persuaded by Weizman (sic?) that a homeland in Palestine wasn’t going to hurt anyone.
Balfour knew perfectly well that he was betraying the war time promises of independence which Great Britain had made to the Arabs and that establishing a Jewish home in Palestine was contrary to their interests. According to British historian Arnold J. Toynbee, who actually worked the Foreign Office Political Intelligence Department during the war, Balfour was an evil person, who simply didn’t care. That comes through very clearly in Balfour’s memo on the subject from the Paris Peace Conference. link to scribd.com
I’ve read more than I ever want to about the discovery of the Arabian oil fields, the need to control them to fuel warships, airplanes and industry, and how ‘good hardworking European stock’ was necessary to be plonked down there to curb the unruly Arabs.
“Just as absent religious pressure, far fewer Jews would believe that it was worth anyone’s life to preserve a Jewish state in Palestine. ”
Hmmm…. Before zionism did Jews in Judaism worship Israel?…as in ‘actively’ working to re create a Israel? I though that happened after zionism.
Don’t guess it matters, it’s totally screwed up now.
Everything is always about religion, every time and every where.
I wouldn’t say it’s about religion. Many of the early Zionists were atheists, socialists or social democrats. An American Jew who wants to emigrate to Israel can do so, whether or no he professes any religion. A lot of Israeli Jews are secular.
And in Israel, unlike the US, politicians who are open atheists can often get elected.
Instead I’d say that Zionism is Jewish nationalism, blood and soil nationalism. Some Zionists are believers and some atheists.
But what about Islam and the Arabs? A number of prominent Arab leaders and spokesmen have been non-Islamic. Edward Said was an Episcopalian by background. George Habash was a Christian. In a different field, consider Ralph Nader (whose family was Lebanese Christian). It’s Arab nationalism that’s the dynamic force.
I agree with Rashid Khalidi (Columbia U. Prof.), who said… “It may seem hard to believe today, but for decades the United States was in fact a major patron, indeed in some respects the major patron, of earlier incarnations” of radical, militant Islam, in order to use all possible resources in waging the Cold War. He adds, “The Cold War was over, but its tragic sequels, its toxic debris, and its unexploded mines continued to cause great harm, in ways largely unrecognized in American discourse.” (See Rashid Khalidi page on Wikipedia)