GegenStandpunkt 2-2004

Israel and the Europeans:
The thorniness of the Jewish state

In March, the Israeli army liquidates Hamas leader Ahmed Yassin and, soon after, his successor. More killings, as necessary and as opportunities arise, are announced and carried out daily on less prominent victims. The Sharon government explicitly points out that Yasser Arafat, the old “arch-terrorist,” is also on the list and only allowed to survive in his rubble-strewn residence thanks to Israeli generosity.

The leading powers of old Europe see themselves expressly affected: they condemn the “extrajudicial killings” as contrary to international law, worry about the “peace process” in the Middle East for which they have invented a “road map to peace,” and about “stability” in the region in general, as well as “Israel’s security” in particular, due to the “rise in terrorism” that is supposed to be connected to the Israeli army’s fight against it. In short, they find that their claim to a share of significant responsibility for the situation in this part of the world is being snubbed by the Sharon government.

That certainly does not make them enemies of Israel – they have never seen themselves as sworn friends of the Palestinians – ; but they also do not allow such dismissals to frustrate their desire to construct an imperialist order. The region is simply too important to them for that: they know the map and are aware that they have “direct neighbors” “from the Atlantic to the Himalayas”; they have counted the inhabitants and assessed the natural resources and found “a tenth of the world’s population,” along with “three-quarters of the world’s oil reserves,” and more than “half of the gas” in “the greater Middle East.” German Minister Fischer – like his important European colleagues – is explicitly concerned about what is happening in Belarus, Moldova, the Balkans, Turkey, and Iran; and as one of the masters of the Mediterranean and the natural point of contact for all its neighbors, he cannot be indifferent to whether Europe’s Mare Nostrum “is a sea of peace or of conflict.”

In these multifarious efforts, the European superpower, in both its national and communitarian forms of appearance, has to deal time and again with a Jewish community bristling with weapons; and this is increasingly becoming a source of discontent.

On the one hand, Israel, with its historical contribution to the position of Western imperialism in the Arab world, continues to be a rather favorable factor for some European calculations. Israel’s potential for violence and its ruthless use against enemies of the Jewish state are the real negation of Arab aspirations for power and thus a practical guarantee that the Islamic states in the region are dependent on powerful licensors and supporters in order to pursue their interests. The hopeless inferiority of Arba nations to Israeli supremacy forces them to align with non-Arab powers in the hope that they will be taken into account in their imperialist competitive calculations. Hence, Israel’s power projection in the region is the practical basis for how European interests do business with the powerlessness of the Arabs: on this basis, the Germans and the French, the British and the Spanish, alternately and together, offer themselves as advocates and helpers – for example, in the notorious “Palestinian question” – and interfere in all the calculations of the Arab states permanently threatened by Israel.

On the other hand, Israel is increasingly becoming an obstacle to the European states’ efforts in this regard. As “honest brokers,” they do not simply define Arab interests and leave it at that. When they diplomatically convey these interests to the other side – the Israeli side – , constantly launch new “peace initiatives” and try to show their “Israeli friends” the way to peace with specially drawn road maps, they are extending their Euro-imperialist will to order over Israel as well, in order to assign this small country its place in a Middle East organized according to European ideas. But the rulers of Judea and Samaria did not ask for this. They have not won one war after another for decades in order to now be dictated to by European wannabe world orderers on how Israeli statesmen should behave in completing the Jewish state project. Accordingly, Israel’s leaders are not amused by Europe’s advances and are giving them the cold shoulder. They are pushing ahead with the crushing of Palestinian resistance, paying no heed to European attempts at intervention, and when they occasionally destroy Palestinian projects funded with European money, such as the airport in Gaza, the diplomatic message of Israel’s smart bombs is certainly well understood in Europe. Israel, the unambiguous message reads, will by no means voluntarily submit to European definitions of its political role in the region, whether initiated by individual states, the EU, or the United Nations. The EU states cannot get around this. And Israel’s unaccommodating attitude is damaging their influence on the Arab side – and thus the entire European interventionist project – which has nothing to offer in terms of counter-balancing Israeli supremacy.

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Europe’s efforts in the region appear to Israeli leaders not merely as uninvited and unwelcome meddling. Israel wants to remain the unbeatable power in the region. Israeli political leaders treat the freedom to take violent actions as the question of its national survival. According to the prevailing Israeli interpretation, the appropriate response to this includes the permanent annexation of the occupied Palestinian territories, the destruction of Palestinian livelihoods, and the complete disempowerment of Palestinian claims. According to this view, security for Israel can only be achieved through the permanent elimination of its enemies, control over its neighbors, and the deployment of a military power unhindered by foreign meddling. And anyone who – like the Europeans – relativizes Israel’s right to ruthlessly attack must face the suspicion that they do not take the Jewish state’s right to exist seriously and endanger its existence by demanding that it make unreasonable concessions to its enemies.

This position had to be temporarily relativized in the Israeli internal debate: Under the slogan “land for peace,” deliberations were held on whether the security of Israel’s existence could not also be achieved with less violence, the size of the reservations to be granted to the Palestinians was debated, whether and how they should perhaps even be granted the status of a state of their own, and how many settlements in the Promised Land, which actually belongs to the Israelis, was a self-managed subjugation of the Palestinians worth. The Sharon government responded decisively to this debate: through an aggressive settlement policy and merciless military force, it “proved” that a peaceful agreement with the Palestinians is simply not possible and proceeded to annihilate Palestinian resistance.

The success of Sharon’s bloody crackdown, which was never in doubt given the numerous Israeli victims of Arab terrorist attacks, but only demanded all the more vehemently precisely because of these victims, largely rendered this domestic political debate obsolete. Sharon’s government has apparently convinced large sections of the population that they should not be satisfied with less than the territory won in the war and that it is possible, after the wars against Syria and Egypt, to also win the asymmetrical war against Palestinian terrorism. Against the backdrop of this success, withdrawal from the occupied territories has become so “unrealistic” (US President Bush) that even Sharon’s proposal to clear the military field of fire by abandoning the settlements in the Gaza Strip has been decisively rejected in a vote by the ruling party.

European concepts about a “Middle East” settlement that involve territorial concessions from Israel, that bring into discussion its withdrawal to pre-war borders and Palestinian refugee rights of return as bargaining chips, or even just recognize the Palestinian Authority as a formally authorized negotiating partner for a “peace settlement,” consistently seem to Israelis to be anachronistic, an unacceptable return to old, outdated conditions, and solely a threat to the status they have achieved militarily, which must be rejected by all means.

These means always include the political and moral move of demanding, as the community of Holocaust victims, a ban on criticism of the “Jewish people’s struggle for its right to exist.” The deliberate confusion of criticism of Israel’s policies with anti-Semitism is used as a diplomatic weapon to silence European critics by morally glorifying its own state terrorism. The European critics reject accusations of anti-Semitism, stage an entire congress to combat anti-Semitism, and demand nuance and responsibility in criticism and counter-criticism. They calculatingly overlook Israel’s sometimes fatal treatment of the Palestinians which would put less important states in the category of rogue states, always with the calculation of repeatedly creating a new basis for new attempts to intervene against Israeli resistance.

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In this trial of strength with the European powers, Sharon finds reliable support in the US policy, without which he would not be able to hold out. The Bush administration explicitly shares the Israeli government’s interpretation of the situation in the region: Palestinian resistance against Israel is terrorism and the fight against it puts Israel in a united front with the USA’s global war on terror. If Israel in its rightful place crushes Arab terror, it is fighting the USA’s fight and has all the freedom it needs to do so. European interference and hinderance in this joint campaign is out of the question. The Bush administration guarantees this.

America knows what it has with its warhorse in this “sensitive oil region”: thanks to American political, economic, and military support, Israel asserts itself as an aggressive representative of Western imperialism in the Arab world and, in the course of its territorial conquests, has so thoroughly crushed all resistance in the new national territory and in the neighboring region that those affected have still not recovered. Israel, acting in its own interests and those of the West, ensured that the formerly rival world power, the Soviet Union, was unable, despite all its efforts, to forge powerful allies in the region; and after the USSR gave up, Israel ensured that any regional ambitions that could have proved an obstacle to Western exploitation and control lacked power and means.

In the course of the USA’s transition to practical efforts to eradicate the crime of anti-Americanism worldwide, the state of Israel has gained a new role, not unlike its old one, in the extension of the American-Western way of life against terroristically presented objections from governments or relevant NGOs. And this well armed state system is doing everything it can to fill this role, as always, with an Israeli-defined content: it strikes its enemies, becomes the nightmare of all regional terrorists, and is thus – once again – the representative of the US desire for world order on the Middle Eastern frontline, this time as a comrade-in-arms in the USA’s global war on terror.

The US prizes this brotherhood in arms not only for the Israelis’ military efficiency and relentlessness against their common Islamic terrorist enemy. The intransigence of Israeli policy towards its European rivals for world power also comes in handy. This fits seamlessly into the calculations of the Americans, who do not want to be hindered by the Europeans in their rearrangement of the nations of the “Greater Middle East,” but rather want to assign them the status of subservient auxiliary powers of US interests. That is why the USA is providing the Israelis with the political backing they need to make it possible for them to withstand European pressure to get a foot in the door on the Middle East question and a share of responsibility in the region.

From the US perspective, the State of Israel is an ideal member of the “coalition of the willing”: it makes, in its very own interest, a considerable contribution to the fight against America’s enemies, because they are also its enemies, and simply sidelines competing efforts by European politicians by constantly creating new faits accomplis.

This is obviously not a situation that the trustees of Euro-imperialism are content with. They see themselves compelled, despite being vastly superior to the state of Israel in resources and power, to constantly reposition themselves vis-à-vis the recalcitrant Jewish state. In trying to surmount their lack of authority and subordination within the American-organized new world order in the Middle East, they are fighting, despite all the adversities that Sharon’s annoying inaccessibility is causing them, ultimately with the USA. The US could well use the Euro powers in its coalition. But when it comes to ceding real authority to its fellow imperialists, it leaves no doubt that the latter simply lack the same footing and that, as long as they do not submit to America’s command, its Jewish brothers in arms are much closer to it in the war on terror than its rival, old Europe.