=?windows-1256?Q?Ilan_Papp=E9_-_Israeli_historian?=, New Resources, Arab-Israeli Politics, Fall, 2005

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From: "Clement Henry" <cmhenry@mail.la.utexas.edu>

Date: Sun, 11 Sep 2005 13:29:43 -0500

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Title: Enemy of the State: a Conversation with

Here is an excerpt of a discussion in Middl East Policy, which in general is a useful journal. Prof Pappe is a leading Israeli "revisionist" historian - we will be talking about him and others in a week or two --CH

Volume XII, Fall 2005, Number 3

EXCERPT
Enemy of the State: a Conversation with Ilan Pappé

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.

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.