{"id":1433,"date":"2006-05-19T16:17:28","date_gmt":"2006-05-19T20:17:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/wordpress\/?p=1433"},"modified":"2006-05-19T16:17:28","modified_gmt":"2006-05-19T20:17:28","slug":"sandstorm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/?p=1433","title":{"rendered":"Sandstorm"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sandstorm<\/em>, by Leon Hadar, provides an historical review of U.S. interventions in the Middle East and promotes alternatives to the unilateral hegemony that has replaced Cold War-era policies of containment. He deftly deconstructs the myths that the U.S. is dependent upon Middle East oil and must “do something” about terrorism and the Israeli\/Palestinian conflict. <\/p>\n

Hadar does not propose reinstating U.S.-led, offshore balancing strategies when, as he predicts, the neoconservative-led experiment ends in disaster. He argues that since the collapse of the Soviet Union and its counterbalance to U.S. hegemony in the region, rather than attempting to establish unilateral dominance in its wake, the U.S. should implement a policy of “constructive disengagement” and allow Europe to assume the controls.<\/p>\n

I part company with Hadar in several respects. Firstly, despite the overwhelming evidence he provides that U.S. support of Israel over the years arose from geo-strategic concerns, he insists on forwarding the notion that this support was and remains rooted in morality, including Harry Truman’s decision to recognise the state of Israel in 1948. Hadar is stodgy on this point, more than once, he wraps-up extensive pages of brilliantly constructed and informative analyses with an inclusion of this presumptuous fallacy. I don’t disagree that many assume the position, but he seems to indulge it, at least he offers no serious challenge to it.<\/p>\n

“If Jesus Christ couldn’t satisfy them here on earth, how the hell am I supposed to?<\/em>“
\n– Harry S. Truman<\/a><\/p>\n

Truman’s presidency and the establishment of a Zionist state in Palestine were catastrophes<\/a>. The defence of Truman as a moral crusader requires picking poisoned fruit from the tree of Western exceptionalism. Zionists such as Daniel Pipes are proud to claim<\/a> that the man who ordered the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki<\/em><\/a> supported Israel due his deeply rooted religious and moral beliefs. But the record is clear<\/a> that Truman’s support for Israel required him to take an extended leave of absence from his moral conscience.<\/a> <\/p>\n

He wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt on August 23, 1947, apparently in the wake of one or another Jewish terrorist atrocity:<\/p>\n

“I fear very much that the Jews are like all underdogs. When they get on top they are just as intolerant and cruel as the people were to them when they were underneath. I regret this situation very much because my sympathy has always been on their side.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Truman was pushed and prodded towards his eventual championing of the creation of a Jewish state. He thought the Morrison-Grady compromise, “that both London and the US State Department accepted,” was fair. Palestine would have been divided into British, Arab and Jewish sectors and the British would have remained in control for four years. Jerusalem and the Negev would have been in the British sector. It also allowed for the entry of 100,000 refugees. “Zionists did not accept the federalization scheme or the small amount of land allotted to them.” Palestinian leaders also rejected the plan<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Zionists supported partition. When Truman finally did go to bat for the partition team<\/a>, a fearsome group of arm-twisting thugs<\/a> that coerced other nations into supporting it, he may have been breaking from the policies of Franklin Roosevelt. And implementing a solution that is only acceptable to one-side was not the way the United Nations usually conducted business, as Ilan Pappe pointed out to Baudouin Loos in<\/a>, “An Interview of Ilan Pappe<\/em>,” 29 November 1999. But popular support for it amongst American citizens was business as usual.<\/p>\n

“65% of Americans supported partition according to a poll taken in late 1947.” It stands to reason that many of them had stood with the overwhelming majority of Americans who vehemently opposed Truman’s attempts to bring displaced Jews to America. Marauding vacationers from morality – Hypocrites – Advocates for the theft of another people’s land so they would not have to share their own. What has changed since then? National Guard troops are now patrolling the U.S. southern border as their comrades occupy Iraq and the only remaining justification for the latter is control of the oil tap. It seems the only borders considered sovereign by these folks are their own.<\/p>\n

But they were not alone in prioritising land ownership over morality<\/a>. <\/p>\n

From the very beginning of the War, the Orthodox took the lead in all efforts to unite the community behind rescue. Rabbi Leo Jung and the Agudath Israel Youth Council under Mike Tress were pioneers in the tedious and frustrating work of procuring visas for Jews in Europe, saving thousands.<\/p>\n

In contrast to the mainstream Jewish leaders, for whom Jewish activities were, in Kook?s words, a form of extracurricular activity, Tress threw himself into full-time rescue work, without even a salary, in 1939. Agudath Israel was the only Jewish organization to defy a British boycott to send food parcels to starving Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland.<\/p>\n

When Reform leader Stephen Wise received information from Europe in the late summer of 1942 that the Nazis had already exterminated two million Jews, he remained silent, until Jacob Rosenheim, the president of World Agudath Israel, who had received similar information, forced him to call an emergency meeting of 34 American groups. At the meeting, Wise accused the rabbis of spreading “atrocity tales.”<\/p>\n

Only at the insistence of Orthodox groups was rescue given even a minor place on the agenda of the American Jewish Conference of major Jewish groups in August 1943, nearly a year after confirmation of the Nazi extermination campaign. All the major resolutions dealt with a post-war state in Palestine. Kook remembered, “I walked out. I was sick at the whole thing, because I had been sure that this was a conference on saving Jews.”\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Truman was a bald-faced liar. In 1944, then Senator Truman told a Chicago rally<\/a>:<\/p>\n

“Today, not tomorrow, we must do all that is humanly possible to provide a haven for all those who can be grasped from the hands of Nazi butchers. Free lands must be opened to them.” <\/p>\n

The following passage refers to Truman’s close friend and former business associate<\/a>, the indefatigable Eddie Jacobson, who by all accounts acted as Truman’s personal historian and his liaison to the Zionist lobby<\/a>. Jacobson was a critical mender of fences whenever the Zionists offended Truman, as they did on more than one occasion, and he is credited with convincing Truman that the new state should include the Negev. <\/p>\n

KRONHEIM: Well, in the first place, he had been associated in business with Jacobson, and he had been exposed to the Jewish people and through him to the Jewish organizations. I think Mr. Truman at heart — not that he wanted to do something for Jacobson, but I think that he was whole-heartedly in favor of the establishment of a Jewish home. He knew more about Jewish history that a lot of people will ever know. As a matter of fact, to prove that, I went to the White House sometime later with a group to invite him to a Jewish affair and before we left the White House he gave us a talk on Jewish history that astounded those who were there who knew Jewish history, not that I did, but they did. And when he rolled off the facts of Jewish history, it was astounding.<\/p>\n

HESS: What group was that, do you recall?<\/p>\n

KRONHEIM: Well, I have a picture on the wall here of the group. It was the Jewish National Fund, which was a group organized to buy land in Israel for the State. This land had to be bought, and it was all bought through the Jewish National Fund, an organization that had been in existence for many, many years. I daresay that Jacobson had been an active member of that too. We went to Mr. Truman that time to invite him to come to a dinner in his honor, sponsored by the Jewish National Fund. As I say, at this meeting, when we went to him for the purpose of inviting him to be the recipient of the honor, he gave us an exposition of his knowledge of Jewish history that was really astounding.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

One of the most astounding fabrications of Jewish history is that the Jewish National Fund<\/a> acquired Palestinian land legally, through purchase. Truman could not have been blind to this propaganda<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n
\n<\/div>\n

1946 October 5 – 6, TOWER AND STOCKADE SETTLEMENTS (Eretz Israel)<\/a><\/p>\n

In one night, 11 new settlements (the largest number to date) were put up in the Negev by using the stockade and tower method. First begun in 1936 (at Nir David), 118 settlements were eventually set up in this manner, helping to determine the borders of the future state.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Truman may have been a simple man from Missouri but he was no simpleton. He knew that Palestine was neither a “free land” nor was he ever willing to secure or maintain it with the U.S. military. He was not someone who would have believed that Palestine was a “A land without a people for a people without a land” as the most delusional continue to assert. So when he addressed that rally in Chicago, he was lying.<\/p>\n

Perhaps a selective version of humanitarianism was his guide. He expressed disappointment when he realised the Zionists were not going to allow the right of return to the 700,000 or more people they’d made refugees. But he did not become a champion of Palestinians when it was obvious they were the underdogs, despite the instrumental role he’d played that enabled their ruthless ethnic cleansing. Is that the moment he turned to his religious teachings, the part of it that today leads millions to play video games like “Left Behind: Eternal Forces<\/a>“, the objective to convert the Jews in the Holy Land or send them to hell? <\/p>\n

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

Secondly, Hadar excludes Arabs from the decision-making process. His book is essentially an appeal to the U.S. to handover control of the Middle East to Europe that envisions an expansion of the EU to include an independent Palestine and Israel, and he offers the model of NAFTA in Mexico as an incentive for doing so.<\/p>\n

pp. 164, 165<\/p>\n

The prospect of joining the EU could even help launch a process of economic and political liberalization in an independent Palestine and an Iraqi federation. In the same way that the establishment of NAFTA produced pressure for democratic reform in Mexico, the evolution of trade and institutional ties among the EU, Palestine, and Iraq, and eventually Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, could lay the foundation for a movement toward democracy in the entire Levant.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Resistance towards establishing democracy<\/a> is not kicking-up the sandstorm in the Middle East. It is currently the insertion of the hierarchal totem-pole that places “civilised” Christian Westerners on top and allows Israel and varying allies to occupy a deferential position. Anyone who resists their self-serving demands are subjected to the might of their economic and military forces. <\/p>\n

Last week, the Forward<\/em> reported<\/a> that, “Jewish community leaders have urged the White House to refrain from publicly pledging to defend Israel against possible Iranian hostilities, senior Jewish activists told the Forward<\/em>.”<\/p>\n

This week, the White House urged<\/a> Israelis to keep their plans for unilateral disengagement quiet as they travel to Washington to “get support” for it. As many have noted, including Hadar, U.S. support for Greater Israel was “formalised” during the Bush-Sharon meeting in April 2004. And whilst the WH also warned Olmert not to request money for the so-called convergence, $1.2 billion is still in the works for the last “disengagement” that resulted in the expansion of illegal settlements, including in the Negev<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Redefining the Middle East<\/em><\/a> is in order, but not in the manner that Hadar promotes, which is the same old “Empire Lite” just with a different master.<\/p>\n

But his book is a brilliant contribution to the historical record.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sandstorm, by Leon Hadar, provides an historical review of U.S. interventions in the Middle East and promotes alternatives to the unilateral hegemony that has replaced Cold War-era policies of containment. He deftly deconstructs the myths that the U.S. is dependent … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1433","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pdXTf-n7","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1433","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1433"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1433\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1433"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1433"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1433"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}