Democratic Palestine : 7 (ص 26)
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- Democratic Palestine : 7 (ص 26)
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Jackson and his supporters into sharp opposition with the main
thrust of imperialist policy on almost every major issue of the
day nationally and internationally.
Yet it was no accident that Jackson's Middle East position
gave rise to a particularly sharp polarization with the U.S.
bourgeoisie. By opposing U.S. intervention and Israeli expan-
sionism, and by calling for negotiations with the PLO and rec-
ognition of the right to a Palestinian homeland, Jackson is
throwing up a major political and ideological challenge to a
strategic vital interest of both imperialism and Zionism.
Jackson's basic point is that if we are to have peace and
justice in the Middle East, the U.S. must pursue principled and
friendly relations with the 22 Arab states and their 100 million
people, and not treat the Arabs as enemies while maintaining
exclusive ties with Israel and its 4 million Jews. This is a direct
hit on U.S. imperialism’s Middle East strategy of using Israel as
its main local policeman against the Arab people's striving
toward national democracy. And it challenges forthrightly the
racist ideological dehumanization of the Arabs that justifies
that strategy.
Equally important, the Rainbow Coalition has put the Mid-
dle East issue squarely on the progressive agenda, affirming
that one cannot be a reliable advocate of peace and justice
unless one is prepared to fight the imperialist/Zionist axis and
support Palestinian national rights. The campaign showed that
the role of the «dispossessed,» especially the minority com-
munities, in the struggle against Zionism cannot be underesti-
mated.
These are signal developments given the longstanding
conciliation of liberal Zionism by many U.S. progressives.
Zionism is a powerful political and ideological bulwark of the
bourgeoisie that stands at the juncture of racism, national
chauvinism, and jingoism. Yet it is particularly insidious and
widespread, even among the progressives, because it
parades under the banner of «the struggle against anti-
Semitism.»
Zionism is therefore a mortal danger both to world peace
and to the struggle for democracy and socialism internal to the
U.S. This vantage point is absolutely key in order to properly
clarify the stakes involved and the formidable class interests
that must be confronted in this bitter fight.
Imperialism’s stake in the region
Jackson's Middle East position touches an exposed raw
nerve of U.S. global strategy. One of the cardinal tenets of this
strategy is that keeping the Middle East firmly in the imperialist
orbit is absolutely essential to the survival of the imperialist
system as a whole. Within this, Israel is assigned the role of
chief local surrogate. Israel is, in essence, a military garrison
State charged with defending U.S. dominance in the Middle
East from the threat posed by the Arab people's national liber-
ation struggle. .
There are two basic reasons why the iliddle East is a reg-
ion of such qualitatively special interest to U.S. imperialism.
The first, of course, has to do with Middle East oil, though not
simply because of gigantic U.S. oil company profits. The bigger
picture is that, since WW II when oil replaced coal as the main
energy source, the advanced capitalist economies of Western
Europe and Japan have become fundamentally dependent on
Middle East oil. 65% of Western Europe’s petroleum comes
from the Middle East, as does 80% of Japan's.
While the U.S. itself is not directly dependent on Middle
East oil, its concern is no less compelling. Without ready
access to Middle East oil, the entire world imperialist economy
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Jesse Jackson at a press conference with Barbara Lubin, of Jews for Jackson,
and Osama Doumani, of Arab-Americans for Jackson.
would be qualitatively destabilized, including the U.S.
economy itself. Moreover, the U.S. role as military and political
guarantor of oil to Western Europe and Japan gives it enorm-
ous leverage over its erstwhile allies. After all, the U.S. still
largely controls Middle Eastern oil through the refining process
and transportation.
The second, and more longstanding strategic stake in the
Middle East has to do with geopolitics. The region's location at
the intersection of Asia, Africa, and Europe, and the great
waterways of the Mediterranean Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the
Indian Ocean means that it holds sway over key naval and
trade routes. It is thus of inestimable political, military, and
economic value. Not only does the U.S. use this leverage
against its imperialist rivals, but also as a threat to the Soviet
Union's vital access to the Mediterrranean.
For these reasons, the U.S. sees the Middle East as a crit-
ical battleground in the international class struggle, a front
which it is openly prepared to «defend» with the full weight of
its economic influence and military arsenal, including nuclear
weaponry.
However, unable to impose outright colonial forms, the
U.S. must seek and cultivate allies in the region to serve as its
surrogates. In addition to Israel, its committment to the reactio-
nary Arab regimes in the area--especially Egypt and Saudi
Arabia--is massive. These regimes, while standing in conflict
with Israel's unrelenting expansion into their territories, are
nonetheless completely tied to imperialism. Although they
posture as champions of Arab nationalism, the reactionary
Arab classes who hold power in these countries are increas-
ingly impelled to seek a U.S.-sponsored accomodation with
Israel.
Stillit is the U.S./Israeli axis that stands as the centerpiece
of imperialist defense of its massive interests in the region. The
U.S. committment to Israel is staggering, constituting the
largest single sector of all U.S. military and economic assis-
tance. More than $3 billion per year, nearly one-third of the
entire U.S. foreign aid budget, goes to the land of kibbutz-
owned swimming pools and Jews-only «settlement towns» to
shore up U.S. influence in the Middle East. And this is
supplemented by another $2 billion from private U.S. sources.
As Joseph Harsh wrote in the Christian Science Monitor:
«Few countries have ever been as dependent on another as
Israel on the U.S...Israel’s major weapons come from the U.S.
either as gifts or on long-term, low-interest loans that few seri-
ously expect to be repaid in full. !srael’s survival is underwritten
and subsidized from Washington. Without American arms
Israel would soon lose the ‘quantitative and qualitative advan- - هو جزء من
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