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| Volume XII, Fall 2005, Number 3 |
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EXCERPT
Enemy of the State: a Conversation with Ilan Pappé |
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| Israeli academic Ilan Pappé first came to prominence in the 1980s as a
member of Israel’s “New Historian” movement, which chronicled the war
crimes and ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians in the first Arab-
Israeli war of 1948. Dr. Pappé teaches political science at Haifa University
and is the academic director of the Research Institute for Peace at Givat
Haviva. He is currently writing a second edition of his most recent book,
A History of Modern Palestine, One Land, Two Peoples (2004). The
following interview was conducted by Don Atapattu, a free-lance writer in
London. |
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Q: The traditional Chomskyite
Leftist view of Israel’s role in the Middle
East is as a surrogate army for the
United States. A newer and highly
controversial theory is that Israel and its
American lobby are actually the tail
wagging the dog. According to this
analysis, the cause of the Iraq War was
an alliance between non-Jewish ex-cold
warriors and oil-industry insiders
(Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, etc.) and
the Jewish “neocons” (Wolfowitz, Perle,
Feith, Abrams, etc.) who had previously
worked for think tanks promoting the
Eretz Israel agenda. Which more closely
reflects your opinion?
Dr. Pappé: I think it is really somewhere
in the middle. I don’t really buy this
idea that the Jews of Israel are so powerful
as to totally control American policy, even to
the point of causing the American president
to send troops into Iraq. As a historian, I
know that American support for Israel
developed in a very bizarre and unpredictable
way. It was not there to begin with, so
I lean more towards the Chomsky view. I
would like to believe this. If Israeli and
Jewish influence is so dramatic, then we are
in for a very long winter. There was a kind
of ad-hoc American policy in the Middle
East to begin with in the 1950s and 1960s,
not a very clear-cut American policy, some
people say. As it developed the Israelis very
cleverly pushed themselves into becoming a
central pillar of that policy. I think they had
the ability to say, this is your policy, and so
what you need is a bastion like ours. Now, I
think that neoconservatives developed
independently of Israel during the Cold War.
It’s a strategy that believes that America
needs a constant enemy and a constant war
between the good and the bad. However,
there is the new development of the Chris-
tian Zionists, and it’s premature to say
whether it’s so fundamental that they will
stay there forever. Together with AIPAC,
there was definitely an attempt by the tail to
wag the dog, but the dog has other tails, and
they are not all coming from Israel and
Jewish people. If you read carefully the
ideology of the Christian Zionists, it’s very
antisemitic. For the time being, it is pro-
Israel, but the idea is to basically get rid of
the Jews once their divine plan materializes.
If you look at the complex relationship
between the industrial and military complexes
on both sides, I think the center is
America, not Israel. I don’t think the Israeli
military industry is the one that dictates
strategic American policies. I think it
became almost an integral part of that
military-industrial complex, which needed
new markets after the end of the Cold War.
Definitely, there is a kind of mutual reciprocity
of interest, but I think that it is
mainly Israel as a proxy and America as the
empire — not the empire that fights the war
of the proxy. I am very open and wouldn’t
fall from my chair if people would show me
the fact that neoconservatives were pushed
by Israeli ideas to change the nature of the
Middle East. You have the well-oiled
AIPAC, but you cannot blame Israel for the
90 million members of the Christian fundamentalist
movement in America. It’s an
alliance, a terrible alliance, but don’t misunderstand
me; Israel will suffer from it in the
end. I think the empire can change the
policy, and it can also collapse, as we know.
Empires do collapse. Then the Jews in
Israel will be in dire straits. Secondly, it is
destructive to the interests and welfare of
the locals in the area.
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