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Netanyahu seeks war with Iran so he can ethnically cleanse the West
Bank — Machover
by Philip Weiss on July 23, 2012 30
Our fundraiser just ended, but you can still get a copy of Moshe
Machover's exciting and challenging new book, Israelis and
Palestinians: Conflict and Resolution, by donating $60 by the end of
July. Published by Haymarket, the book is a collection of essays from
the last 40 years by a socialist intellectual who was born in Israel
and moved to London to pursue a career in academic mathematics.
What follows is an exchange with the author. My headline comes from a
question halfway through, about the opportunity Israel sees in
regional turmoil to deal with the "ethnic peril" of a large
Palestinian population in the West Bank.
You live in London. How much of the book reflects that removal from
Israel?
Not very much because the bones of it, the kernel was formed before I
ever moved to London, and also because as I keep stressing, the ideas
were collectively produced with comrades, most of whom were living in
Israel most of the time…. In my head as it were I’m living a lot of my
time in Israel. I think as an Israeli, of course as a dissident
Israeli. I follow what is happening. I am an Israeli exile. Part of
the time I am living in an Israel that no longer exists.
Your book is about conflict and resolution. Where's the resolution?
Moshe Machover (Photo: Haymarket Books)
We believed right from the 1960s, before the June war, and I continue
to believe, that the only hope for resolving the conflict between
Zionism and the indigenous people and the surrounding Arab world, is
the integration of Israel and the Hebrew nation into a regional union.
The model for this is not a binational state, not a quota arrangement
in which the legislature has so many seats for each nationality. This
is looking at the real problem and its solution in a regional context,
and for providing for the national rights of non-Arab national groups,
of which the Hebrew nation is one: to accord it appropriate national
rights within a regional federal union. This is a view we have always
had in Matzpen (a longtime socialist organization in Israel). Whether
this will actually come about, this solution, is really a matter of a
race against time. Because what may happen if the conflict goes on
long enough is that the Zionist side will manage to ethnically cleanse
the remaining Palestinian population. That may eventually lead to a
catastrophic result.
So I’ve never been completely confident that a benign resolution of
the conflict will actually happen, but what we said is that the only
chance for it is provided by integration of the Hebrew nation in a
progressive socialist regional federal union.
Does your solution require a dissolution of the nation state paradigm?
Isn’t the nation-state the governing idea in the world today?
I think this paradigm is in any case on its way out. Look at Europe.
And of course the European Union is now in deep trouble, but it is in
deep trouble because of the effects of the global capitalist crisis. I
think that despite this, the idea that Europe is going to revert to
self contained nation states, this is cloud cuckoo land. The trend of
history, moreover in the region of the Near East, and especially in
the Arab east-- the whole notion of the nation state as opposed to an
all-Arab union is laughable. The only stable national state in the
region is Egypt, which is paradoxically, by far, far, far the oldest
state in the world. When the first emperor of China unified China and
made it into an all Chinese state, the Egyptian state was already
1000s of years old. It is as old as time itself. All the other so
called nation states in the Arab world are Mickey Mouse states.…
All the problems in this region stem from the way that the imperial
powers France and Britain divided the region after the First World
War, to serve their purposes. Iraq was put together to serve British
interests. Syria, Lebanon, and a country called Palestine were created
or refashioned. This new country, Palestine, was an invention of
British imperialism following the First World War; and it was designed
explicitly as a domain for Zionist colonization. A whole complex of
problems, including the Israeli–Palestinian conflict are a sort of
fallout from the fragmentation and parcelization of the Ottoman Empire
in its eastern flank.
Does the new Middle East give you optimism about such a change?
Very much so in terms of acceptance of these ideas, especially on the
left, but what is sadly missing not only in the region but globally is
an organized socialist force that could actually make use of the
crisis. When the great economic crisis happened in the late 20s, early
30s, there were massive working class parties. There were enormous
weaknesses because of Stalinism; nevertheless, there was a massive
organized working class in many countries. Even in the US, the
situation was much better than it is now…
You can see the consequences of this, for example, in the outcome so
far of the revolution in Egypt. What transpired in Egypt recently--
there was no organized working class force. There used to be in parts
of the Arab world, especially Iraq, massive working class
organizations. Unfortunately they were Stalinist, and that led to the
tragedy after the 1958 revolution in Iraq. But nothing like that
exists in our region and in the world in general, with some exceptions
of course. Though you can see it in parts of Greece and some parts of
Latin America.
Your essays seem to anticipate the Arab Spring.
If credit is due it’s not by any means to me personally. It’s not I,
it’s we. Look at the second chapter of the book, the homage to my late
comrade, Jabra Nicola (1912-1974) a Palestinian Arab Marxist. He would
not stress Palestinian; he would call himself an Arab Marxist. And he
actually implanted this perspective in Matzpen, this idea that the
problems of the region and in particular the Israeli Arab conflict,
can only benignly be resolved in an Arab union following an Arab
revolution. This was largely due to his influence. I adopted the idea
in the mid 1960s because it made a lot of sense to me.
If you go back to the early 1970s, the late 1960s, this idea was not
confined to Matzpen, but the radical left of the Palestinian movement
also thought on the same basis. The PFLP-- this actually was a
transformation of a leftist all Arab nationalist party led by a
Palestinian, George Habash; and a more radical leftist movement that
split from it, the Democratic Front (DPFLP), led by Naif Hawatmeh, who
was technically a Jordanian, born on the other side of the river, in
Jordan. It was not a movement confined to Palestinians, and its
message was not confined to Palestinians…. It was supported by leftist
groups and individuals throughout the Arab world. Their perspective
was one of Arab revolution. The idea that even the Palestinian Israeli
conflict can only be resolved within a revolutionary regional context
was not confined to us, or to Palestinians in the Democratic Front,
but to Arab leftists generally. These ideas dissipated with the onset
of reaction in the Arab East. The 1970s became a period of deep
reaction, and a right turn throughout the world. We are beginning to
recover now.
Are you optimistic?
I’m not expecting things to change tomorrow. I am cautiously
optimistic. I don’t hold my breath, but on the other hand I think it’s
a mistake to lose hope and become pessimistic because of
counterrevolutionary turns in Egypt and other places. There is an ebb
and flow in these events. The story is not ended yet. I think we
should keep our optimism but don’t expect anything in a hurry.
Let’s talk about what is happening in Palestine.
You see there is a Zionist version of what in America was called
“manifest destiny”. The Zionist leadership regards the various
accords, for example their agreement to the Partition of Palestine in
1947-- they regard it in the exactly the same spirit as the US
regarded the Indian treaties. They have just made it explicit with the
Levy commission. The Levy Commission actually submitted a report that
is going to be problematic, because you see the Zionists want
Palestinian land but they don’t want Palestinians. The reason why they
have not annexed the bulk of the West Bank with the exception of
Jerusalem, where there is a Jewish majority-- the reason why they have
not annexed, is they want to get rid of the population first.
People forget, they annexed not only East Jerusalem but the Syrian
Golan Heights, but first they did a massive ethnic cleansing there.
People who are focused on the Palestinian aspect forget about the
Golan Heights because it is not Palestine. The occupied territories
include also the Golan Heights. What happened in 1967, when the guns
were still smoking, Israel executed a massive ethnic cleansing of most
of the population of the Golan Heights, more than 100,000 people, with
the exception of part of the Druze community whom the Zionists don’t
consider Arabs. So some Druze were allowed to remain, and Israel
annexed it.
If this Levy commission says that the West Bank is not occupied, then
what is it? If it’s not occupied territory, then Israel is free to
annex it, and that would in the short term pose a problem to any
Zionist government because they would have to annex an area populated
by non-Jews. That is the horrible “ethnic peril”. They have to solve
this. They are opposed to a Palestinian state, but they are even more
terrified of being ethnically swamped by the Palestinians. So for them
the way out of the dilemma is ethnic cleansing.
For this they need a prolonged regional crisis, and a war with Iran
may come in handy. I’ve warned against this before. I have an article
in the book about Sharon’s plan [in 2002] to “transfer” Palestinians
from the West Bank. Shortly after I wrote this article, a rightwing
British paper, the Sunday Telegraph, ran a piece by an eminent Israeli
stratetgic expert, Martin van Creveld, and he said, Look, Sharon has a
plan for ethnically cleansing a big part of the population of the
West Bank, and the opportunity for this will be an American invasion
of Iraq. At that time many knew there was going to be an invasion of
Iraq, and Israel anticipated disquiet and ferment through the Arab
world. And particularly in the West Bank, this could be exploited for
evacuating maybe more than 1 million Palestinians into Jordan.
Unfortunately for Sharon, the American victory came too soon. You
remember George W. Bush standing on the ship with the V sign saying,
we won. That came after only a few days. So there wasn’t enough time
for a lot of ferment to develop in the region. It ended too quickly.
This is part of the reason that Netanyahu is so adamant about
resolving the Iranian issue by war, rather than diplomacy or siege; he
wants a full out war, because whatever the actual consequences of the
war regarding Iran, whether it will end Iran’s nuclear program—and by
the way there is no proof that Iran is committed to production of
nuclear weapons-- the opportunity will present itself for ethnic
cleansing in the West Bank that will be a far more important result
for him and far more desirable, than anything he can achieve with Iran
itself.
What likelihood do you assign such a scenario?
I’m not a betting man. But I do read the Israeli press. I don’t think
they have made the final decision themselves. Of course there is a
flipside. It’s not guaranteed to succeed. Secondly, Israel may suffer
casualties in such a war. It’s a costly thing. Of course, if the
casualties are not too high, then an achievement of ethnic cleansing
from a Zionist point of view will justify Israeli casualties, because
that will guarantee the survival of the Jewish Zionist state for the
foreseeable future, by ending the ethnic peril. But it’s a gamble.
As you probably know, a big part of the Israeli military and
intelligence establishment are advising against. But this is
revealing. Netanyahu makes a calculation as a politician, and has the
future of Zionism in mind. Intelligence and military officials make a
calculation focusing on the military aspects of the war.
I don’t think it’s decided. But the most dangerous window would be
from August to September, approaching the American election. In the
period leading to the American election, then we have guaranteed
support from the crazy American right. Obama would be very hard put to
resist it. The risk for him is to be denounced as a sissy, and
pusillanimous. Knowing Obama’s character, I don’t put too highly the
prospect of his actually standing firm on many things.
But if Obama gets reelected, and Israel attacks Iran, he can hang
Israel out to dry. Without any kind of American approval, Israel can’t
go against Iran. There is a fantasy in some circles that the Israel
tail is wagging the American dog. I agree that there is a special
relationship, but Israel is the junior partner, and Israel cannot go
it alone. The last time Israel went against the US in a major way was
the Suez adventure, in 1956, with Britain and France. They were soon
told what to do by Eisenhower.
Doesn’t the idea that Obama could allow a disastrous war to take place
undermine your view that he is acting in the US’s material interests
first?
No, this is not opposed to a materialist view. Christian Zionists,
they have a special name for what will happen to the good Christians
in Jerusalem-- the rapture. Well this is really an ideological dress.
They dress their material interest in ideological garb.
And there have always been differences within the US establishment
about what real American interests are. And there have always been
interests. The American right has always been more aggressive. They
want to counteract the idea of decline of the American empire by going
more aggressive. Material interests are one thing, but people have
minds, and they interpret their material interests according to their
understanding.
What about neocon pressure inside the establishment? Irving Kristol
left the Democratic Party because he thought that Democrats would
favor a small military, and that was not in Jewish interests because
of Israel. Don’t many American Jews put Israel’s interests first?
I’m not so sure of it. The evidence is not completely clear on this.
Lenny Brenner has written a lot about this. Actually I think despite
what Kristol said, the majority of American Jews vote Democrat. So
when asked what is the main consideration, in voting one way or the
other, Israel is not that important.
American Jews are Zionists at this moment, but it hasn’t always been
like that. If you go further back, then a very big part of American
Jewish opinion was non Zionist. But this is not the case now because
Zionism does not seem to conflict with their American patriotism.
Israel is the blue eyed boy of the United States, there is no
perceived conflict between the countries’ interests. Many Jews are
unhappy with what Israel is doing, but it’s quite patriotic to be
Zionist. If this changes, you will see surfacing in the Jewish
community, discontent, anxiety about Israel and so on.
And don’t let us kid ourselves that the self-appointed officials of
American Jewry actually express the view of their community. I believe
the feeling on the ground is better expressed by some writers, for
example Philip Roth. He has not written as a Zionist. Even very
remarkably in the book The Plot Against America, about the presumed
threat to American Jews, there’s no Zionist aspect whatsoever. And in
Portnoy’s Complaint, the episode with this Israeli woman soldier, he
makes fun of Zionism. He has never actually come out explicitly
against Zionism. He simply isn’t interested in it.
And when I come in contact with American Jews, I don’t find that
uniformity that you would expect if you would just follow the media.
Were you ever disappointed with Matzpen associates for turning out to
be religious nationalists?
I don’t know if I would go so far as to describe them as religious
nationalists. Though it applies to some people who have been in
Matzpen. Matzpen began to split, as you can see from the potted
history on the website, after 1970. The biggest split was in 1972.
Virtually all the leftist Marxist groups that existed and exist in
Israel derive from Matzpen with the exception of those that came out
of the debris of the Israeli communist party. And Matzpen itself was
created by dissenters from the communist party.
If you read my review of the book by Michel Warschawski [On the
Border], you will see that one thing that I criticize him for is
reversion to Jewish identity politics. Not Hebrew identity politics,
but ethnic Jewish patriotism. If you look at this review, you will
see, he used to be very orthodox Leninist, as he understood Leninism,
circa 1972, then he reverted to a sort of Jewish identity nostalgia,
while remaining a very staunch and courageous fighter against
occupation. And yes, some of the people who came out of Matzpen may
have actually reverted to this identity politics.
Generally my position and that of those who remained the core of
Matzpen was that identity and ideology politics have very important
things to tell us, but it depends on how you eat that particular
vegetable. Take the feminist variety of identity politics. Is the main
contradiction one between men and women, or the class contradiction?
All the conflict and grievances and problems of women—how do they
articulate with class? It is a gross mistake to ignore the problems
that feminists bring up. But when it becomes the dominant thing,
rather than looking at class, then it is a negative factor.
My difficulty with class analysis in this context is that I look at a
great materialist analyst like Noam Chomsky and I believe that his own
religious identity has played a very large role in his thinking on
these questions, and I think that is reflective of all of us.
First of all, you can’t apply materialist analysis to individual
people. Individual people can have ideas that are not typical of the
class from which they come. Engels ran a factory. Secondly, Chomsky
did not come from a religious Jewish background, but a secular Jewish
background. He has always been a Zionist of the most benign type,
relatively. But he is still a Zionist, he’s never denied it… He did
not object and would not object on principle to a Jewish colonization
of Palestine so long as it would somehow happen with the consent and
the collaboration of the indigenous people. There were a lot of people
like that, who genuinely believed that. At one time it was a
significant minority trend within Zionism, the belief that such a
thing was possible. These people were rightly told by Jabotinsky,
Don’t make me laugh-- natives don’t ever accept, not only a new
master, but even a new partner to their homeland. So Zionism that
calls for binationalism—this whole trend was self deluding.
Tell us a lesson from the essays in this book.
I think what is important and significant is the view of the conflict,
first of all as a colonial one. It is not colonial like South Africa,
but the most pertinent parallel is with the United States;
Palestinians are “our Indians”. The US did not use indigenous labor,
and the South imported slaves from far away, imported slave labor from
Africa. Zionists imported Oriental Jews. Of course the situation was
quite different. They were not slaves, of course, they were “our
brethren”. They were culturally despised, but they were integrated in
the dominant nation. There was a big difference in that respect.
But the pattern of colonization was similar to New Zealand, Australia,
North America, where the local labor was not used. This created a huge
difference. This is lost on those people like the followers of Edward
Said who think that colonialism is an expression of contempt toward
the culture of the east, rather than the other way around-- that this
racist contempt is a superstructure of colonization.
For a Marxist, there is a huge difference between the type of
colonialism that exploits the local labor, where it is needed as a
resource, and the US or Israel model, where natives are to be excluded
and ethnically cleansed.
That doesn’t exhaust the nature of the problem. There is a further
unique attribute to the nature of Zionist colonization. In all places
where the pattern of colonialism did not exploit the local labor, a
new nation of settlers was formed. The same applied to Israel. A
Hebrew nation was formed, as a settler nation. But in no other place
did the indigenous people form into a unitary single nation with its
own identity. In the US you had many nations of so called Indians. In
Australia, there were hundreds of languages, and there was no unified
national movement of the indigenous people. The Palestinian case is
the sole exception. Here you have a colonial conflict, at the core of
it, which has taken the form of a clash between a settler nation and
an indigenous nation. That is unique in colonial history.
This is why on the face of it, it looks like a symmetric conflict,
with two nations fighting over a piece of land, and all you need is to
make peace, while in a typical colonial conflict, either the settlers
win out, as happened in the U.S., or there is decolonization, as in
South Africa or Algeria.
Unfortunately as you see there is no historical case in which
decolonization took place after colonization followed the expulsive
pattern. Because the settlers then formed the majority and they
managed to marginalize the natives. But ours is an exceptional
situation. You have a single Palestinian nation which moreover is part
of a large national entity, Palestinians are a sort of second tier
nationality of the Arab nation, which is one of the major world
civilizations. Nothing like that happened in North America or
Australia. In terms of world history, those indigenous people were a
backwater. From a human perspective, no one is a backwater, but in
global terms, the indigenous people in North America and Australia
were marginal.
But what Zionism is confronted by is a single national group,
Palestinians, which are part of a major major world civilization. So
this is why the problem is so tough and is not going to be resolved
very easily.
Will Zionism disappear?
Ultimately yes. If you compare their position to that of the American
settlers, the Americans had a manifest destiny, and that manifest
destiny was realized when they reached “from sea to shining sea”. That
was it; at the far side of the continent, manifest destiny was
fulfilled. But Israel, however far it expands, it will be confronted
by more Arabs, realistically speaking, unless they expand as far as
Iran. [laughing]
So this is why I think ultimately-- ultimately, I think-- Zionism will
be superseded. But ultimately takes a long time.
About Philip Weiss