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Issue: October, 1990

Note from Palestine Papers: Because of the current Gulf crisis, Palestine Papers feels it is important to broaden the scope of the column this month to include an analysis of the situation. We turn to Jeffrey Blankfort, whose firsthand knowledge of the Middle East is extensive, and who is willing to put his knowledge to work. He is a co-founder of the national Labor Committee on the Middle East, which now has chapters in Boston and Los Angeles, as well as in San Francisco, where it began. He is also the editor of the Middle East labor Bulletin, for which this article was written. MT & MP.

Howard Zinn A People's History of the United States, p. 10. —This Book is skeptical of governments and their attempts, through plitics and culture, to ensnare ordinary people in a giant web of nationhood pretending to a common interest. I will try not to overlook the cruelties that victims inflict on one another as they are jammed together in the boxcars of the system. I don't want to romanticize them. But I do remember (in rough paraphrase) a statement I once read: "The cry of the poor is not always just, but if you don't listen to it, you will never know what justice is."

We must borrow Howard Zinn's perspective if we are to understand the groundswell of support among Palestinian and Arab workers throughout the Middle East for Iraq's seizure of Kuwait and the overthrow of that kingdom's privileged and parasitic monarchal structure; if we are, as well, to comprehend the ease with which a US president, with the majority of the American public behind him, is able to bring the world to the brink of a major war in the name of a "common interest," in this instance, US control fo the world's oil supply.

Iraq's invasion has been justly condemned from the standpoint of "international law," the global implications of which have become frighteningly apparent. That means little, however, for the poor and oppressed peoples of this planet who have seen that law used selectively to serve the interests of the rich and powerful at their expense.

This does not excuse, however, the Iraqi government's annexation of Kuwait. Saddam Hussein's record of human rights violations has been appalling and Iraq's treatment of workers from other Middle East countries is equally deplorable. Nevertheless, his appeal to the Palestinians must be understood in a broader context.

For the past 23 years Palestinians have lived under a military occupation subsidized by the US and tacitly supported by America's Western allies. In the last two years, under pressure from Egypt's Hosni Mubarak and members of the Israeli peace movement and its Jewish American supporters made anxious by the Intifada, the PLO has made a number of painful concessions to the US government which it was told were prerequisites to joining the "peace process." The response from Israel has been more repression and from the US more UN vetoes and breaking off of "the dialogue."

Palestinians see little outrage in the US at the hypocrisy of President Bush declaring the US to be the world's appointed defender against "foreign aggression" as it continues to subsidize the daily repression in the occupied West Bank, Gaza and Southern Lebanon, and while the two to three thousand dead from our invasion of Panama still are unacknowledged and unknown but to their families and the soil of Panama.

The unprecedented buildup of US troops on Arab soil would have been impossible in the days when the Soviet Union served as a "counter-balance" to US global ambitions. We have already been seeing more than a glimpse of the future without this counter-balance in Central America, Cambodia and Angola.

It is clear that the Bush Administration has seized this opportunity to rearrange the Middle East to suit what it perceives to be US interests, and the unavailability of what was once referred to as "the Soviet card," even to such reactionary regimes as Saudi Arabia, has obliged a number of Arab states, from the so-called "moderates" to "radical" Syria, to accept if not a major war, at least the long term presence of US bases in the heart of the oil-rich Arab mainland.

Bush's out of hand dismissal of Saddam Hussein's offer to consider withdrawing in the context of an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank, Gaza and the Syrian Golan Heights and the departure of Syrian troops from Lebanon, made it clear that the US had greater ambitions than simply removing Iraqi forces from Kuwait.

By pretending that Sadam Hussein's push into the feudal sheikdom was a present-day version of Germany's march into democratic Czechoslovakia, however, and by dramatizing the consequences that followed the appeasement of Hitler, Bush had little trouble convincing most of the gas-guzzling American public of the righteousness of the latest US foreign intervention. History has never been our strong suit.

He probably didn't have to play so fast and loose with the facts to get his 80% approval rating. The majority of Americans have been educated for the better part of two centuries to accept as a fact that our sphere of "national interest" includes the entire world and that the US president has a right to militarily intervene whenever he believes that this "interest" is jeopardized—from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli.*

Arab workers see the situation quite differently, as I would guess do the people of color who have been or are currently being victimized by US-supported military power around the globe, and whose already precious supply of oil will be the first to be depleted under the US-UN embargo. They do not need a Saddam Hussein to tell them that US government policy has always been on the side of their oppressors, both foreign and domestic.

In 1958, President Eisenhower sent Marines to Lebanon to suppress a nascent democratic movement that threatened the power of the long-entrenched warlords; it laid the groundwork for the brutal civil war that followed two decades later and continues to this day.

Another generation of Marines came back to Lebanon in 1983, thinly disguised as "peacekeepers." Their job was to protect a puppet government installed by Israel following its invasion of Lebanon in June, 1982. In response to random rifle fire from Lebanese who objected to the US presence, the USS New Jersey fired a 16-inch shell, allegedly at a "military" target. It missed completely and hit a Lebanese village, killing and wounding scores of civilians. While Americans remember Beirut as the graveyard of 241 Marines, Lebanese remember the visit of the USS New Jersey and the US support for the Israeli invasion. The Palestinians remember it, too.

Israel's march into Lebanon, which broke an 11-month truce with the PLO, came on the 15th anniversary of its seizure of the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights. Like Iraq's attack on Kuwait, the invasion was unprovoked. Before retreating in the face of determined Shi'a resistance to the portion of Southern Lebanon it still occupies, Israel's US-supplied military had killed 20,000 civilians, injured tens of thousands more, and had devastated much of the country.

Israel's attack was condemned by the international community but every effort to obtain UN Security Council action was blocked by a US veto. Israel's Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, it turned out, had received a green light from the Reagan Administration. The Democratic Party, which had long since sold its soul to the Israeli lobby, made the suppport bipartisan. It gave the invasion a resounding vote of approval at its 1982 mid-term convention. Today, standing bravely at the shoulder of King George, it demands Hussein's head.

And labor's response? The AFL-CIO bureaucracy, in response to a half-page ad placed by trade unionists in the New York Times protesting the Lebanese invasion, took out a full-page ad in the Times, declaring that "The AFL-CIO is Not Neutral. We Support Israel!"

They were not alone. The response of the peace and anti-war movement, with limited exceptions, was deafening silence. Typical was the missed opportunity afforded at an "anti-nuclear human needs" rally in New York a week after the invasion which drew 800,000 people. The lone concession by the organizers to recognizing the US-financed war that was being waged thousands of miles away was to invite a Palestinian to sit on the stage. Symbolically, he was given no chance to speak.

In succeeding years, efforts to raise the Palestinian issue and the question of US intervention in the Middle East were consistently suppressed by the "movement" bureaucracies that directed the annual spring anti-intervention mobilization, on the basis that they would be "divisive." And while we have been fighting, and correctly so, to cut the relatively few millions in aid to the Contras, and the tens of millions that maintain the death squad government of El Salvador, the billions of dollars going each year to Israel have been considered as untouchable by the "movement" as they have been by Congress.

It is important to remember that history when watching Palestinians cheer the one Arab leader to stand up to the US and Israel, and when witnessing the moralizing of our president and his supporters on both sides of the aisle who only differ from the Iraqi leader in that they present a more civilized image to our Western eyes; they prefer to have their killing done at a distance and by someone else.

Israel's friends in Congress and the media, in the meantime, have used the situation to repair Israel's sagging domestic image and reputation as America's "only reliable ally" in the Middle East, although Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, forgetting the fate of his predecessor, seems to be competing for that dubious distinction with his undisguised collaboration with US interests in the region. Certainly, his recent efforts to gain concessions from the PLO and shift the focus from the human rights violations in the territories to the "peace process" charade will be taken into consideration in Washington.

Despite their support of Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi leader's actions appear to have placed the Palestinians in graver danger, at least in the short term. In the weeks before the Iraqi invasion, the ultra-right wing Israeli government was apparently laying the groundwork for a new "preventive" war, whose object was to be the overthrow of the Jordanian regime and the mass "transfer" of the 1.7 million Palestinians to what the majority of the ruling coalition consider to be the existing "state of Palestine"—what is presently the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.

Such a prospect is not farfetched, according to Professor Israel Shahak. Citing critical references in the Hebrew press, he likened the situation in Israel before the Iraqi invasion to "the process of preparation [that] has occurred before all the wars initiated by Israel, especially before the invasion of Lebanon. . . " (Middle East International,Aug. 3).

The doctrine that "Jordan is Palestine," long advocated by Ariel Sharon, is now supported by "not only the great majority of the ruling coalition," writes Shahak, "but also by many important figures in the Labor Party." Given that the majority of Israelis would approve the mass "transfer," according to several [Israeli] newspaper polls, the support given to Iraq by both the Palestinians and the Jordanian government will have done little to dampen that scenario.

The current situation presents those of us working for Palestinian labor rights with a difficult challenge. On one level, we must continue to raise the issue of solidarity with Palestinian workers within our locals, our labor councils and our internationals, and be prepared to defend them against further Israeli repression. On another, we must vigorously oppose the present US intervention in the Gulf before whole sectors of the Arab mainland are reduced to rubble, tens of thousands of civilians are killed, hundreds of thousands wounded and made homeless, and the remains of US soldiers are returned in body bags. In this post-Cold War era, it seems that the only restraint on US military power will come from us.

Hopefully, when you read these lines there will still be time to act.

A complete list of the 159 US interventions ordered by US presidents between 1798 and 1969, without the consent of Congress and exclusive of the two world wars, was submitted to the Senate by the late Republican Senator Everett Dirksen and published in the June 23, 1969 Congressional Record. Dirksen placed it there to demonstrate to President Nixon's critics in Congress that a US president's "right" to intervene was as American as apple pie. He was unfortunately right.

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