THE U.S./ISRAEL ENTANGLEMENT, PART I
Three trillion dollars sounds like enough to buy anything on the planet. However, the U.S. has found that even this ridiculously large sum can't purchase something our government very much wants: peace in the Middle East.
According to The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, three trillion is what the U.S. has cumulatively spent on military operations, economic aid and opportunity costs in the Middle East. And the region is as explosive today as it was fifty years ago, when President Truman made America's first serious diplomatic forays there.
Israel has drawn the bulk of U.S. Middle Eastern spending. The tanks the Israeli army uses are likely purchased with U.S. money, if not given for free. Several times in the last half century, America has sent in its own troops to fight for Israel. We even pay other countries like Turkey and Egypt billions to leave the Israelis alone.
In military intelligence circles, such a relationship is known as "entanglement", a condition where two countries' actions and interests are so tightly woven together that the states cannot easily walk away from each other. A three with twelve zeroes suggests a pretty tight bind; this with a country that's younger than most of our politicians. Why is the U.S. so heavily involved with a nation on the other side of the world? What exactly is the story with the Middle East?
The story is, of course, an ancient one, dating to at least 1000 B.C. when the Israelites--the original Jews--presumably conquered Jerusalem after Moses had led them out of slavery in Egypt. Over the next 1,500 years, the region that would later become Israel was like a child's sandcastle on the beach: washed over by successive waves of conquerors who each swept away what the previous empire had built, erecting their own infrastructure until that, too, was destroyed by the next invader.
Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, and Romans all alternated control of the proto-Middle East, with the Jews occasionally wrestling back command for short periods. It was in this time that the area surrounding Jerusalem came to be known as Palestine.
But it was during the 7th century A.D. that the seeds of the region's present-day problems were planted. Muslim armies moved north from Arabia and conquered Jerusalem, becoming the first Palestinian Arabs. Already revered as the "Holy City" by Jews and Christians, Jerusalem came to be regarded as a sacred site by the Muslims as well--the spot where Mohammed was thought to have ascended to heaven. Suddenly three religions were claiming the same piece of real estate as ground zero for their beliefs.
The next thousand years saw a bloody game of musical chairs: Muslims, Jews, and Christians alternately coupled to defeat the current ruler of Palestine, with one of the victorious sides inevitably betraying the other and taking control, only to be then defeated by a new inter-religious alliance. Eventually, the rise of the Ottoman Empire in 1517 brought some stability to the land, and the Turkish Sultan allowed Jews fleeing the Spanish inquisition to live in Palestine.
Jewish settlement in the area accelerated in the late 1800's, exploding during World War I, when large numbers of Jews came to Palestine after escaping persecution in Europe. Many of the newcomers were Zionists, avowed to establishing an independent nation in the holy land. They gave little thought, however, to what the hundreds of thousands of Arabs living in the would-be "Promised Land" would think of their home being declared a Jewish state.
After the war, distant Western nations began for the first time to exert their gravitational influence on the Middle East. Determining control of Palestine became a power play between Britain and France. Britain won the struggle, but in the end probably wished they'd lost; their next thirty years of occupation brought nothing but violence and headaches as the region's 600,000 Jews and 1.2 million Arabs vehemently refused to live together, undermining plans to divide up Palestine amongst them.
In 1948, the British gave up and left Palestine, which prompted the Jews to proclaim the State of Israel. The vacuum of international influence created by the British withdrawal was quickly filled by the United States. President Truman even proposed taking trusteeship of Israel, a plan that he soon withdrew when it became clear that Israel needed no trustee to defend itself. Almost single-handedly, the Jewish armies defeated the armies of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq that attacked the newly founded Jewish state.
What made the U.S. so eager to take over as Israel's Western ally? Speculations include: guilt over turning away Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany during WWII, the influence of the formidable Jewish lobby in America, the strong Christian interest in Jerusalem and the desire to establish a toehold in the world's biggest oil-producing region.
Truman and his successor Eisenhower kept their support for Israel largely on a lip-service level, but soon after the 1948 war, when the Soviets aligned with nations like Syria and Egypt, U.S. financial and military support began in earnest. The Middle East became a cockfight arena, with the world's two emerging superpowers pitting their prizefighters against each other. Israelis and Palestinian Arabs now had several new reasons to hate each other: while driving back its attackers, Israel had seized Arab lands and driven 750,000 Palestinians from their homes into refugee camps.
1967 saw another development that haunts the peace process to this day. In the famous 6-Day War, a U.S.-advised Israel defeated Russian-equipped Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian forces and in the process usurped the Sinai Desert, the Golan Heights, and the West Bank. They also took Jerusalem, bringing Palestine's crown jewel under Jewish control.
After two more wars between Egypt and Israel, a peace treaty was brokered by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, a deal the U.S. sweetened for Egypt by tying it to long-term financial aid. After their last battle with another country, Lebanon, in 1982, the Israelis' problems shifted to their own soil, mainly in the form of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), a group of Palestinians many of whom had been displaced during earlier wars.
Bent on recovering their homes, on forcing the Israelis from the occupied territories and eradicating the Jewish state, the PLO carried out suicide bombings and other actions against their "occupiers". Israel, in turn, responded by destroying the homes of bombers' families and assassinating Arabs thought to be PLO officers.
The "Palestinian question" became a major issue for U.S. presidents. Carter sympathized with the Arabs and pushed for Palestinian self-government. So did Reagan. Bush Sr. was reportedly one of the only presidents to exert economic pressure on Israeli-Palestinian relations, threatening to withhold loans unless Jewish settlement in the Arab West Bank was slowed. Clinton was pro-Israel and largely refused to press the issue of Arab rights. George W. Bush's position has been middle of the road, calling for a Palestinian state, but under a democratically reformed PLO leadership.
Perhaps the closest the Middle East came to peace was in 1995, when Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was pushing for an accord with the PLO, with officials from both sides completing a hopeful-looking memorandum on resolving outstanding issues. At this crucial juncture, however, the region's ever-present undercurrent of violence welled up: Rabin was shot and killed by a right-wing Jew. The peace process collapsed, a hard-line Israeli government was elected, and bloody fighting resumed that continues to the present.
Today the U.S. finds itself entangled in a thousand-year-old border dispute where both sides are so hardened by memories of atrocities that they refuse to recognize the other's right to even exist. Add to this mix the inertia of half a century of American involvement--including the ghosts of the Cold War, the perceived need for a U.S. Middle Eastern presence for combating extremist terrorism, the powerful voice of interest groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and the fact that the whole mess sits atop billions of barrels of desperately-needed oil--and you begin to understand how difficult it may be for us to ever extricate ourselves from the Middle East.
For a detailed--and fairly unbiased--history of Palestine and Israel, visit:
www.mideastweb.org/briefhistory.htm
In one of the next WWNK issues, you'll read about the consequences of our Israel support on current U.S. politics. |
