Democratic Palestine : 18 (ص 23)
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- Democratic Palestine : 18 (ص 23)
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tactical aircraft ground support equipment. (US Sixth Fleet jets
have been practicing precision attacks in the Negev area.)
6. Strategic airfields: Construction of a special Israeli facility
for US Strategic Projection Force aircraft. (In the October
1984 issue of Newsweek magazine, columnist George Will
wrote that ‘Israel’ is «The only nation in the region where we
know we can land a plane tommorrow.»!!)
7. Transshipment of US supplies to the Lebanese Army over-
land from ‘Israel’.
8. Intelligence sharing of data and analysis on «radical» forces
and movements in the Middle East.
9. Maintenance: Israeli maintenance and overhaul of US air-
craft and ships in the eastern Mediterranean to raise US opera-
tional readiness.
10. Defense against submarines: Cooperation in _anti-
submarine warfare by increasing Israeli ASW capabilities, and
operating US ASW equipment out of Israeli facilities. (The
first joint anti-submarine exercises between the US and Israeli
navies began after the signing of the strategic cooperation
agreement. «The US has reportedly told Israel that it plans to
play a very active role in overseeing the costs of US participa-
tion in an Israeli diesel submarine project and also in the future
Saar-5-class missiles boats for the Israeli Navy.»!7)
11. Enhancing US-Israeli cooperation in the «struggle against
international terrorist organizations and operations.»
12. Coordinated air and naval peacetime maneuvers to develop
and perfect joint procedures.
13. Coordinated US-Israeli defense industrial base planning to
enhance wartime ‘surge’ production capability.
14. Cooperation in industrial research and development.
(Israeli firms have made significant advances in research areas
of potential importance to the US armed forces. Moreover,
‘Israel’ has served as a laboratory for testing the strengths and
weaknesses of new US weaponry in actual combat. The F-15
and F-16 planes were first tested in combat by Israeli pilots.
‘Israel’ made as many as 27 changes and improvements in these
bombers, as well as 114 modifications on the US Patton tanks.
The Israeli armed forces. tested cluster bombs, phosphorous
bombs and chemical weapons on innocent civilians during its
1982 invasion of Leabnon.)
15. Joint projects to enhance economic development and secu-
rity planning in ‘third world’ countries. (Under the guise of
development or agricultural projects, the US has been able to
impose its influence in ‘third world’ regional politics, using
‘Israel’ as its surrogate, especially in areas where it would be
diplomatically embarrassing to operate overtly. Weaponry is
delivered to fascist regimes, being written off as ‘metal ware’
or ‘machinery’ or ‘electronic goods’. ‘Israel’ often works out
of ‘interest sections’ of European embassies in countries with
whom it does not have diplomatic relations).
At a higher level, 40 US industrial executives explored
aspects of Strategic Defense Intitiative (Star Wars) cooperation
between the US and ‘Israel’. This included opportunities for
cooperation with Israeli companies in high technology, and
space research and development projects. Other fields for pos-
sible cooperation include: communications systems, compute-
rized publishing systems, lasers, microelectronics, quality con-
trol systems, pharmaceuticals, robotics, fiber optics, data
‘transmission and distribution systems, and biotechnology.
In view of the above, ‘Israel’ is simply a nome de guerre for
what is actually a US military base in the Middle East. A
clearly emerging aspect, however, is that military might is not
serving to cower people into the kind of submission that would
allow imperialism to get on with their rearrangement of the
region.
FROM STRIKE FORCE TO MILITARY BASE
Over the years,when the Arab nationalist movement refused
to succumb to imperialist plans and conditions,the US has used
Israeli military might to impose its hegemony. Created by
aggression, ‘Israel’ got its first major war experience in the
1948 occupation of the major part of Palestine. ‘Israel’ joined
the French-British aggression against Egypt in 1956, and in
1967 occupied the rest of Palestine, plus Egypt’s Sinai Penin-
sula and Syria’s Golan Heights. In 1982, the Zionist state
invaded major parts of Lebanon, including the capital, Beirut.
In addition, there were a series of blitz attacks - the Israeli
bombing of the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981, and of the capital
of Tunisia in 1985, as well as semi-daily attacks on neighboring
Arab countries, against the Palestinian people and revolution.
all of these acts of aggression were supported and financed by
US imperialism, because they served its interests.
On the other hand, doubts have more recently been raised as
to the Zionist entity’s ability to implement the full array of
imperialist aims, simply by the US pumping in astronomical
amounts of aid to finance indiscriminate aggression. This is
why US Secretary of State Schultz last year stressed: «Israel’s
long term security can only come through peace with its
neighbors, not military superiority,»!* though the US conti-
nues high power efforts to develop this very superiority.
Meanwhile imperialism is stressing the efforts to impose a
political settlement on the conflict in the Middle East, attemp-
ting to capitalize on the results of Zionist aggression. By brid-
ging the gap between Arab reaction and the Zionist state,
imperialism hopes to secure the latter’s permanent presence
while ensuring its own exploitation of the area’s resources and
manpower. Such an ambition requires elimination of the Arab
national liberation movement and especially the Palestinian
revolution. For this reason, when the imperialist plan took
concrete form in the Camp David accords, these were just as
much a model for a military pact in the area. Parallel to the
political settlement between ‘Israel? and Egypt, the US
increased its direct presence in the area, building and expan-
ding bases in a string of countries bordering on the Gulf and
Indian Ocean; it established the RDF and made other prepara-
tions for direct intervention.
With the advent of the Reagan Administration, the emphasis
on military might - both American and Israeli - increased,
along with the imperialist drive to establish the Middle East as
reactionary bulwark against the Soviet Union. At the same
time, Arab reaction did not capitulate all at once and join
Camp David openly. Not even all of the reactionary Arab
states welcomed the degree of direct US military presence that
the Reagan Administration wanted. In this situation, the ori-
ginal US-Israeli strategic cooperation agreement was signed,
and the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon was launched, sup-
ported and financed by US imperialism, to break the deadlock
for Camp David. This war exhibited the most obvious form of
US-Israeli wartime coordination to date - with the US Marines
brought in to protect the Israeli occupation and reap the poli-
tical results of the invasion. Despite all the signs of US-Israeli
friction during this time, and the failure of this joint venture,
the experience of Lebanon actually served to add momentum
to closer US-Israeli coordination. The US’s fiasco of trying to
bolster Amin Gemayel’s unpopular regime increased apprecia-
tion for the importance of ‘Israel’ as a totally dependable ally.
The Zionist state’s dependability is virtually ensured by its
very nature as a settler colonial society. Established by aggres-
sion and displacement of the native Palestinian Arab popula-
tion, the Zionist state placed itself in geopolitical isolation. The
settler society has a high degree of internal cohesion in the face
of the «external enemy» created by its own aggression. Thus,
the Zionist society’s internal stability is virtually ensured, and
the settler population is highly mobilized to serve as cannon
fodder in military ventures which they perceive as a struggle
for their own existence. This situation dictates the Zionist
state’s loyalty and readiness to struggle for imperialist domi-
nance as the ultimate guarantee for its own existence.
It is these qualities in the Zionist state that made it inevitable
that the strategic cooperation agreement would be revived and
materialized in ever closer Israeli - US military cooperation.
For all the while the US promotes the ‘peace’ process, it
encounters obstacles and weilds the threat of aggression to
eliminate them. Thus, we witnessed the Israeli bombing of the
PLO’s headquarters in Tunis, with US logistical and intelli-
gence support. In turn, this spring, the US bombed Libya and
counted on ‘Israel’ for intelligence information about the
effects of its aggression.
The unprecendentedly high degree of US-Israeli military
cooperation today has its war-and peacetime applications, for
military and political means are two sides of the same strategy
for imposing imperialist dominance. As more Arab reactio-
nary regimes are now showing readiness to capitulate to the
US-Zionist conditions, closer US-Israeli cooperation on the
alternate use of these two options is more crucial than ever
23
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