From the perspective of early twenty-first century American imperial interests ... a failed state.
Retort (Iain Boal, T.J. Clark, Joseph Matthews, Michael Watts), Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War. London, New York: Verso, 2005. Excerpt from Chapter 4:
We propose instead that the core, the abiding silent animus, of the US relationship with Israel has been Israel's Middle East reflection of the pernicious double identity of the American state. On the one hand, Israel has been a play of motifs and appearances that for a period seemed capable of projecting a seductive image of capital onto the screen of the post-war world. It stood as the realization, in the most unlikely (but symbolically charged) corner of the earth, of a market-enriched, "democratic" future: McJerusalem, to sum the dream up in a word. And, simultaneously, the Israeli state was emblematic of hyper-militarized, crudely colonizing Western power. The first aspect slowly grew to significance (more slowly than is usually assumed) as the imperatives of spectacular politics took hold within the post-1945 West; the second became increasingly prominent as the US empire became more deeply militarized--and spread its reach across more of the world--over roughly the same period.
In this two-faced role--as exemplar of a society in which total militarization and spectacular modernity were fully compatible--Israel has mirrored and mesmerized the American state for nearly four decades. But we believe that this exemplarity has been so thoroughly degraded in recent years--indeed has been turned inside-out--that, in terms of US imperial interests, Israel as currently constituted has become an extreme liability. Rather than working to erode or intimidate resistance to the implantation of American capital in the Middle East, Israel's intransigence now furnishes that resistance with constant fuel. And rather than continuing to offer a version of modernity to be embraced by the region's numerous weak and vulnerable states, it now stands for a set of cultural and social relations that is rejected by the forces of political Islam, in part because those relations are equated with the entity "Israel." Every radical Islamic website, every communiqué from Islamic militant factions, is filled with denunciation of Israel and its American protector. As long as political Islam can focus on the fact that modernity has taken this particular form in its midst (however reasonably, however cynically, with whatever tincture of racism-answering-racism), every effort of the US toward "soft" penetration of the Middle East is doomed to fail. And all continuing US attempts at forced penetration--we have no doubt that such efforts will continue--will be met with the same broad-based, desperate resistance now confounding the American state in Iraq.
Unqualified US support for Israel, then, has turned out to be a geopolitical trap. (Even Tony Blair is capable of recognizing this). Yet that support is unwavering. We shall try to parse some of the reasons for this, though we offer no simple diagram of causes. Every empire enters into commitments and implantations that it later regrets. (Blair can be unctuously regretful on the subject of Israel because Northern Ireland is always on a British prime minister's mind). Our arguments about US support for Israel--about an imperial power's fascination with an image of its own double nature, and about the ability of that image to entrap the power that sought to deploy it--are offered here preeminently as a lens through which the US invasion and occupation of Iraq might come to make more (misguided) sense. In this regard, our analysis of US-Israel relations might lead to two versions of a question we have not heard posed elsewhere in quite the same terms: Can the US move into Iraq be understood as a delusional attempt to repeat the one-time "success" of the Israeli lodestar? Or, put another way, did the Iraq invasion follow from the (conscious or unconscious) recognition, finally, that Israel's time as a projection of the West--as an illusion--has come to an end?
* * *
Two startling reminders here: On the eve of its birth, the political character of the new Jewish nation was still so protean, and its strategic posture still so much up for grabs, that it was the Soviet Union, not the US, which cast the first United Nations vote for Israeli statehood. Upon Israel's official recognition in 1948, the US imposed an arms embargo on the new state. As a consequence, the Israelis bought arms from the Czechs, with Stalin's blessing. The Cold War game was on. And the Israelis learned quickly how to exploit it. Their first connections with the US state apparatus was through the two nations' spy agencies. The Haganah (pre-Mossad Israeli intelligence) had deep, effective networks inside the Soviet Bloc--or, at least, presented itself as such to the ever-gullible US spy bureaucracy--and was willing to work unofficially with the OSS/CIA in exchange for that agency's quiet support for Israel within the US government.
* * *
States try to make use of the spectacles they fall in love with. No sooner had the appearance of Israel become a functioning part of the US imaginary than its agencies set to work projecting the image back to the Middle East, as the poster child of Western modernity. And to its own citizens, as the hero of various Cold War passion plays. Israel was the Western David holding off the Eastern Goliath, or the champion of free enterprise facing down Nasserite "totalitarianism." It was alternately (or simultaneously) Judeo-Christian and secular (that is, modern through and through), therefore the antetype of godless Communism or Oriental despotism or threatening theocracy. Apply as needed.
There then was the question of Israel's belligerence, its ongoing actions in the Occupied Territories, and the dominance of its military over society at large. Again, our topic here is not the actual dynamics and instigation of that process, about which others have written unforgettably, but the nature of the US state's attachment to (and deployment of) the spectacle of Israel permanently at war. We believe, in a word, that the attachment was rooted in self-recognition--that Israel functioned most deeply as an image, and justification, of the US's own culture of endless arms build-up and the militarization of politics.
Lately, this bonding and doubling has centered on the issue of Israel and Terror. Both Israel and the US have made terrorist tactics the baseline of morality against which all government conduct is to be measured, and "security" the all-consuming obverse of "terrorism." Within such a framework--in the West Bank and Gaza, in Lebanon, in the Balkans, in Afghanistan and (for over a decade) in Iraq--the distinction between civilian and military targets and casualties has been obliterated, collective punishment has become accepted practice, and grotesquely disproportionate response to acts of resistance has become the hallmark not only of the Israeli Defense Forces but also of "America under siege." All resistance is terrorism. All state violence is self-defense.
Through its support for Israeli policies, the US began to test the limits of its own developing unilateralism. The more Israel became isolated internationally, the more intractable became its defense by the US. United Nations resolutions that could not be vetoed by its protector were ignored by Israel, with full US backing, and erased from the stage-managed reporting on such subjects in the American media. Israel's nuclear weapons are a threat to no one, and in any case do not exist. When the US blocked international consequences for Israel's incursion into, and later occupation of, southern Lebanon, the Israelis embarked on their now well-known attempt at a Revolution in Occupation Afairs: the slaughters in refugee camps; the bulldozing of Palestinian villages and orchards; bombing of homes and helicopter assassination committed with US weaponry; shooting of rock-throwing children, and a "security" wall appropriating broad swaths of land and imprisoning an entire population. All of it immune from international response. And, more and more, such Israeli actions provided a model for the US's own conduct, in its pursuit of absolute impunity on the world stage.
* * *
Failure is compounded by a Revolution in Image Affairs in the surrounding Arab world. People no longer depend on images tossed back at them from the West, or filtered through their own dismal state media. They have built themselves an alternative wisdom: al-Jazeera, al-Arabiya and their imitators; scores of Arab-language newspapers and journals; multiplying cyberspaces. The Israel portrayed by this new apparatus, safe to say, does the US no spectacular service. Orientalism talks back.
Even as colonizer and enforcer--the aspect of Israel's spectacular identity to which the American state is most deeply attached, we feel--Israel has lost its efficacy. Nearly forty years on, the Israeli state is no closer to an end-game in the Occupied Territories. The Palestinian people, its own failed official structures notwithstanding, has proved indomitable. And indomitability, over time, cannot be disguised or dissembled. As enough rock-throwing boys confront enough Israeli tanks, eventually they are seen as ... tanks against boys--and no amount of casuistry will keep the "security" gloss intact. As more and more anguished Palestinian families sit in the rubble of their homes after yet another attack by helicopter gunships, eventually they are seen and heard as ... gunships against families--and no amount of "reliable information" about terrorists can alter the equation. None of this means to suggest that bombings of civilians in Israel by Hamas, al-Aqsa and others are in any way excusable in response. The tactic is execrable and futile. But if Israel-the-occupier is a model of anything now, it is a model of abject failure.
* * *
To the extent that our subject is the balance of "influence" in Washington, then we should also enter into the equation the absence of any countervailing power. Palestinians have a small and relatively recent diaspora in the United States, without long-standing political organization. And the notion of a broader "Arab lobby" in support of the Palestinian cause is a phantom: Arab states have never been willing to spend their limited political capital with the US on the Palestinians' problems, and pan-Arab political organizing within the United States is even more spectral than in the Middle East.
We are heading fast, we realize, into the mere totting up of political sums. And to a certain extent that is the reality of the situation. For even at the level of the spectacle there remain no pressing or persuasive reasons for the US to go on looking into the Israeli mirror. Israel, it has been clear for some time now, is a classic instance of a failed state--a characteristic product of Cold War over-armament plus "free enterprise" decay. But its failure, from the US point of view, goes deeper than this. It is a failed spectacle, above all--the first and most glamorous such failure, we predict, of a great new round to come.
It remains obscure how the imperial master frees itself from an illusion it has cultivated and cherished for four decades. In the first instance, it is trapped by its own apparatus of PACs and fundraisers and agents of influence. In particular, the evangelicals are a sorcerer's apprentice, let loose in a holy war but without any magic words with which to rein them in. And neo-con jingoes are especially well represented in the current White House and Pentagon: any turn away from Israel would be, for them, a deplorable and enraging sign of weakness--evoking the satanic name of Vietnam, no less, which never stops echoing in their skulls.
But the state is trapped by something more. Something that prevents the US from changing course, even though that course is clearly self-defeating--there will be no end to anti-American jihad as long as the matter of Israel and Palestine remains "unresolved"--and could be reversed by the hegemon with little consequence to its grip on global power. There is something deeper at stake here, something particular to the alchemy of spectacle. Support for Israel has long ceased to be a simple motif in a government-run propaganda flow--one that can be turned off at the tap whenever the state deems it expedient. It has become a compulsion, beyond mere adjustments in strategic design. The US, in a word, is in thrall to the image of its body-double. It is trapped by the logic of its own image-co-dependency. The state believes in Israel the way the addict believes in the next fix.
In nearly four decades now, the US has developed no strategic plan for the Middle East which includes a viable, independent Palestine. Instead, it kept afloat the pathetic Arafat as an alibi for refusing to address the dispossession of the Palestinian people. Likewise, it has imagined no version of the region that does not revolve around the "only democracy in the Middle East." This ideological addiction, this pathology of empire, leads us back finally to questions we posed at the outset: Can the US move into Iraq be understood as a delusional attempt to create a new "only democracy in the Middle East?" Could part of the impetus be, at last, an implicit recognition--at some levels of imperial power--that the phantasm of Israel as projection of the West has come to an end?
Delusional, indeed. And some delusions of empire may be markers of its late-stage morbidity. But this is cold comfort. For the horror of the present situation lies in the fact that the price of this delusional system is paid every day by actual bodies, actual death and despair, in Ramallah and Gaza, in Fallujah and Sadr City. Eactly this has been one main theme of our book. The spectacle, we have been arguing, is not merely a realm of images: it is a social process--a complex of enforcements and exclusions--devoted to the suppression of social energies, with the imaging and distancing of those energies being only one (among many) of its techniques. The spectacle, that is to say, is deeply (constantly) a form of violence--a repeated action against real human possibilities, real (meaning flexible, useable, transformable) representations, real attempts at collectivity.
When a particular node of the spectacle enters into crisis, as we have been saying has happened to the spectacle "Israel," it is precisely the violence of this process that comes into view. Ultimately, the spectacle comes out of the barrel of a gun. State power informs and enforces it. Mostly that fact is hidden. The spectacle is that hiding. But in the end, when a spectacle agonizes, the guns reappear at every margin of the image-array.