The slogan of the University of Louisville is “Dare to be great”. Perhaps that is why United States Secretary of State Colin Powell chose it as the venue two weeks ago for what was trailed as the most important statement of American foreign policy for years, perhaps decades.
As such, the speech deserves careful attention
and scrutiny, focusing as it does on two main themes: the role of the US in the world and, more specifically, the Middle East. On both, it flatters to deceive.
Academic analysis of US foreign policy has often hinged on what Christopher Coker for one has described as the US sense of redemptionism. By “redemptionism”, what is meant is the extent to which the US is prepared to intervene in international affairs over and beyond the protection of its core national interests.
Traditionally, Republican administrations have been far less inclined towards a redemptionist approach to foreign policy than Democrat ones. The first nine months of George W Bush’s presidency was a typical example of Republican withdrawal from the world; his administration’s decision to “disengage” from the Middle East the most obvious symptom of such a policy.
Not any more. The other day Powell said this: “American leadership in foreign affairs has never been more important,” because, of course, of the so-called war against terrorism; “… we will not rest until the job has been done and civilization is safe again.”
This is a classic statement of US redemptionism: only it can protect civilisation; only America can save the world.
Powell then turns to Israel and Palestine and begins, tellingly, with a statement about the nature of the relationship between Israel and the US: “Since Israel’s establishment over 50 years ago, the United States has had an enduring and ironclad commitment to Israel’s security. The US-Israel relationship is based on the broadest conception of American national interests, in which our two countries are bound forever together by common demo-cratic values and traditions. This will never change.”
First, the phrase “broadest conception” gives the game away: supporting Israel will generally be in the US’s interest. The adjective “ironclad” could also not be more clear. But it is this notion of “common democratic values and traditions” that I find so intriguing.
This, after all, is the country — Israel I mean — that in the face of the most recent intifada adopted a shoot to kill approach to children throwing stones against soldiers and armoured vehicles: innocents against the ironclad, one could say. How can I say this? Because I was there and I saw it for myself, in Ramallah. I saw the Israel army drive into the city — an act of provocation in itself — and I witnessed ironclad soldiers, totally unimperilled by the stones thrown, mostly inaccurately, from 100m away.
And I saw, for an hour or two, the soldiers fire so-called rubber bullets, that are actually steel covered with a thin veneer of rubber, with a surreal sense of lazy disinterest, until for no apparent reason the sound of the discharge changed and “live” ammunition issued forth, depriving mothers of sons and sisters of brothers.
On the other side, in the hospitals, I saw the products of these acts of murder and maiming for myself. More than 500 Palestinian deaths since. And yet Powell, like CNN, persists in presenting a picture of the violence as if it were a war between two equal forces. For anyone who has visited Palestine this is an exposition in absurdity. It is equivalent to saying that the apartheid state was fighting an even-handed war against the liberation movement.
Earlier this year the Israeli electorate decided in its wisdom to elect a man who is a war criminal and who I believe wittingly triggered the current intifada with his outrageous, ironclad visit to the Al-Aqsa Mosque on September 28 last year. Did Ariel Sharon know that his visit there would be like throwing a match on to a tinder box?
Well, the answer to that question would be the same as the answer to the question posed almost 20 years ago after the Phalangist slaughter of Palestinians in the Sabra and Chatila camps in Beirut: either he did or he should have done.
The recent BBC Panorama programme, The Accused, examines Sharon’s role in the slaughter of innocent men, women and children. Richard Goldstone confirms the position in international law, that an occuping army has responsibility for what takes place under its occupation, a legal principle of “command” that rested, in that case, with the Minister of Defence, Ariel Sharon.
The then special US envoy to the region, Morris Draper, sent an urgent message to Sharon: “You must stop the acts of slaughter. I have a representative in the camp counting the bodies. You should be ashamed. The situation is absolutely appalling. They’re killing children! You have the field completely under your control and are therefore responsible for that area.”
BBC journalist Fergal Keane then asks Draper: “And you’ve no doubt since that time that Ariel Sharon was responsible?” Draper replies: “No doubt whatsoever. Well of course more Israelis have to share in that responsibility but absolutely.”
Are these the “common democratic values and traditions” that Powell wants to protect? Or, perhaps, it is the system of discrimination against Palestinians that is so resonantly traditional: shades of the American south as well as of apartheid South Africa. Go there and you will see. Palestinians, even those with the right to live and work in Israel, treated as second-class citizens. The Palestinian government trying desperately to run a state that can not be a state because the Israelis will not permit it to operate as one. Take a look at the Oslo Accord map of the West Bank: a hundred shards of land, splattered like blood. Try and impose the rule of law in such circumstances; try and run an economy in such circumstances; try and build a culture of democracy in such circumstances.
As former Guardian editor Peter Preston argued earlier this week, the suicide bombers who wreaked such appalling carnage in Israel last weekend were anything but cowardly. They were desperate; a desperation that is the child of Israeli policy. Israel fails to see that until you address the cause — a desperate desire for the dignity that will come with a Palestinian state uncontaminated by extremist settlers — the effects will always threaten to destroy you.
They fail to see that the distinction between the Palestinian extremists driven to blow themselves and innocent civilians up and the extremism of the Israeli state. The policy of assassinations of “terrorists” by the Israeli army — how is that for the rule of law? — and of innocent children (and don’t tell me that stone throwing is an act of terrorism that invokes the right to self-defence), is that of a supposed democratic state. One that continues to defy two United Nations Security Council resolutions. Are these the common democratic values and traditions?
I admire so much the stance taken by Ronnie Kasrils recently, and echoed in the campaign of Jonathan Shapiro and Bradley Bordiss and other South African Jews who say, very simply and powerfully, “not in my name”.
Courageously, they like so many others around the world, want to put human rights and international law ahead of the racist, murderous policies of Israel. Standing shoulder to shoulder in the fight against terrorism should mean standing against the state terrorism of Israel. It is the defining struggle of the first part of the new century. And it will define America’s approach to the region and beyond. Sadly, Powell’s words in support of a Palestinian state are now meaningless as he and his government gave blank cheque support for Israeli military reprisals at the start of the week. So much for the redemptionism.
And so the commonality becomes clear: both the US and Israel are united by a common blindness: an inability to see and understand the causes of desperation and discrimination. This is as true about the response to September 11 as it is in relation to the Israeli response to Ben Yehuda street. A courageous US foreign policy would be to stand against Israel and to join a worldwide campaign to treat it, as with its ugly sister the apartheid state, as a pariah nation. Sadly, daring to be great is, it seems, an empty vessel; it does not extend to daring to be brave. The cowardice is not the suicide bombers’; it is the one-eyed vision of those with real power, in the US and Israel, who refuse to apply it to the weak in the name of justice.
Archive: Previous columns by Richard Calland