How did the Mideast become a Nuclear Flashpoint?
Ali Abootalebi 11/04/2024
Eau Claire, WI (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – The state of world politics since the end of the Cold War has been marked by more conflicts and wars. The United States’ imperialist impulses during the Cold War had to consider the threat of Communism in Europe and at the global level. Today, the ongoing war theatres in Ukraine/Russia and in Palestine/Lebanon are threatening to escalate into major regional and global confrontations and escalation into a nuclear holocaust. The ill-conceived NATO expansion since the 1990s has contributed to a Russian backlash and its invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The United States for the first time has left Israel ‘unhinged,’ allowing for significant violation of international liberal norms and values, institutions, and humanitarian and human rights laws that it had spent decades building during the Cold War years. The United States’ pursuit of unilateralism and reinvigorated Zionism in Israel is detrimental to a vision of global order based on multilateralism, big-power diplomacy, and international law.
The US-Israeli Symbiosis
The United States recognized the new State of Israel within one hour of its declaration of independence on May 14, 1948. The Soviet Union’s recognition followed shortly after on 17 May. Previously both states supported the United Nations General Assembly’s Partition Plan of November 29, 1947. US support and patronage of Israel during the Cold War for the most part fell within its broader global policy of Containment, anti-communism, and internationalism, exemplified early on by the Truman Doctrine, and support for Iran. In the Middle East, US policy focused on the free flow of (cheap) oil, political stability (not democracy), and support of the state of Israel.
The precarious position of Israel as a newly independent state surrounded by hostile but weak Arab regimes (some then were still under colonial rule) coincided with an inter-Arab tribal and national rivalry, the Korean hot war (1950-53), and US strategic overt and covert military and intelligence operations (Baghdad Pact, 1955; Iran, 1953; Lebanon 1958). Turkey played its pro-Western stand joined NATO in 1952, and Iran remained a client, dependent state until the 1978-79 revolution. Despite flare-ups in Arab nationalism (Nasser’s Pan-Arabism 1952-70; Syrian (1963) and Iraqi (1968) Baathism and Iranian nationalism (Mossadeq1951-53), the Arab and Iranian regimes remained stable and free from communism. In North Africa, the Algerian Revolution (1962) and Muammar al-Qaddafi’s Libya (1969-2011) proved inadequate to seriously threaten Western interest and influence, despite these countries’ support of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). Consequently, communism as a political, ideological, and economic systemic alternative never took hold in the region. Communist-perceived threats in Yemen and Oman were quickly dealt with. Islam also proved a strong ideological barrier to the appeal and the spread of communism, and even the Soviet Union’s covert intervention and the invasion of Afghanistan (1973-1989) failed to remove the Islamic appeal.
The World Zionist Organization (WZO) since its inception in 1897 envisioned a European Jewish project to address the ‘Jewish question.’ The Jewish Aliyas to Palestine beginning in the late 1800s necessitated the rejuvenation of a ‘Hebrew culture’; the founders were Western and Eastern European and Russian Jewish intellectuals and influencers united by their struggle to create a Jewish a homeland, and later a State. At the 1897 congress, 200 participants from 17 countries voted to adopt as an explicit goal the creation of “a publicly and legally assured home in Palestine” for Jews. As British colonial rule continued, not all Zionist action was peaceful. Paramilitary organizations such as Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s Irgun and the Lehi (also known as the “Stern Gang”) conducted bombings and attacks against the colonial British. The 1942 Biltmore Conference during World War II revealed the racism inherent in the Zionist movement when it declared, “The new world order that will follow victory cannot be established on foundations of peace, justice, and equality unless the problem of Jewish homelessness is finally solved. The Conference urges that the gates of Palestine be opened; that the Jewish Agency be vested with control of immigration into Palestine and with the necessary authority for upbuilding the country, including the development of its unoccupied and uncultivated lands; and that Palestine be established as a Jewish Commonwealth integrated in the structure of the new democratic world.”
The 1917 Balfour Declaration and the subsequent events in Europe and in Palestine under the British mandate witnessed Jewish migrants flowing into Palestine, Palestinian riots and resistance, the Holocaust in Europe, the end of the British mandate, and the 1947 UN Partition Plan. Despite some opposition by the Jewish public, the Zionist leadership accepted the proposed partition because it represented the first official recognition of a Jewish state, and because it was the most generous proposal that had yet been offered. The Zionist project led to the creation of a proposed Jewish State in control of 55% of Palestine but with a mixed population of roughly 53% Jewish and 47% Palestinians. The UN Partition Plan fulfilled, hitherto, some of the Zionist ambitions since it meant the creation of a Jewish state in the ‘promised land.’
The 1948 war resulted in the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians and the expansion of Israel by 30 percent, including the control of the Western part of the city of Jerusalem, previously a UN-declared international city in the Partition plan. Israel participated in the Anglo-French invasion of Egypt in the 1956 Suez War (October 29) and quickly took over the Sinai Peninsula. In the intense years of the Cold War, they were aligned with the Zionist impulse, using Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal, arms purchase from Czechoslovakia, and flirtation with the Soviet Union as the excuse to punish a major Arab country. This paralleled the British and French interest in reversing Egypt’s nationalization of the Canal. The United States, however, disagreed. The invading armies withdrew upon the United States’ pressure trying to avoid a major confrontation with the Soviet Union while the Hungarian Revolution (October 23) was in full swing. The United States’ concerns over communism and keeping the flow of oil through the Suez Canal eclipsed the Israeli Zionists’ urges for expansionism. Israel kept its troops in Gaza until March 19, 1957, when the United States finally compelled the Israeli withdrawal. Recall, that some immediate events before the Suez crisis included a hot war in Korea (1950-53), the Iranian (1953) and Guatemalan (1954) coup d’etats, and a close Soviet Union and Chinese relations after 1949.
The humiliation of Arab armies in the 1967 war emboldened Israeli religious Zionists. The Israeli territory expanded by 400 percent after its capture of the West Bank and the Eastern part of the city of Jerusalem, Golan Heights, Gaza, and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt. Israel then found itself within an expanded territory that was difficult to defend. Fearing the American meddling in its preemptive war plans, Israel attacked the USS Liberty with jet fighters, helicopters, and three torpedo boats for 50 minutes. Israel claimed it mistook Liberty for a hostile Egyptian ship, although the encounter remained suspicious, giving credence to the argument that Israel saw an opportunity to win a war against its Arab rivals. The CIA estimated at the time that Israel would easily win the war, despite the three Arab armies’ preparation to attack Israel. President Johnson bluntly told Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban, “All of our intelligence people are unanimous that if the UAR (Egypt and Syria) attacks, you will whip hell out of them.”
After the defeat in the war, Pan-Arab nationalism fell into disarray, and the Baathists rose to power in Iraq in 1968. Israel has since defied the 1967 US-supported UN resolution 242 calling for the exchange of captured territories for peace and a two-state solution, regardless of the US geopolitical stand and international law. The ensuing war of attrition with Egypt, the PLO attacks from Jordan, and the threat of losing the the1973 war to Egypt and Syria along with the Arab Oil embargo provided the opportunity to exchange captured lands for a peace treaty with Egypt in 1979.
Israel’s occupation and the conduct of the 1973 war were costly and dangerous to the United States and the West. Recall, the Arab oil embargo led to higher prices of fuel in the West and a massive US “emergency security assistance of $ 2.2 billion to Israel. Israel’s also considered using a nuclear bomb in the first losing week of the war and the United States went to Defense Condition, DefCon 3. According to Kissinger and historians who have studied the period, the 1973 war was the closest the US and USSR ever came to a nuclear exchange. Nevertheless, Israel exchanged the Sinai desert for its recognition as a legitimate state with a major foe, Egypt, and continued its control over occupied territories. Israel ignored the Egyptian lip-service commitment to the Palestinian cause in the Camp David Accords (September 1978) and the final peace treaty in 1979.
The end of the Cold War provided Zionist nationalism with an opportunity to further their goal of an expanded Israeli state in the ‘historical Eretz Yisrael.’ The end of the Cold War occurred on the hills of the defeat and the split of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in Lebanon in 1983. The PLO’s departure to Tunisia after its expulsion first from Jordan in the early 1970s and then from Lebanon was a major blow to Palestinian nationalism. The 1987 Arab Leagues’ declaration of Iran, instead of Israel, as the enemy of Arab countries after their failed collective efforts to help Iraq’s Saddam regime counter the ‘Shi’a threat’ revealed the paucity of Arab State’s nationalism. The rise of Hamas, Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya (Islamic Resistance Movement), and the Intifada I movement was in part a response to the failure of Arab regimes to secure credible and accountable independent nation-states supportive of the Palestinian cause.
Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 led to the American-led and Arab coalition brief but bloody war that saw the restoration of Kuwaiti sovereignty and a truce with Saddam Hussein’s regime. The following US/UN sanctions of Iraq resulted in hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqi children in the 1990s and ultimately ended with the Persian Gulf War II in 2003. Except for Algeria and Libya, the Arab governments, including the PLO, sided with the winning Western coalition against Iraq in exchange for funding and political patronage.
The Clinton administration used the US hegemonic moment to push for a peace settlement between a defunct, weak Palestinian government under the PLO, demoralized and dependent client Arab governments, and an emboldened Jewish state. The protagonist Arab states were in their weakest position, with Iraq defeated, American troops stationed in Saudi Arabia, Syria compelled and bribed to cooperate and Egypt at peace with Israel. Expectedly, the OSLO ‘peace process’ was destined to fail, since it facilitated only, starting with Jericho, an artificially limited Palestinian control over small areas of historical Palestine. The major issues separating the protagonists were all postponed to the later stages in the negotiation process, including the status of East Jerusalem, Israeli settlements and settlers, the right of return of Palestinians, the territorial boundaries of a future Palestinian state, and the allocation of water resources.
The OSLO Process led to the 1994 peace treaty between Israel and Jordan, relegating the responsibility to care for millions of displaced Palestinians to the Hashemite Kingdom, where the King was/is a minority in his domain. During, and contrary to the spirit of the peace talks, the number of Israeli settlers in the occupied territories climbed from 76000 in 1990 to over 123,000 in 2000! The United States also continued with its financial and military support of Israel, including billions of dollars in guaranteed loans, some of which were redirected for settlement activities. Finally, after years of negotiations, the Clinton Parameters proposal asked for the creation of a discontinuous, dysfunctional future Palestinian entity.
The Clinton Parameters soon was criticized by the incoming Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, and the newly elected President G W Bush. President Clinton, to the satisfaction of the US Christian religious right and ultra-nationalist Zionists, blamed the late Yasir Arafat for its failure. Israeli population and the Palestinians also remained largely skeptical about the terms of the peace plan. The Oslo Process had no chance of success from the beginning, and it only hardened the position of religious right and Israel’s Zionist nationalists.
“Mushroom Cloud,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3, 2024.
The United States’ reckless behavior during its ‘hegemonic moment’ in the 1990s failed to respond to the challenges of a changing global political economy, e.g., the rise of China and India, economic paralysis in the Russian Federation in the 1990s, and the arrival of radical, militant Sunni Muslim movements. The US military presence in Saudi Arabia after the 1990-91 first Persian Gulf war, Islamic militant attacks on US interest in Saudi Arabia (1994, 1996), Kenya and Tanzania (1998), and Yemen (2000), US failure to deal with Somalia’s civil war (1990-92), and the foreseen genocide in Rwanda (1994) signaled an aloof hegemon. The Bosnia-Herzegovina war (1992-95) ended with some 130,000 dead, and along with the Kosovo war (1998-99) helped ‘justify’ continuing NATO expansion at the expense of Russia’s perceived interest. The United States’ rash response to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks ensued with a declared ‘war on terror’ and with pervasive consequences.
US declaration of ‘war on terrorism’ in 2001 has since resulted in several million mostly Muslim fatalities across the Middle East and an estimated 38 million people displaced in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and the Philippines. The undeclared and controversial wars and military interventions in Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (2003), Libya (2011), Syria (2014), and Yemen (2015) have violated international laws on multiple fronts but have also helped serve to destroy ‘enemies’ of the state of Israel while complicating the regional power relations among its major players. Meanwhile, the rise of Iran as a regional player, despite the US and the UN’s severe sanctions, encouraged and developed the rise of an ‘Islamic Resistant Front,’ dedicated to a struggle against US and Israeli hegemony in the Middle East and the restoration of Palestinian rights.
The Barack Obama administration’s policy of ‘pivot to Asia’ was to redirect many resources to Asia in countering the rise of China but instead has encouraged closer Russo-Chinese relations. The outcome has been economic ruin and political uncertainties across multiple regional states in the Middle East, millions of internal and international refugees, a NATO-led war against Russia since 2022, an intimated China lashing out in East Asia to preserve its legitimate rise in power as a regional hegemon, and an embolden Israel led by an age-old Zionist dream of a dominant ‘Jewish state’ hegemony in the historical Eretz Yisrael regardless of the cost.
Israel Unhinged
The Cold War years and the 1990s provided Israel with a great degree of leverage to gain an unprecedented level of Western and particularly American support. The historical British and American support came through support for Jewish migration to Palestine since the 1880s and through the 1917 Balfour Declaration and the British mandate years. The smarts of the Zionist founders throughout such years were their ability to muster political and financial support from governments and financiers in the realization of a Jewish state. The Zionist founders used religion to revitalize the Hebrew culture in their political project. The blending of Hebrew religion with Jewish nationalism (religious and political Zionism) was ‘natural,’ as was the initial cultural domination of the Western Ashkenazi Jews over the native Sephardic Jews in Palestine. Hence, Hertzl wrote in his Jewish State pamphlet, that he envisions the Jewish homeland as ‘a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilisation as opposed to barbarism.’ The victims of 19th Century European nationalism and discrimination, the Zionist European Jews were to use nationalism and racism to build, first, a new Jewish culture, and then a national homeland/state. The Zionist leadership and intellectual disagreements about the treatment of the native Arab population in Palestine in the end did not change the WZO push for the creation of a Jewish Homeland/State.
The migration of Jews from different regions and countries with varied cultural backgrounds, e.g., Russian, Polish, and German, necessitated the creation of Jewish institutions to organize the task, e.g., the Jewish Agency, Hagana, the Histadrut, and the Knesset. The initial socioeconomic organization, Kibbutzim, served the cause of social solidarity and economic egalitarianism during the early years of nation-building, and it lost complete lackluster over the coming decades after independence. The blending of political Zionism and Judaism during the early nation-state building proved effective. This was an original sin set to haunt the new state forever: a state that is both Jewish and democratic and with a heavy Zionist inspiration among leadership to instigate expansionist impulses to realize the biblical roots of the promised land, Eretz Yisrael.
Israel as a close ally of the United States has since the end of the Cold War become increasingly emboldened in its defiance of the United States’ regional and global position and concerns. Israel’s national confidence and dominance proved viable, boosted by the end of the Soviet Union, neutralization of Egypt and Jordan through treaties and US support, the destruction of Iraqi and Syrian national viability as a serious threat, the emigration of one million Russian Jews to Israel in the 1990s, and unrivaled American/Western political and financial support. The full-fledged U.S. commitment to aiding Israel has long-standing roots. The United States has given Israel more than $260 billion in combined military and economic aid since World War II, plus about $10 billion more in contributions for missile defense systems like the Iron Dome. That’s the most granted to any country throughout that time frame, and around $100 billion more than Egypt, the second-highest recipient historically. As a “major non-NATO ally,” Israel also receives assistance from the Excess Defense Articles (EDA) program. This program allows the United States to reduce its inventory of outdated equipment by providing friendly countries with necessary supplies at either reduced rates or no charge. From 2010 to 2019, Israel received at least $385 million in EDA deliveries.
Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack has been unusually punishing, leading to widespread global condemnation. No unbiased, serious scholar of politics and international law can deny Israel’s collective punishment strategy used in Gaza. Israel’s military operations have targeted hospitals, schools, Mosques, and UN shelters, resulting in tens of thousands dead, injured, and maimed, with the final tally yet to emerge. Most victims in Gaza, as well as those in the West Bank, have been women and children non-combatants. There is plenty of evidence, readily available in social media circles, pointing at collective punishment, war crimes, crimes against humanity, or genocide. The rulings of the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court reflect Israel’s grave violations of international humanitarian laws. According to the 2024 ICJ ruling, “it is plausible that Israel’s actions in Gaza Strip could amount to genocide. The Israeli attacks on UN organizations, including the UNWRA and the Office of Human Rights High Commissioner, attacks and threats against UN special repertoire, Georgia Albanese, and the Secretary-General as persona non grata have been unprecedented.
Israel under the mantra of its war on terrorism and after its withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 has waged wars in Gaza (2008-9, 2012, 2014, 2021), while expanding its settlements in the West Bank. The question is if Israel is lashing out to avenge the killing of almost 1200 of its citizens, or whether the October 7 attacks have provided once again an opportunity for Israeli religious and political Zionists to push for the realization of the biblical ‘Eretz Yisrael?’ In that scenario, Israeli settlers will replace the Palestinian population after their expulsion from Gaza.
Conclusion
The United States’ ‘ironclad’ support of Israel has helped ensure the rise of an increasingly emboldened religious and political Zionism in Israel. Regardless of the power of the Israeli lobby and the reasons behind such support, Israeli nationalism since the beginning manifested itself in religious and political Zionism, envisioning the restoration of the biblical Eretz Yisrael. The 1967 war Israeli victory proved pivotal in strengthening the Zionist dream of a dominant Jewish state in the Middle East. An emboldened Israel in the post-Cold war effectively killed prospects for a viable ‘two-state’ solution during the Oslo Process while neutralizing Jordan through a peace treaty, home to millions of Palestinians.
The United States’ unilateralism since 2001 has wasted its hegemonic moment in the 1990s at the expense of great power diplomacy. The US-declared wars on terror have resulted in the invasion and occupation of several countries with many lives lost and trillions of wasted dollars. US war on terror, the overt military interventions, and the failure of Arab nationalism to check Israel’s power helped strengthen the Zionist political right. These wars have been detrimental to global stability while depleting the United States’ national military power and eroding its soft powers’ appeal in the Middle East, the wider Islamic world, and the global audience in general. The erosion of the liberal order since 2001 intensified after the US and Israel’s overreaction to the Hamas October 7, 2023, attacks. Israel has behaved beyond any perceived expectations and has committed widespread killing of mostly innocent civilians. The United States’ unbridled support under the guise of ‘self-defense’ has bolstered Israel to defy all norms of international behavior.
Great power diplomacy and cooperation can go far in settling regional disputes and conflicts and, more importantly, avoiding wars. The US failed in its hegemonic movement in the 1990s to use diplomacy and its soft power to actualize two-state viable solutions and to promote a multilateral approach to the Persian Gulf security that would have included Iran, and a Middle East free from nuclear weapons. US repeated military invasions and a policy of regime change, instead encouraged the Zionist political right in Israel. Israel has used its ‘war on terrorism’ to assault Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza, and derail the Iranian nuclear deal. A year after the October 7, 2023, Hamas assault from occupied Gaza, Israel is engaging in a policy of ethnic cleansing and genocide. The unwise and miscalculated NATO expansion has brought the eventual Russian invasion of Ukraine that is now dangerously threatening global peace. The recent North Korean troops deployment to help Russia’s war efforts promises more uncertain, dangerous months ahead. President Putin’s repeatedly expressed redlines should be taken seriously, as are the escalation of direct attacks between Israel and Iran.
Instead of a NATO-Russian partnership, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2009 argued that the United States still needed to be a global leader but must lead differently than during the Cold War: “By inducing greater cooperation among a greater number of actors and reducing competition, tilting the balance away from a multipolar world and toward a multiparter world.” However, the multiparter approach has thus far led to NATO partners and Israeli acquiescence and indulgence in, expansionism and mass killing. A return to multilateralism and big power diplomacy in a multipolar world is warranted, should we resolve regional conflicts, promote global human security, and avoid a nuclear war.