Open Secrets , livre ebook

Open Secrets

First published 1997 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 22883 Quicksilver Drive, Sterling, VA 20166–2012, USA
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright 1997 © Israel Shahak
The right of Israel Shahak to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0 7453 1152 0 hbk ISBN 0 7453 1151 2 pbk ISBN 9 781 7837 1067 6 ePub
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Shahak, Israel Open secrets: Israeli nuclear and foreign policies/Israel Shahak. pp. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7453-1152-0 (hbk) 1. Israel—Foreign relations. 2. Israel and the diaspora. 3. Jews—United States—Attitudes towards Israel. I. Title. DS119.6.S491997
327.5694-dc20
96-34397
CIP
Printed in the European Union by Antony Rowe Ltd, Eastbourne, England
Dedicated to the memory of Witold Jedlicki without whose help this book could not have been written
Contents
Foreword by Christopher Hitchens
Preface
Introduction
Part I: CENSORSHIP
1 The Struggle Against Military Censorship and the Quality of the Army
Part II: FOREIGN RELATIONS
2 Israel’s Strategic Aims and Nuclear Weapons
3 Syrian Cities and Relations with Saddam Hussein
4 Israel Versus Iran
5 Israeli Foreign Policy after the Oslo Accord
6 Coalition Building Against Iran
7 Israeli Foreign Policies, August 1994
8 Israeli Policies Toward Iran and Syria
Part III: ISRAELI FOREIGN TRADE
9 Trade Between Israel and the Arab States
10 Drugs and Vegetables: The Israeli Trade with Arab Countries
Part IV: AMERICAN JEWS
11 Israel and the Organized American Jews
12 The Pro-Israeli Lobby in the US and the Inman Affair
Part V: OSLO AND AFTER
13 The Real Significance of the Oslo Accord
14 Analysis of Israeli Policies: The Priority of the Ideological Factor
Index
Foreword by Christopher Hitchens
I should like to begin – very probably to the ire of the author of these pages – by introducing the writer as well as the subject. Dr Israel Shahak has been for many decades a beloved guide, in the superior sense of that term, to the city of Jerusalem, to the culture of a multi-historical Palestine, to the politics of a multi-national state and to the archaeology of a multi-layered civilization. I am only one of many writers and visitors to have drawn upon an immense and uncovenanted reward, merely by acquaintance with a man who has decided to act and to live and to think as if we already dwelt in a reasoned community.
One can summarize the biographical headings without capturing the point. Nevertheless – born in the doomed Eastern European diaspora, unlucky by the obverse of what Helmut Kohl so crassly called (of his own complacent case) ‘the grace of late birth’. Condemned as a boy to witness the clearance and then the destruction of his people and much of his family. Embracing Palestine as a refuge and home, and then deciding (by degrees, naturally) that the entire answer to the ancient conundrum of racialism and bigotry and fanaticism had not been discovered by the messianic. I think we can already see the difference between this kind of ‘multi’ and the soft-centred and innocuous versions that are so freely offered by those in the West who fear only intolerance and ‘insensitivity’ and who, under this sanitizing rubric, promote the phoney rhetoric of consensus.
On occasion, when I have telephoned him to discover the latest developments within Israeli society, Shahak has unaffectedly said, ‘There are encouraging signs of polarization’. For most of our domesticated intellectuals, such a statement is absurd on its face. What, after all, can be more desirable than consensus? Yet Shahak, in his lonely analysis, has accomplished a synthesis that will forever mystify and evade our practitioners of pseudo-realism and ‘accord’. Some decades ago, he foresaw a gruesome unity between the ultra¬nationalists (who had been mostly secular) and the ultra-clerical (who had been mostly indifferent to the project of territorial acquisition). Now, for those Israeli Jews who seek an accommodation with their Palestinian Arab neighbours, and for those Israeli Jews who do not wish to live in a fully theocratic state, the alarm has begun to toll. Those who desire an Arab-free land, and those who wish for an exclusive and rabbinically-determined culture for Jews, have made common cause. The prophet of this confrontation (I trust he will overlook the first of these expressions) is Dr Shahak. And this explains the hatred which he attracts from the certified peaceniks. Shall I soon forget an evening in Washington DC, not long after the disaster and atrocity of Lebanon in the summer of 1982? A gathering of anxious and well-meaning liberals had been assembled, to hear General Matti Peled. As a uniformed figure, he was naturally considered acceptable and impregnable. He uttered some ‘Peace Now’ platitudes and consoled the audience. And then I asked him about Shahak’s interpretation and he became contorted with rage: ‘Madman ... delinquent... extremist...’. Here was the ticket to the status of OK dissident. (And now I ask myself: Whatever did happen to Matti, the one-time hero of Gaza and darling of the peace-loving diaspora?)
The following pages do not answer that now-irrelevant question. What the following pages do is to show a mind at work. And also a society at work – that Israeli Jewish society that is so seldom scrutinized in the West. In order to explain the reluctance or incapacity of our mainstream gurus to spend any time on this topic, we might have to postulate the hitherto unthinkable, the self-hating Gentile. How else to explain the refusal to engage with the way the Israeli elite actually thinks? The late I. F. Stone once said that it was easier to publish criticism of Zionism in the Israeli press than in the American. He didn’t guess the half of it. In the public prints, in official reports and in semi-official interviews, the mentality of the ruling order gradually discloses itself. Very often, even if only because it must seek justification, the disclosure is authentic and requires a certain integrity. And Dr Shahak is there, at the elbow or the shoulder, keeping notes and taking names. Possibly you desire to know the real nature of Israeli nuclear doctrine. Then turn to page 37. In the case of a war with Syria, which city north of Damascus would first be obliterated? See page 76. Does it matter what Ariel Sharon thinks about Israel as a regional superpower? Don’t make your mind up until you have scanned page 32 (I might add that these were written with unusual prescience at a time when many Panglossians believed that the Sharon factor was a thing of the past.) Have you ever heard yourself uttering the cretinous liberal mantra ‘Think globally, act locally’? Read on, if you wish to understand how a truly serious regime will put such a slogan into reverse.
Shahak was unusual if not unique in his criticism of the ‘Oslo accords’ because he understood at once that the agreement was not local. It was, instead, a holding action, designed to keep the Palestinians in baulk while trumpeting a settlement as the admission card for international acceptance. In an especially luminous passage, he shows how the degraded Arafat dialectic operated even to the disadvantage of his Labor Party sponsors. Rendered effectually impotent by the ‘accords’, the great leader had no currency except the rhetoric of religious redemption. And in his fervid but empty periods about holy Jerusalem, he was able to frighten Israeli voters without threatening them, and thus to help consummate the return of the Jabotinsky/Stern faction – though this time draped in a haredi garb. By seeing this without sentiment, and by scorning those who had helped bring it to pass, Shahak earned again the right to sound the alarm against those who would coerce Jews in the analogous way. There is quite literally no other critic or commentator who can claim this non-sectarian privilege.
Those who will murder and repress Arabs for the sake of a pure land will also murder and repress Jews. This has already been proved, and proved at the expense not just of Israeli peace-marchers but even at the expense of a master of cynical statecraft like Yitzhak Rabin. Nobody warned of this contingency, to my knowledge, except Yehoshua Leibowicz – then editor of the Encyclopaedia Hebraica – and Israel Shahak. For Shahak in particular, the past is not another country but potentially the same one writ large. In his considered view, the emancipation of the Jews by the Enlightenment was not merely their emancipation from Christian anti-Semitism, it was also their liberation from a ghetto priesthood and from imposed scriptural control. Viewed through this optic, the reassertion of Orthodoxy is retrograde for Jews and calamitous for those non-Jews who might get in the way (by, say, chancing to live in the wrong place) of their heaven-determined project.
If I have a criticism of these pages (and I have several) it would be this: the strict insistence upon certifiable truth sometimes overlooks the ironies. Thus, Shahak tells us a good deal about the sordid errand-boy tasks performed by Israel for its American patron, everywhere from Zaire to El Salvador. But was not Zionism supposed to free the Jews from dependence upon the goyim? Again it is often said, and not entirely without evidence, that Israel is ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’. How does this boast actually work upon the mentality of those who operate censorship, carry out beatings and curfews, enforce ‘emergency laws’ and preserve official secrecy? Our author is often sarcastic at the expense of such procedures. He was one of the very first to suggest, by a very intricate and exact process of induction from available evidence, that