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Zionist origins of the global War on Terror:

Implications for Palestine solidarity

Les LevidowLes Levidow has been an active supporter of the Campaign Against Criminalising Communities(CAMPACC) since it was founded in London in early 2001. In opposing all anti-terror laws,CAMPACC links human rights campaigners, lawyers, migrant groups and individuals targetedby those laws. In this work he brings a long experience of solidarity here with people demonisedand targeted by state terror in Ireland, Italy, Chiapas and Palestine. During the first intifadathere, he was actively involved in the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, especially as a member ofthe National Executive Committee. Along with several other members, he participated inEditorial Board of Return magazine, which opposed the so-called Law of Return for Jews andcounterposed the Palestinian right of return. He is also a supporter ofJews Against Zionism,formed in 2005.

Abstract:A relentless war against the Palestinians has been portrayed as Israeli self defence, even as asearch for peace. Meanwhile any resistance has been portrayed as the obstacle to peace, even asterrorism. Through this storyline, the so-called international community has legitimised theZionist occupation of Palestine through its imitation of these policies in the global war onterror.

I am for peace, but peace is against me. Palestinian rap group DAM, Whos a terrorist?

As expressed ironically by rappers, the so-called peace process has caused much confusion andsuffering. A relentless war against the Palestinians has been portrayed as Israeli self defence,even as a search for peace. Meanwhile any resistance has been portrayed as the obstacle to peace,even as terrorism. Through this storyline, the so-called international community has legitimisedthe Zionist occupation of Palestine.

The Zionist project has long gained systematic support from Western governments. Consider the$5bn per year from the USA, its regular vetoes of UN resolutions criticising Israel, militarysupplies (even nuclear weapons components) provided by the UK, and quasi-membership of theEU through access to research funds. More recently, the UK government has denouncedPalestinian terrorism as a cause of the conflict. The EU has imposed collective punishmentupon Palestinians for electing the wrong government, led by a terrorist organisation, accordingto the EU blacklist of banned organisations. Western governments accept the Zionist storylinethat Palestinian terrorism, especially its Islamic version, obstructs the prospects for peace.

Drawing on those examples, here are some difficult questions:

What is the affinity between the Zionist project and the global War on Terror?


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As Israel has intensified its brutality and dispossession of the Palestinians over the past decade,why has this injustice been readily accepted (even supported) by Western governments?

Why do the governments policies diverge from the interests of their people in global justice?

These questions have had quite different answers, each with different implications for strategiesto support Palestinian rights. This article will draw upon divergent views which arose at a recentconference, Against Zionism: Jewish Perspectives.

National interests?

According to some accounts, the Israel lobby has skewed US government policy to diverge fromUS interests on the false assumption that Israel is a strategic asset. This view was popularisedin the recent article by (Mearsheimer and Walt, 2006), which usefully broke a political silence inthe USA. However, the article narrowly focused debate on the lobbys undue influence, whilereinforcing deeper assumptions about a unitary US interest. Indeed, support for Israel was

questioned as aberrant even though the US government has consistently supported oppressiveregimes for at least the past century. Certainly the lobby has been effective in silencingpoliticians critical of Israel, or simply those who regard US financial aid as excessive, thussuppressing political debate. But this role does not fully explain US government policy.

Some accounts have more explicitly distinguished between US interests and Israeli governmentpolicy. Back in 1971 a State Department official commented that US foreign policy hasresponded more to the pro-Israel views of the American Jewish community than to American oilinterests. This comment was recently quoted as evidence of divergent interests (Blankfort, 2006).This begs the crucial question of how overall Western support for Israel may involve convergentinterests.

Explanations emphasising the Zionist lobby have some variants which are even moreproblematic. Some cite Jewish power, i.e. the financial resources of Jews. This account updatesanti-Semitic conspiracy theories, which have effectively blamed Jews for disrupting orperverting a unitary national interest. Indeed, the conspiracy theory binds oppressed peoples withtheir oppressors through a nationalist ideology. The pro-Palestinian variant of anti-Semitismgenerates disunity among those who would support Palestinian rights, while obscuring the basisof US foreign policy.

The Zionist lobby certainly has a great capacity to silence dissent, but not to determine USgovernment policy. As an alternative explanation for affinity between the Israeli and Western

governments, the lobby has always depended upon persuading imperialist rulers about wheretheir own interests lie. As a key basis for them to support Israel, it has helped to pre-emptdemocracy in the Arab world and to deter efforts at claiming local oil resources for the peoplesbenefit (Rance, 2006a).

A turning point was the 1917 Balfour Declaration. Long before such a lobby could wieldfinancial power, Britains rulers were persuaded that the Zionist project would be a strategicasset. According to the British military governor of Palestine, a Zionist state would provide a


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little loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of hostile Arabs. This phrase drew an analogy to the racistOrange State, which had united Protestant capitalists and workers in oppressing the Catholicpopulation.

The persuaders for the Zionist project include Christian fundamentalists, who regard Israel as a

bulwark against Islam as an evil religion, even as a catalyst for the apocalypse. This affinityprovides a bizarre twist to an old story: that Zionism has always gained support from anti-Semites who prefer that Jews live elsewhere, as well as from imperialist powers seeking a loyallocal policeman (Rance, 2006b). In the last decade, Israeli government strategy has provided aprototype for the global War on Terror, as the rest of this article will argue.

Projecting terrorist threats

Israel has remained dependent upon Western imperialism for material and political support.Perversely, it has earned this support by suppressing nationalist and anti-imperialist forcesthroughout the Middle East. Zionism has always meant occupation, colonisation and war

directed against the indigenous Arab population and neighbouring states. Early on, Zionismdemonised any resistance as Arab terrorism, thus projecting its own barbarism onto its victims,in ways analogous to European colonialism.

In parallel, a Zionist anti-Semitism sought to substitute its own colonialist culture for previousJewish identities. It sought to eliminate the indigenous Palestinian Jews as a cultural category, sothat Arab Jew was turned into a contradiction in terms. Likewise Zionism adopted Westernanti-Semitic stereotypes of Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe, whose socialist loyalties wereantagonistic to Zionism (Levidow, 1990). They were all pressed to become new Jewsaccording to the Zionist version of European colonialism, or else become enemies of the state.

As a racist colonialist project, Zionism guaranteed Arab hostility. Zionism has always attributedthe persecution of the Jews to an innate anti-Semitism of non-Jews. This was later projected ontothe Palestinian population to explain its hostility to being colonised.

Moreover, Israeli political and military leaders engineered terrorist attacks across the Jordanianborder, in the name of avenging and preventing violence against Israelis. As the main politicalaim, these attacks sought to undermine Israeli and US negotiations with Arab neighbours. Led byAriel Sharon, this strategy turned Israeli revenge into a sacred moral principle. Having soughtpeace, President Moshe Sharett was outmanoeuvred. In 1955 he wrote:

In the thirties we restrained the emotions of revenge and we educated the public to consider

revenge as an absolutely negative impulse. Now, on the contrary, we justify the system ofreprisal out of pragmatic considerations .. . . we have eliminated the mental and moral brakes onthis instinct and made it possible. . . to uphold revenge as a moral value. This notion is held bylarge parts of the public in general, the masses of youth in particular, but it has crystallized andreached the value of a sacred principle in [Sharon's] battalion which becomes the revengeinstrument of the State (Rokach, 1980, Chapter 6).

Thus pre-emptive war dates back at least to 1950s Israel; later it would gain greater significance.


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Eventually the Zionist project faced legitimacy problems from the rise of the PLO as a secularnational liberation movement. With the mass uprising of the intifada starting in 1987, Palestiniancivil society threatened the security of the racist Zionist state. To contain the revolt, Israel usedphysical repression, collective punishment, economic theft, etc as well as new politicalstrategies which had a wider resonance in the Middle East.

With backing from the USA and UK, other governments in the region were promoting politicalIslam i.e. groups which politicise religion, while Islamicising politics as a weapon againstsecular nationalist movements. Israel developed its own version of this strategy. Palestinianorganisations could not legally receive funds from abroad without permission; the governmentgave permission to only one such organisation, Hamas, which attacked projects of the PLO andintimidated women activists in particular.

As a parallel strategy, Israel aimed to create an alternative Palestinian leadership which could beincorporated into the occupation, by analogy to the strategies of indirect rule under 19th centuryBritish colonialism. Eventually the Palestine National Authority (PNA) was created along these

lines under the Oslo Accord, engineered by Israeli Labour politicians and the ClintonAdministration. The PNA was designed to delegitimise resistance as terrorism, whilenormalising and policing the occupation. Under imperialist pressure, and enticed by an illusorylegitimacy, the PLO recognised Israel an inherently expansionist state which has neverdefined its borders.

After the mid-1990s, the incorporation strategy was breaking down. More and more Palestiniansrightly saw the PNA as policing the occupation for Israel. Its collaborationist role discreditedsecular Palestinian politics in the eyes of many. Meanwhile Hamas was providing basic welfareservices, in lieu of the PNA fulfilling its basic responsibilities to the people. Partly by default,Hamas remained a more credible basis for resistance to the occupation and gained more popular

support, even if its Islamist agenda created divisions among Palestinians. For all these reasons,the Labour-Clintonite approach was becoming a weaker strategy to suppress Palestinian revolt.

Likud prototype of the New American Century

Since the mid-1990s the Zionist project has extended its colonisation through more settlements,roads and fragmentation of the West Bank. It has systematically attacked Palestinian civil societyas a terrorist infrastructure, in the name of protecting Israeli security and democracy. Withthe rise of Hamas, the Zionist storyline could blame Islamic terrorism, as if the systemicviolence of the occupation arose from religious extremism. In all these ways, the Likudgovernment strategy offered a prototype of the neoconservative global agenda, which involved

Likud politicians early on.

The neoconservative agenda was responding to several real problems for imperialist rule.Domestic market-liberalisation agendas were losing public support and jeopardising thelegitimacy of Western governments, so they needed an extra means to frighten their people intosubmission. Anti-globalisation activists, demanding global justice, were making solidarity linkswith movements opposing the Western theft of resources throughout the global South. After thedemise of the Communist threat, imperialism needed a new global enemy which could justify


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yet more militarism and discipline of home populations. As the neoconservative remedy for allthose problems, the Project for a New American Century sought an American peace through apermanent, preventive war against existential threats.

For Israel in particular, the neoconservative agenda set out to rebuild Zionism through economic

reform (market liberalisation), counter-terror measures (yet more terrorism) and attacks on itshitherto partner for peace. After a Study Group on A New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000 wasled by Richard Perle, the Group reported as follows:

To secure the nations streets and borders in the immediate future, Israel can:Work closely with Turkey and Jordan to contain, destabilize, and roll-back some of its mostdangerous threats. This implies clean break from the slogan, comprehensive peace to atraditional concept of strategy based on balance of power.Change the nature of its relations with the Palestinians, including upholding the right of hotpursuit for self defense into all Palestinian areas and nurturing alternatives to Arafats exclusivegrip on Palestinian society (Perle et al, 1996).

On that basis, the Likud project sought to wage and justify permanent war against the Palestinianpeople. Rather than retain the PNA as a partner for policing the Palestinians, the Likud sought toweaken it and then blame Arafat for failing to stop terrorism. Having effectively encouragedthe Rabin assassination, Likud then used it to abandon any pretence of a peace process.Likewise, in colluding with Sharons invasion of the Temple Mount, the government guaranteedviolent protest. In destroying Palestinian civil society, Israel has portrayed its actions as self-defence at the frontline of a global struggle for civilisation (Warschawski, 2006). According tothe new Zionist storyline, Islamic terrorism posed the same existential threat to Israel and theentire Western world, whose survival depends on support for Israels actions.

11 September opportunity

In retrospect, this Likud strategy was a social laboratory for what would become the global Waron Terror though a Likudisation of US politics (Souief, 2004). As a neoconservative diagnosis ofmajor global threats,

Americas global leadership, and its role as the guarantor of the current great-power peace, reliesupon the general stability of the international system of nation-states relative to terrorists,organized crime, and other non-state actors (PNAC, 2000).

The neocon emphasis on non-state actors resonated with earlier warnings about a clash of

civilisations. Samuel Huntington (1993, 1996) had warned that post-Cold War conflict wouldoccur most frequently and violently along cultural lines, by contrast to the Left-Right ideologicalconflicts of the Cold War. This scenario had been widely criticised, even in the journal whichoriginally floated the idea. Yet a few years later it was appropriated by the neocons with a morespecific focus on Judeo-Christian civilisation versus Islamic fundamentalist-terrorism.

The 11th Sept 2001 attacks provided an opportunity for the neocon agenda, along with greaterconvergence between the Israeli and Western governments. Former Israeli Prime Minister


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Netanyahu happened to be in New York during the 11th Sept 2001 attack, so journalists askedhim what this meant for Israel. He replied: It is very good. It will strengthen the bonds betweenthe two peoples. Israelis have suffered from terrorism for years, and now so does the USpopulation. In a similar vein, said Prime Minister Ariel Sharon: Together we can defeat theforces of evil. Thus he equated the counter-terror campaign of Israel and its Western allies.

The equation has become more than rhetorical. Soon the Western war on terror was justifyingits global plunder, illegal wars and systematic brutality along similar lines: as a self-defenceagainst an abstract evil terror amidst a clash of civilisations. This war has drawn uponcolonialist counter-insurgency strategies, which conflated all types of anti-colonial resistance asterrorism (CAMPACC, 2005). As UK Prime Minister Tony Blair has said, Middle East peacewould be easier to achieve if it were not for terrorism; this diagnosis blames those who resist theZionist occupation. Western governments have adopted Israeli demands: that Palestiniansrenounce terror as a condition for any support or even subsistence.

Alongside those parallels with colonial strategies, the war on terror has a new blowback

effect, highlighted by the 11 September attack itself. Western societies now find themselvesbeing attacked by Islamic terrorist networks related to those which their own governments hadsponsored for their foreign intrigues and/or protected as intelligence assets (Ahmed, 2006).Like Israels permanent war against the Palestinians, the global war on terror intensifies thethreats from which it claims to protect us. Its self-perpetuating logic conveniently justifiespermanent war.

Moreover, Western governments have appropriated elements of Zionist strategy for their ownactivities. They have learned from Israel for their occupation of Iraq, e.g. by intensifying ethnicdivisions and inflicting collective punishment upon communities which resist. Notcoincidentally, as training for the invasion of Iraq, US soldiers watched films of the Israeli

Defence Force operations treating entire populations as terror suspects.

Also by analogy, Western governments have persecuted migrant and Muslim populations athome by turning them into an internal colony. This counter-terror campaign aims to deter,disorganise or even criminalise dissent from foreign policy (CAMPACC, 2005). The UKgovernment has maintained close links with organisations of political Islam, while demandingthat community representatives help to counter a vaguely defined extremism. Prime MinisterTony Blair has asked the moderate majority of Muslims to adopt his storyline: If we want todefeat the extremism, we have got to defeat its ideas and we have got to address the completelyfalse sense of grievance against the West (quoted in Grice and Russell, 2006). Thesemanoeuvres have several aims: shifting blame away from the government, Islamicising Asianpolitics, marginalising progressive Muslim forces, and justifying political surveillance of entirepopulations as terror suspects.

Implications for Palestine solidarity

In all the above ways, the Zionist project has an affinity with strategies for global counter-insurgency, even within Western countries. Elements of the neoconservative project have


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become mainstream politics in Israel, the USA and much of Europe. This analysis matters forstrategies to oppose the Zionist occupation and imperial plunder more widely.

Implications can be put in negative and positive terms for what should and should not be done.

It would be misguided to do the following:

y Making appeals to Muslim religious affinity, or identifying Jewish traditions/culture asthe problem. This would reinforce the Zionist storyline of a religious conflict, intensifypolitical divisions among those who oppose the occupation, and divert attention from itscolonial basis.

y Identifying the Zionist lobby as the main problem. This would exaggerate its influenceand divert attention from the imperialist-class interests which must be fought.

y Appealing to the humanity of Western governments. This would be futile and obscure thereasons why they depend upon Israel as a local policeman.

As an alternative strategy, we should:

y Oppose the Jewish state because it is a racist colonialist project not because it issupposedly Jewish, especially given that Zionism attacks progressive Jewish traditions.

y Build unity around a demand for a democratic secular state which guarantees equal rightsfor all its citizens.

y Develop direct solidarity between civil society organisations here and in Palestine.y Ally with all those who resist imperial plunder, and all those targeted by the war on

terror, both here and abroad.

Although this war on terror persecutes Muslims in particular, it targets anyone who resists

Palestinians, Kurds, Tamils, Colombians, etc. regardless of their religious background. Asecular basis can more effectively achieve the unity needed to oppose our common enemy. Tostop the constant threat of Zionist aggression, opponents will need to raise the cost to itsperpetrators and imperialist allies both there and here.

Acknowledgements

For helpful comments for improving this article, I would like to thank Ahdaf Soueif and fellowsupporters of Jews Against Zionism (Tony Greenstein, Roland Rance, Deborah Maccoby).

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