The Israeli military machine's current repression against unarmed Palestinian civilians protesting against the Jewish state's colonial occupation of their national homeland has been so brutal that even Israel's chief sponsor, the United States, felt it could not vote against a United Nations Human Rights Commission resolution condemning Israel for "excessive" use of force.
Washington's abstention was no doubt motivated by a desire to try to present itself to world public opinion as an "honest broker" between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.
This diplomatic fiction has been central the "peace process". However, it has become so obviously at odds with the reality of continued US's financial and military support for Israel that even Washington's closest ally in the Arab world has been forced to declare the "peace process" finished in its present form.
On October 25, Amr Moussa, Egypt's foreign minister, told the Lebanese newspaper As Safir that: "Nobody among the Arabs, and especially among the Palestinian, will agree to return to the negotiating table on the basis of the old criteria and standards."
Palestinian leaders have concurred with this view, saying Washington support for Israel precludes the US being accepted as the sole international intermediary in any future negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.
That Washington is not neutral in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is very apparent to the masses throughout the Arab world. They only have to compare the US rulers' mild expressions of "concern" about the Israeli military's use of massive force — tanks, helicopter gun-ships, heavily armed troops, snipers, etc — against stone-throwing Palestinian protesters with these same rulers' vigorous denunciation of any act of Arab terrorism committed against Israeli civilians to see which side the US is on.
The state of Israel has been supported by US imperialism from its founding. It could hardly be otherwise. Like Australia, Israel is a colonial-settler state. It was founded on the premise of dispossessing Palestinian Arabs who were already living there in favour of European and North American Jewish colonists.
Zionism and imperialism
From its founding by Theodr Herzl in 1897, the Zionist movement realised that in order to succeed they had to achieve recognition of their "right" to Palestine by an imperialist power, or else convince the rulers of Palestine that an independent Jewish state would be to their benefit.
Prior to World War I, Palestine was ruled by the Ottoman Turkish Empire, which was allied with Germany. Max Nordau, Herzl's deputy, wrote at the time: "Our aspirations point to Palestine as a compass points to the north, therefore we must orient ourselves towards those Powers [Germany and Turkey] under whose influence Palestine happened to be."
During its first few years, Zionism courted the German Kaiser and Turkish Sultan in an attempt to win them over.
This focus shifted during the first world war when it became clear that Britain would be the next major colonial power to rule over Palestine. The publication by the British government in 1917 of the Balfour Declaration was the first major political victory for the movement, as it was the first indication of public support by a major imperial power for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine.
The British rulers were lavish with their promises. The Arabs were also being promised national independence by the British agent T.E. Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia"). Such promises were driven by British war aims, which were to undermine the Ottoman regime and secure post-war access to Middle Eastern oil supplies.
In 1914 there were about 700,000 Arabs living in Palestine. The creation of an exclusively Jewish state on Arab territory would of necessity force the Arabs to leave, or remain there as second-class citizens. It would be impossible to colonise the area and establish a purely Jewish economy and political institutions without the support of whoever controlled Palestine. It was the very internal logic of Zionism that drove it to ally itself with imperialism.
Of course the Arabs who actually lived in the area were not considered worthy of consultation. At one extreme the approach taken was similar to that taken by the British in Australia. It was considered that the land was not occupied, at least by a people that considered itself Palestinian. However, many did recognise the reality of the situation and some, at least initially, recoiled from the implications.
In his memoirs the philosopher Martin Buber related the following anecdote: "When Max Nordau... first received details on the existence of an Arab population in Palestine, he came shocked to Herzl, exclaiming: 'I never realised this — we are committing an injustice'."
Having received the sanctity of legitimacy from Great Britain, the next step was to implement the Zionist plan. This necessitated the encouragement of a mass emigration of Jews to Palestine, and the acquisition of land. Palestinian Arabs, who were awakened to political consciousness by the war and hints of national independence, were opposed to the plan. Their aim was the creation of a Palestinian state.
This forced the Zionists to back British rule in the region, because a Palestinian state created while Jews were still a minority would be a defeat for the Zionist cause. David Ben-Gurion, who was to become Israel's first prime minister, declared in 1935 that "whoever betrays Great Britain betrays Zionism".
Thus during the Palestinian rebellion against British rule from 1936-1939, the Zionists actively aided the British military's repression (which was tying down a large proportion of the British army). The crushing of this rebellion removed the Palestinians from the political arena, which then become dominated by Britain and the Zionists.
From 1918 to 1948 the Jewish population in Palestine grew from 50,000 to about 600,000, mostly due to Zionist-organised immigration. The rise to power of fascism in Europe in the 1930s, and the refusal of the United States and Britain to receive most of the Jewish refugees fleeing the German fascists drive to physically exterminate Jews meant that many had little choice but to go to Palestine.
Funds acquired from Jews around the world by Zionist organisations helped acquire land and the establishment of a purely Jewish economy and social infrastructure in Palestine based on Zionism's racist policy of hiring only "Jewish labour" and buying only "Jewish-made" goods.
Land was purchased from absentee Arab feudal landlords, and the Arab tenant farmers were evicted. They usually remained unemployed because Jewish firms would not hire them, and if they went into business themselves it was difficult for them to sell their produce. This meant that Zionism opposed any form of land reform, as this would have placed the available land in the hands of the Arab farmers who worked it. This would then mean that land would be more difficult to come by.
National liberation struggle?
It has often been claimed by Zionists that the Zionist project was a national liberation struggle, and the Zionists' fight against British rule over Palestine in 1947 is indicative of this.
However, though there developed differing interests between British imperialism and Zionism these did not indicate that the nature of Zionism had altered. British policy in the 1930s revolved around securing oil reserves and protecting the Suez Canal. The demand for increased Jewish immigration and more independence for the embryonic Zionist state were having a negative impact on Britain's attempt to woo the Arab worlds again. By 1939, the British government had issued a declaration opposing a purely Jewish state in Palestine.
The war also altered the nature of the Palestinian economy. Before World War II, British commercial interests dominated the local economy. The advent of war in North Africa and the Mediterranean disrupted the British supply line. Palestine became a major supply point for the British army, and this led to substantial increase in demand for locally produced goods.
This particularly benefited Jewish industrialists, who were able to respond to the increased demand due to their relatively modern industrial methods (aided by an influx of Jewish capitalists from Europe fleeing Nazism). The Arab sector of the economy was unable to respond in like manner because the process of Jewish colonisation helped to distort the development of the Arab economy.
However, the end of the war led to a contraction of the economy, and saw the resumption of British imports.
Unwilling to demand independence before the war, the Jewish predominance in the Palestinian economy by 1945 gave an impetus to the Zionist demand for the establishment of an independent state in Palestine. This state was still seen as an exclusively Jewish one, the creation of which would therefore require the "ethnic cleansing" of Palestinian Arabs.
Joseph Weitz, head of the Jewish Agency's colonisation department noted in 1940: "Between ourselves, it must be clear that there is no room for both peoples together in this country... And there is no other way but to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighbouring countries; to transfer all of them; not one village, not one tribe should be left."
The United Nations decision to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab enclaves was not going to satisfy anyone.
The problem for Palestinian Arabs was not necessarily the existence of Jewish settlers per se. In a speech to the UN General Assembly in 1974 Palestine Liberation Organisation chairperson Yasser Arafat stated that "if the immigration of Jews to Palestine had had as its objective the goal of enabling them to live side by side with us, enjoying the same rights and assuming the same duties, we would have opened our doors to them as far as our homeland's capacity for absorption permitted".
Given that the colonialist aims of the Zionist movement were generally known, it's not surprising that the creation of the Israeli state was actively resisted by the Arabs.
In the end, the 1947-48 war that the Zionists launched to conquer Palestine led to the expulsion of about 850,000 Palestinians, out of a total Arab population of just over one million. Those that remained were, according to Israeli law, second-class citizens in what had been their own country.
The young Israeli state was always prepared to deal with the neighbouring Arab monarchies, which at the time continued to serve British interests. The 1948 war was settled not only on the battlefield. The Ben-Gurion government entered into a secret arrangement with King Abdullah of Jordan, which gave to Jordan the West Bank. At the end of the war, the Israel state had taken control over 81% of Palestine.
Washington's key Mideast ally
The establishment of the Israeli colonial-settler state coincided with a drive by the US surround the Soviet Union with a network of military bases and US-dominated military alliances. Israel was keen to join such a US-dominated Middle East alliance because the Zionist rulers felt able to get inserted into such any alliance treaty a clause recognising of each state's "territorial integrity", thus forcing Washington's Arab allies to give diplomatic recognition to their colonial conquest of most of Palestine.
This was something most Arab politicians were unwilling to do. Anti-imperialist movements were gaining influence in the Arab world, and the leaders of Arab nationalist regimes such as Gamal Nasser in Egypt were reluctant to sign because they correctly believed that such treaties were designed to replace British imperialist domination of the Middle East with US domination.
Israel thus became US imperialism chief ally in the region. This alliance was and is based on shared political interests — opposition to any form of Arab radicalism that would threaten Western economic domination of the region.
In 1956, Israel responded to the Egyptian government's nationalisation of the Suez canal by joining an Anglo-French invasion force (which was badly beaten by the defending Egyptians).
The June 1967 war which Israel provoked with its Arab neighbours had two objectives. One was to seize as much territory as possible. As a result of the war Israel was able to seize the West Bank from Jordan, the Golan Heights from Syria and the Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula from Egypt.
The other Israeli objective was to try to force the overthrow of the nationalist regimes in Egypt and Syria. Again, the Israeli rulers had some success. After the death of Nasser in 1970 his successor, Anwar Sadat, moved quickly towards finding a rapproachment with the US and Israel.
The 1967 war was also a turning point for Israel's economic development. Before 1967 the Israeli economy was heavily subsidised by the US and West Germany. This "aid", which would continue and expand after 1967, along with Israeli territorial expansion, transformed Israel from a colonial-settler state allied with imperialism into an imperialist power in its own right, directly and indirectly exploiting the labour of the Palestinian Arab nation.
Traditionally, Israel has been the first to the third highest recipient of US aid. In return for such lavish support, Israel has made its own substantial contributions to the maintenance of the imperialist world order.
During the 1970s Israel supplied to the Romero military dictatorship in El Salvador more military hardware than did the United States. Overthrown in 1979, this was a regime so brutal that the US did not want to be openly identified with it. Israel also supplied weapons to the military dictatorship in Guatemala during the same period.
In 1978, Washington cut arms supplies to Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza. Somoza's war against the Nicaraguan people, defeated in 1979 by the victory of the Sandinista National Liberation Front, was in the end waged largely with Israeli-supplied weapons.
Israel had excellent relations with the apartheid regime in South Africa. In its continued illegal blockade of Cuba, the only support for the US now comes from Israel. During the 1980s Israel militarily occupied southern Lebanon in order to clear the area of Palestinian refugee camps.
Today the Zionist state is continuing its 53-year war against the Palestinian people. Because Israel's very existence is based on the dispossession and oppression of the indigenous Arab population of Palestine, the logic of Zionism has made the Israeli state a bastion of pro-imperialist reaction. This will not change until the Israeli state is replaced by a secular, democratic state in which the Hebrew- and Arabic-speaking people of Palestine live together with the same civil and political rights.
BY JOHN NEBAUER