AT THE outset I want to beg your indulgence and forgive me for a somewhat misleading title, ‘The Role of BDS in the Struggle for Palestine’. A better title might have been ‘The politics of BDS and the struggle for Palestine.’ What I want to do tonight is to go back to the basics, as it were, and think about how BDS fits into the long history of the struggle for self-determination in Palestine.
It goes to the question of why we are all here in the first place. What’s behind the unfolding genocide in Gaza? How do we understand the rock-solid support of the United States in particular, but also of other Western governments, for a genocide?
It’s not that American support for genocide is a remarkable thing — the US is itself a settler colony that has yet to come to terms with the sordid history of its own founding, or with the massive death toll from the wars that it has waged just in the latter half of the twentieth century alone, from Vietnam and Cambodia to Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention the many bloody campaigns it has waged in its ‘backyard’ of South and Central America. No — US support for Israel today seems quite consistent with its behaviour elsewhere and throughout history. And yet, there is a difference between, say, turning a blind eye to the genocide in Rwanda — US president Bill Clinton’s White House staff were infamously instructed to avoid the G-word when talking about what was happening in Rwanda and Burundi in 1994 — and what the US is doing today, which is actively aiding and abetting a genocide while denying it’s a genocide, providing repeated tranches of military shipments and aid to the occupation forces, and criminalising any criticism of the Israeli state as anti-semitic hate speech.
Watching the horrors unfold via social media, millions of people around the world have taken to the streets in protest, calling for a ceasefire. And yet here we are, eight months on, and there is little hope that this will end anytime soon.
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A religious conflict or a political one?
TO MAKE sense of this madness it is necessary to come to grips with the underlying causes of the conflict, but this can sometimes be difficult to do from a distance. Here in Bangladesh, things happening in West Asia (what the West calls the Middle East) can seem quite remote and it is easy to reach for the simplest explanation at hand —this is a religious conflict involving the persecution of a predominantly Muslim population by Jewish fanaticism that goes by the name of Zionism. In response, Muslims around the world have rallied and are rallying behind the Palestinian cause.
The recent Coca Cola ad kerfuffle illustrates this sentiment. In video responses to the now-infamous Coke ad on social media, we repeatedly come across the same assertion: I am going to boycott Coke because Muslims around the world are doing so. Of course, expressing solidarity with persecuted co-religionists is not a bad thing, and I have nothing against that per se. But it obscures the historical and structural roots of the conflict and narrows the audience for the Palestinian cause.
Against what appears to be common sense among many people I’ve spoken with in Dhaka, I insist that this is not primarily a religious conflict. Yes, it’s true that the vast majority of Jews in Israel, the US, and France (the three places with the largest Jewish populations in the world) appear to support the Zionist project of establishing Jewish supremacy in all of historic Palestine. I don’t deny that religious fanaticism is an element in this ‘conflict,’ but to focus on the religious fanaticism doesn’t explain much because Zionism did not have this kind of support from the Jewish diaspora until fairly recently.
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Zionism is a political movement
THE modern Zionist movement emerged in the late-nineteenth century on the fringes of European Jewish society. In much of Europe, especially Eastern Europe and Russia, in the late-nineteenth century and leading up to the Nazi Holocaust, Jews faced relentless and often extreme forms of religious and racial discrimination and bigotry. The Tsarist regime in Russia carried out vicious pogroms against Jews. From this, Zionists — a fringe group at the time drew the conclusion that racism against Jews could never be ended, that Jews and gentiles could never live together peacefully, and that therefore a separate Jewish state was needed. Convinced of the need to found a Jewish homeland in a world already carved up by imperial powers, Zionists looked to those powers to offer up space for a so-called ‘homeland for Jews.’ They settled their sights on Palestine — after briefly considering Uganda and Argentina as potential alternatives. Mining scripture for justification wasn’t difficult.
When in 1918 British Lord Thomas Balfour declared in a letter to the Rothschilds his commitment to a Jewish homeland in Palestine, the idea was championed by Zionists but had little mass support. Most Jews who emigrated from Eastern Europe went to the West. For example, in 1890 there were fewer than half a million Jews in the US, but by 1920, there were 3.6 million.Ìý Before this massive immigration, 1 out of 100 Jews lived in America, by 1930 it was 1 out of 4. Most European Jews fleeing or migrating out of Europe did not see Palestine as a first option.
More importantly, Jewish people did not buy the idea that anti-Jewish racism could not be defeated.Ìý Rather than turn their backs on it and form a separate state, they sought to fight antisemitism where they lived. More specifically, they didn’t look to Zionism but to revolutionary socialism to lead the struggle against racism and religious bigotry.Ìý Because of this, politically-minded Jews played active roles as founders, leaders and activists in socialist parties in Europe. In his book Jews and the Left, Arthur Liebman notes that socialist ideas were so appealing to Jews in Tsarist Russia that the Tsar’s finance minister once bitterly complained to Herzl that Jews constituted only 5 per cent of the Russian empire but they ‘comprise 50 per cent of the membership of revolutionary parties.’ At this time the largest Jewish organisation in Europe was the Jewish Bund that was closer in spirit to the Bolsheviks than to the Zionists.
Zionist leaders were faced with two challenges. First, Palestine was not, contrary to Zionist fabrications, a ‘land without a people.’ In order to create a Jewish state in a land where Muslim and Christian Arabs had overwhelmingly outnumbered Jews for centuries, they had to find a way to draw European Jews to Palestine. This meant that they infamously actively campaigned against allowing Jewish refugees from the Holocaust to enter Britain or the US, so they would be forced to settle in Israel.Ìý In 1938, for instance, David Ben-Gurion opposed a plan to allow German-born Jewish children to emigrate to Britain. Here’s how he justified himself:
If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England, and only half of them to [Palestine], then I would opt for the second alternative. For we must weigh not only the life of these children but also the history of the people of Israel.
In other words, the lives of Jews who were fleeing Nazi persecution was less important than the Zionist project of founding the state of Israel.
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Zionism, oil, and the West
THE second challenge Zionist leaders faced was Arab resistance. Palestinian resistance was met by terrorist militias — Irgun and Haganah. To help quell resistance from neighboring Arab states they sought to underscore their allegiance to the West. Zionists sought to expel any doubts about their relationship to imperialism, and they proudly declared that the new state would be an arm of Western power in the Middle East.Ìý Theodore Herzl, for example, wrote that Israel would be ‘a portion of the rampart of Europe against Asia’ and ‘an outpost of civilisation as opposed to barbarism.’Ìý Thus he saw the Zionist state through the same racist, white supremacist, Eurocentric lens that produced European anti-Semitism. Zionists consciously presented themselves and their state as watchdogs for Western interests in the region. And so it remains to this day.
The only change in this aspect of the state of Israel since its foundation is that Britain, France, and the US have taken turns holding the leash of the watchdog state.Ìý In the 1950s, the Israeli newspaper ±á²¹â€™a°ù±ð³Ù³ú put it this way:
The West is none too happy about its relations with states in the Middle East [i.e. Arab states].Ìý The feudal regimes there have to make such concessions to the nationalist movements … that they become more and more reluctant to supply Britain and the United States with their natural resources and military bases….Ìý Therefore, strengthening Israel helps the Western powers maintain equilibrium and stability in the Middle East. Israel is to become the watchdog.Ìý There is no fear that Israel will undertake any aggressive policy towards the Arab states when this would explicitly contradict the wishes of the US and Britain.Ìý But if for any reason the Western powers should sometimes prefer to close their eyes, Israel could be relied upon to punish one or several neighboring states whose discourtesy to the West went beyond the bounds of the permissible.
Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands is thus intricately tied up with Western, and particularly US, imperialism in the region. Access to oil and control over the supply of oil has been one of the central features of U.S foreign policy since at least the end of the World War I, if not earlier. At the time of WWII, the US was the largest producer of oil in the world, and just as in WWI, when Lord Curzon proclaimed that ‘the allies floated to victory on a wave of oil,’ so also, the US’s oil-producing capacity played a role in the allied victory in WWII.
But the US’s search for sources of oil outside its own borders goes back at least to 1933, when the Southern California Oil Company gained a concession for oil exploration and production from Saudi Arabia. By 1941, a working paper commissioned by the State Department argued that the US should pursue ‘a more and more aggressive foreign oil policy aimed at assuring access to petroleum overseas’ (qtd. In Michael Klare, 30). The first target of this aggressive policy was to be Saudi Arabia, which was soon to become the linchpin of US interests in the Middle East. In 1943, Roosevelt declared that ‘the defence of Saudi Arabia is vital to the defence of the United States.’ The reason was obvious enough — it had become clear that the Saudi monarchy ruled over a land that contained vast oil reserves, and, as the head of the State Department’s Division of Near Eastern Affairs informed Truman in 1945, ‘In Saudi Arabia the oil resources constitute a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in human history’ (Klare, 32). In return for their loyalty to the US’s interests, the Saudi royal family received billions in financial and military aid. It was the US that first established and trained the Royal Saudi Air Force, and supplied the kingdom with its first combat aircraft.
So the militarisation of oil policy — making access to oil a national security issue and a military matter — has its roots in the middle of the last century. The Second World War ended with a carve up of the world between two superpowers, with the US and the USSR locked in a MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) struggle for global dominance. In 1946, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff announced that it was ‘to the strategic interest of the United States to keep Soviet influence and Soviet armed forces as far as possible from oil resources in Iran, Iraq and the Near and Middle East’ (Klare, 40).
Following this, the Truman Doctrine, announced in 1947, pledged assistance to any nation threatened by Communism. This is the Doctrine that guided US policy towards the Middle East in general, and Iran and Egypt in particular. Anti-communism was simply the ideological cover for going after anyone who dared to go against US interests, and any country that seemed to be slipping out of the US’s orbit.
In 1951, Iran’s prime minister Mohammad Mosaddeq nationalised the country’s oilfields, and took control of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Two years later, Mossadeq was overthrown in a CIA-engineered coup, the republic was subverted and in his place they installed Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as the Shah. But when it was time to feast, Britain was only granted a 40 per cent stake in the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, with the US controlling the majority share. The Shah of Iran established a brutally repressive regime, and ruled over Iran for the next 25 years as a staunch ally of the US.
In 1956, Egypt’s secular-nationalist leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, nationalised the Suez Canal, which links the Red Sea and the Mediterranean Sea. In response, UK, France and Israel launched a full-scale invasion to force Nasser to withdraw. The US actually opposed this invasion, perhaps because they were worried that Nasser’s Arab nationalism could spread and threaten the stability of the Saudi monarchy. But it was also an indication of who was now going to be the key player in the Middle East. In 1957, President Eisenhower declared that the US would defend ‘friendly’ regimes in the Middle East, signalling a willingness to deploy US troops in the region.
The Shah of Iran and the Saudi monarchy became two of the pillars propping up US power in the Middle East. The third pillar was — and continues to be — Israel, which began receiving large amounts of US military aid after it won the six-day war in 1967, defeating its Arab rivals with relative ease. The US immediately recognised the role that Israel could play in further defending Western interests in the region, and took over the task of strengthening the Israeli regime from Britain.
This is why, since the 1967 war, the US has pumped billions of dollars in unconditional military and economic aid to Israel, and continues to do so, to the tune of about $4 billion a year. That’s in ‘normal’ times — since October 7, Joe Biden has sent several tranches of additional ‘emergency’ funding and military aid.
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Nagesh Rao is an associate professor of English and modern languages at the Independent University Bangladesh. The speech the author gave on June 28 at a Drik Picture Library-organised Palestine solidarity event is published here.
