The Iron Cage Read online

  Needless to say, all of these questions will be colored by the recognition that to this day the Palestinians remain considerably less powerful by any measure than the forces that stand in the way of their achieving independent statehood. It seems clear that in the decades since 1948 the Palestinians have been plagued by some of the same problems that afflicted them before that date. It is an open question whether examining past failures might help to prevent future ones, on the theory that there is a link between those structures and forces, internal and external, that operated in the past to hinder Palestinian self-determination, and those at work today. Either way —whether external forces or internal Palestinian weaknesses (or a combination of both) have prevented the establishment of an independent Palestinian state—a final question remains: Is statehood the destined outcome for a people who, since the early part of the twentieth century had a clearly defined national identity but who have been unable to develop lasting, viable structural forms for it, or to control a national territory in which it can be exercised? Is it not possible that the Palestinian people will continue to exist indefinitely into the future, as they have since Ottoman hegemony ended in 1918, in a stateless limbo? Are we perhaps too obsessed with the very idea of the state, demonstrating the bias in favor of the state that Hegel found in historical discourse, in our attempts to place the state at the center of the historical narrative?3

  These are questions that perplexed me for several years after I finished an examination of Palestinian identity published in 1997.4 I had planned to devote a sabbatical leave beginning in September 2001 to completing my research and writing about why the Palestinians had not achieved statehood. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, however, a different set of questions diverted my attention from this task. With the United States at war in Afghanistan and about to invade Iraq, there seemed to be more pressing inquiries concerning the Middle East than the issue of Palestinian statelessness. Moreover, the spectacular events of September 11 and its aftermath had rendered every aspect of the Middle East once again a subject of intense interest, a subject that was difficult to deal with objectively, in view of the powerful emotions these events had unleashed.

  At the time, given the background of the assailants of September 11, given the reverberations of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and of a war with Iraq that already appeared inevitable in 2001–2, it seemed to me that Middle East experts had a responsibility to illuminate the fraught history of the region’s relations with Western powers, against which any intervention in Iraq would necessarily be judged. Admittedly, even in the best of times, it is difficult to engage Americans in an objective discussion of Middle Eastern history; Americans often come to such discussions with a dearth of knowledge about the region (and the world), and they are often oblivious to their country’s massive impact on, and complex role in, the world generally, and the Middle East in particular. However, this was the worst of times.

  Partly in response to these concerns, in 2002–3 I therefore stopped working on the topic of Palestinian statelessness, and instead wrote Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America’s Perilous Path in the Middle East.5 In so doing I was trying to elucidate for Americans who would have to live with the consequences of their government’s actions some of the key historical issues that were obscured, largely deliberately, as the United States rushed into an invasion of Iraq that, even before its inception, promised to be disastrous to those acquainted with the region’s history.

  Having completed that book, I realized that I had largely failed to address an issue generally ignored in American public discourse about the Middle East. This is the long, involved, and often close relationship of the U.S. government with some of the villains of the tragedy of 9/11, a relationship far more complex than Americans have generally been led to believe. Delineating these ties would of course in no way mitigate the full and terrible responsibility of those who had planned and perpetrated the atrocious murders of thousands of innocent Americans. Nevertheless, it would show that these individuals did not materialize out of a vacuum, and that they were not in fact as utterly alien as they appeared to be, or were made to appear by the government, the media, and assorted self-proclaimed experts. To show this, it would be necessary to explain how for many decades the United States fostered or allied itself with some of the reactionary, obscurantist, and illiberal Islamic tendencies that, metastasizing over many years, engendered the individuals and groups who carried out the attacks of September 11. It would also be necessary to explain to Americans—many of whom hold the belief that their country acts only for good in the world—that various actions of their government over several decades have had disastrous consequences in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, and elsewhere in the Arab and Islamic worlds.

  In the wake of September 11, some commentators have argued that to refer even obliquely to such matters was tantamount to acting as an apologist for the assailants, and for terrorism generally. Irrespective of the sometimes sordid reality of American involvement in the Middle East for well over a half century, those who made such references were described as “blame America firsters.” Here is a clear case of how a traumatic atrocity can be cynically exploited to suppress historical truths. The result was a rejection of any attempt to explain the historical context for the events of 9/11 and other gratuitous acts of terrorism against Americans, and the preponderance of grotesque and thoroughly ignorant caricatures as conveyed in such statements as, “They hate our freedom,” “They resent our culture,” and “Their religion preaches hatred.”

  This avoidance of the hard realities of the Middle East in some quarters in the United States is not a new phenomenon. In particular, there has been a traditional aversion on the part of many Americans to hearing any serious analysis, let alone criticism, of their country’s Middle East policies, or of those of U.S. allies in the region. This is true even though the veil that had generally been maintained in public discourse over the undemocratic domestic policies of the Saudi Arabian and Egyptian regimes has slipped considerably since September 11, 2001. In consequence, both governments are now subject to more congressional and media criticism, especially Saudi Arabia.6 Beyond this, Israeli excesses have occasionally forced the media to show some measure of objectivity. This happened in 1982 during the ten-week siege and bombardment of Beirut and the subsequent Sabra and Shatila massacres,7 and at times during the first Palestinian intifada, from 1987–91. In recent years, however, especially since the second intifada began in late 2000, the resistance in the United States to any criticism of Israel’s policies has increased, even as a military occupation over millions of Palestinians that in June 2006 began its fortieth year grows ever more suffocating.8

  In consequence of all these factors, there has been little coverage of certain types of Middle Eastern news in the United States. This virtual blackout has largely been a function of American media self-censorship. Especially on television, where most Americans get their news, there has been little detailed reportage on conditions in the Israeli-occupied territories (indeed of the very fact that there is an Israeli occupation, maintained by violence), and there has been little coverage of routine domestic repression, violations of human rights, and restrictions on democracy and freedom of expression in America’s Arab allies and client states. Such reports are common in the media of Europe and the rest of the world, and even in Israel. Only since the unrealistic war aims of the Bush administration in Iraq have produced chaos in that country has a willingness to critique some aspects of U.S. Middle East policy crept into American public discourse.

  Nevertheless, it is an undeniable fact that many of those who planned and carried out the attacks of September 11, or those who guided, led, taught, and supported them, were not so very long ago the welcome allies of the United States and various Middle Eastern regimes to which it is closely linked. This is true whether these individuals belonged to one of the radical offshoots of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Egyptian Islamist political party founded in 192
8, or adhered to some extremist version of the Wahhabi doctrine, which represents religious orthodoxy in Saudi Arabia, or aided the Afghan mujahideen during the war against the Soviet occupation during the 1980s. Specifically, the masterminds of 9/11, and their intellectual forebears and spiritual guides,9 were frequently the ardent and devoted foot-soldiers of the United States and its allies in the murky covert struggles against the Soviet Union and other opponents in the Middle East from the mid-1950s until the early 1990s. American and allied policymakers supported them against such identified enemy forces as Arab nationalism, Pan-Arabism, local communist parties, radical regimes, Palestinian nationalism, and later the Soviets in Afghanistan.10

  All of this exceedingly germane history, some of it quite recent, has been obliterated or forgotten. Over the past few years, the intellectual progeny of these U.S. clients, their successors, and in a few cases the very same individuals (figures such as Shaykh ‘Umar ‘Abd al-Rahman, convicted in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing,11 the late Shaykh Ahmad Yasin, founder of Hamas, Salman al-‘Awda and Safar al-Hawla, both Saudi clerics,12 and the two top leaders of al-Qa‘ida, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Usama Bin Laden) who once were allies, fellow travelers, or salaried agents of the United States and the Middle Eastern governments it supports, came to regard the United States and its allies in the region as their enemies. Another example would be the transformation of the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood and its offspring, Hamas, from the protégés of the Israeli occupation into Israel’s fierce enemy.13 One hears little about this history in the United States today, perhaps out of deference to the individuals and institutions that directed and executed American policy during the Cold War.14

  Uncomfortably for both American policymakers and for their critics, these Islamic radicals, beyond their reactionary social and cultural stances, which generally have had a narrow appeal in the Arab and Islamic worlds, also espoused other causes that have been broadly popular throughout the region. These causes included several related positions: opposing Israeli occupation and supporting Palestinian self-determination; condemning the sanctions regime imposed on Iraq after the Gulf War of 1991 and the 2003 invasion of that country; demanding the removal of unpopular American bases from Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and other Arab countries; and resisting the undemocratic, oligarchic, and often corrupt regimes like those of Saudi Arabia and Egypt—most of them shored up by the United States and other Western powers—that dominate the Middle East.

  This situation is deeply problematic for American policymakers, especially those in the Bush administration, who claim that the United States always acts in the name of freedom and democracy. Yet if most people in Middle Eastern countries could freely express their opinion, they would likely be opposed to U.S. policy on all of these issues, from Palestine and Iraq to the presence of U.S. military bases, and including the propping up of unpopular autocracies. On the other hand, long-standing domestic opponents of American Middle East policies find it discomforting to hear Usama Bin Laden or other such radical figures attack these policies. The last thing they want, after years of being virtually ostracized for criticizing America’s actions in the Middle East, is to be identified in any way, even indirectly, with the people who killed thousands of innocent Americans on September 11, 2001. The task of policy critic thereafter became even harder as media self-censorship intensified, and as an especially problematic form of political correctness took hold in some quarters, one that implied that any critique of past policies amounted to treason in the “global war on terror.”

  In reflecting on these considerations, I realized that there is a link between these pressing current issues of terrorism, war in Iraq, United States policy, and the seemingly unconnected question of the Palestinians’ failure to achieve independence. It lies in a striking continuity of Western policies in Palestine and elsewhere in the Middle East—most especially a carryover from the policies of the once-dominant power, Great Britain, to those of the current hegemon, the United States. Both have tended to favor outcomes that fit distorted accounts of the situation in Palestine (notably, the Zionist vision of Palestine as “a land without a people for a people without a land”). Both have favored outcomes that were politically convenient domestically, over what was in keeping with the actual realities of the situation on the ground and with the principles of self-determination and international law. Long before there was an American position on the Palestine question, driven primarily by domestic political concerns, there was a British position, similarly driven by concerns almost entirely external to Palestine. For reasons of self-interest, strategy, ideology, and domestic politics, both powers consistently privileged the interests of the country’s Jewish population over those of its Arab residents (and, after about half of them were made into refugees, former residents). And facing both was a weak and ineffective Palestinian leadership that seemed to grasp only dimly, if at all, the strategic challenge facing their people, the actual balance of forces in the field, the exact nature of the relationship between the great power of the day and its local Zionist allies, the way politics functioned in London and Washington, and how best to use the meager resources at their disposal to overcome these long odds.

  A second link to current issues in the Middle East is the fact that over time, Palestine has proven to be the Achilles’ heel for both past British and current American policies in the Middle East. While each power has had to deal with various local sources of dissatisfaction with its Middle East policies, their respective handling of the Palestine question has rendered them unpopular in a broad range of Arab, Middle Eastern, and Islamic countries. This has become most apparent in times of crisis. Thus on the eve of World War II, at the height of the 1936–39 Palestinian Arab revolt against colonial control, British policymakers realized that their policy of forcibly repressing Palestine’s Arab population in the interest of the Zionist movement threatened to be a major strategic liability throughout a region that promised to be, and in the end was, a major arena of conflict with the Axis powers. They thus reversed some of their core policies in Palestine via issuance of the 1939 White Paper, in which they made apparent concessions to the Palestinians and placed restrictions on Jewish immigration. Similarly, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, Bush administration officials apparently felt obliged to shore up the United States’ sagging image in the region by an endorsement of a Palestinian state. However, there were deep structural factors of support for Zionism in Britain and for Israel in the United States that remained unchanged in spite of these measures, and that in the end prevented either of them from having any significant effect. An examination of how Britain’s handling of the Palestine issue helped to make it highly unpopular in the Middle East might shed light on a similar process that appears to be unfolding with regard to the United States.

  There are several aspects of continuity between the British Empire and the new post–World War II age of American hegemony insofar as Palestine is concerned. When Britain and the international community, whose will was then expressed by the League of Nations, solemnly committed themselves to self-determination and the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in the Mandate for Palestine in 1922, at a time when the Jewish population of the country was less than 10 percent of the total, most Jews had probably not become political Zionists. This fact is easily forgotten today, now that there are over 5 million Jewish citizens of Israel,15 and that political Zionism—the idea of the Jewish people as a national entity—has become the prevalent ideology among Jewish communities everywhere. Nevertheless, despite the fact that in the first part of the twentieth century Jews were a tiny minority of the population of Palestine, and the Zionist movement was as yet probably unrepresentative of mainstream Jewish opinion, Britain and the dominant institution of the international community, the League of Nations, were broadly faithful to that commitment. The reasons for this stand had primarily to do with the utility of Zionism to British imperial purposes, the sympathy of a major sect
or of the British elite for Zionism, and the skill of the Zionist leadership in cultivating those who might be of use to them.

  There was, however, no similar British or international commitment to the self-determination of the Palestinian people, in spite of the Palestinians’ insistence on the justice of their claim, and on Britain’s obligation to make good on its World War I promises of independence to the Arabs. Both the Covenant of the League of Nations—which defined the former Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire, Palestine among them, as Class A mandates, regions that had achieved a level of development that made them “provisionally independent states”—and the text of the various British and allied pledges to Arabs, supported the Palestinian claims. Nevertheless, only after three years of a bloody Palestinian revolt that started in 1936, and with the shadow of another world war looming in 1939, did the British grudgingly, indirectly, and conditionally grant the principle of independence for Palestine with majority rule (to be implemented after ten years, and only if the Jewish minority was in agreement, a condition that was presumably intended to be impossible to fulfill). Soon thereafter, World War II and the Holocaust changed circumstances so drastically as to render this promise effectively meaningless. In fact, the British government of the day always intended to subvert even this highly conditional projected extension of independence to the Palestinians. This is clear from the minutes of a British cabinet meeting of February 23, 1939, detailing the British approach that resulted in the White Paper of 1939, in which this promise was embodied. There it appears that the British colonial secretary, Malcolm MacDonald, and his cabinet colleagues meant to prevent Palestinian representative government and self-determination, even while appearing to grant the “independence” of Palestine.16