COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY IAN BLACK IN THE GUARDIAN
Will Abbas’s ‘Eff off,
Trump’ fury play into the hands of rightwing Israelis?
Thank you for an unusually reasonable and fair-minded piece
on this subject.
I have always regarded Abbas as a kind of Stepin Fetchit
character, which would explain why Israel treats him with less than complete
contempt, the kind of contempt we saw constantly towards Arafat and we see
towards Hamas.
So, I am surprised by a couple of his recent efforts, this
speech, especially, and his reaction to all the recent American-Israeli
bullying and ill will towards the UN for taking the most modest steps towards
justice.
His thought about Israel not truly being about Jewishness
but about American imperialism is I believe a genuine and important insight,
and this was I think the idea which created a firestorm in the Israeli press.
The truth is for most of its history America has never
really cared about Jewish matters. Why would it care about such a minority? America
made no effort at all to save Jews trying to leave Germany before the Holocaust
began. Indeed, it turned boatloads of refugees away, just as it turns away
Muslims today.
Jews in America at that time couldn't even be admitted to
Harvard in any but the most token numbers. Jews created their own schools to make
themselves new opportunities.
The American Bund, too, was a very big movement. Their
uniforms resembled those of the Brownshirts and they held marches and some huge
rallies. And even today in some parts of America, we have militia-type
movements and Aryan “churches.” Yes, they are called just that.
The great American journalist and chronicler of the Third
Reich, William Shirer, wrote that he believed at the time America was easily
capable of going fascist itself. And, after all, he was employed by “Colonel’ Robert
McCormick, owner of the then notoriously right-wing Chicago Tribune.
A great deal of wealthy and rich class of America was
sympathetic with the Nazis and happily and profitably helped them.
And America had laws before Germany about sterilizing
""undesirables" and tens of thousands were sterilized. Hitler
admired these laws, and he kept a photo of the unbelievably hateful Henry Ford
in his office.
The Bush grandfather, the Kennedy father, Henry Ford, and
scores of other well-known elite families admired the Nazis and cooperated with
them.
So, how did such a huge country just turn around and become
a protector of Jewish people?
It did not really.
Yes, there was public horror over the picture which emerged
of atrocities, and I’m sure there was some guilt, but that is never the kind of
thing which affects policy in a great power. Sentiment plays no role with the
hard-nosed careerists and military-thinkers in Washington or any other major
capital, no matter what our more sentimental and really propagandistic films
tell us in retrospect.
Washington saw the immense future importance of the Middle
East owing to its oil and gas in a world where engines of every kind were being
built by the millions after the war. And just like Britain or France, before America’s
rise to empire, it sought to gain a foothold there.
The tragedy of the European Jews offered a perfect parallel motivation
and emotionally-wrought excuse. A good many Jewish Americans and Europeans
wanted to re-create Israel, but their emotional motives were quite apart from
what moved American policy.
Many became large political campaign supporters for
politicians who embraced the idea, a practice to this day, but that kind of
support, while easing the way, is not the kind of thing which alone causes such
a big shift in policy.
It was also effectively a way for America not to be obliged
to accept huge numbers of Jewish refugees, a quite cynical but real motivation.
America’s elites had not really changed that much suddenly. Washington doesn’t
work like a Steven Spielberg movie.
The prime motive for Washington’s power elites was that a new Israel would create a friendly and financially-dependent colony in the region, a colony peopled with Europeans and Americans of European descent. Jewishness was incidental from the elites’ point of view.
You know, it is a very common thing for great powers to play
such games with the lives of others. And it does seem to me important to
understand the genuine origins of a problem in order to solve it. But our press
and politicians are rarely honest about this still-terrible problem of millions
being held against their wills for generations and widely abused in the land of
their forefathers.
