Translation of Ch.2, Part 1 of Abweichende Meinungen zu Israel: Die politische Emanzipation der Juden durch eine Militärdemokratie mit imperialistischem Auftrag, H.L. Fertl, Resultate Verlag 1982
Contents Israel and its enemies:
War as a normal case of Israeli imperialisml.
Conditional respect between sovereign states for each other is usually the norm on the scene of diplomacy and international politics. States tend to recognize the sole authority of foreign rulers within their defined borders; and they do so out of calculation. The power that sovereign states can exercise over their people and mobilize against third parties, and the sources and fruits of the wealth they have within their sphere of influence, is something that foreign governments try to utilize for their global political concerns and the economic interests of their correspondingly financially strong and engaged citizens. This includes the recognition of a foreign sovereignty – as a formal prerequisite for the constant endeavor to make it more amenable to their own national interests by extortionate offers of cooperation, by granting “advantages” and by inflicting disadvantages; for this reason, it is also part of the customary practice under international law for sovereign states to occasionally renounce respect for the sovereignty of the other in order to come to an agreement with it again on a new basis.
Israel does not maintain this kind of relationship with its Arab neighbors. Not that they refuse to accept such exploitative relationships in principle: they have long since accepted their “dependencies” on the world market. Israel has never asked them for a partnership based on business and violence. The only interaction Israel has with them is constant competition with their military means of power. Israel does not want to exploit its neighbors or open them up politically to exploitation by its entrepreneurs and business people; nor does it want to keep them under military control so that normal business and diplomatic dealings can be conducted according to its interests and under terms set by the Israeli side. Keeping the Arab states under military control is Israel’s primary foreign policy objective, not a means that should be replaced by favorable peace terms, even if they include foreign guarantees, or reasonably be replaced at all from the Israeli point of view. Israel has no current economic concerns for the sovereign rulers of the Arab countries for which it uses its power – only one: it wants to have power over them, using the military means at its disposal.
As far as Israel's latest war is concerned, Syria, with its years of practically proven compliance in the “Palestinian question,” has made no impression on Israel’s warlords. With a blitzkrieg from the air, the Israeli invasion army in Lebanon completely eliminated the Syrian armed forces, which had after all guaranteed a far-reaching restriction of Palestinian power for years and maintained conditions that were anything but a threat to Israel. From the point of view of the war, such an approach is perfectly normal:
A belligerent power does not trust the declared willingness of even a potential enemy to remain quiet, or at most only does so as a matter of necessity; where it can, it also reserves the right to eliminate every conceivable source of danger. The unquestionable self-righteousness with which the Israeli high command has denied the Syrian armed forces any right to possess missiles, let alone deploy them, which could have endangered Israel’s unlimited air supremacy over Lebanon and beyond its airspace, is also part of the customs of a state of war. What is remarkable, however, is that Israel does not merely act in this way in the course of a war, but that it declared Syrian anti-aircraft missiles to be a sufficient reason for war long before the invasion of Lebanon. Quite regardless of the question of which Israeli interest would actually be hindered by such weapons, Israel arrogates itself a supreme judgment about the level of defense capacity can possibly be granted to Syria, and comes to the conclusion: this state is not entitled to an effective air defense. For Israel, keeping Syria in a state of defenselessness is a matter that is always worth a war! And with the creation of this state of affairs, the demands on Syrian “good behavior” also grow. After all, Israel's military is 30 km from Damascus!
This national legal claim to establish absolute military superiority over all Arab opponents not only in the event of war, but to make its security against any possible challenge into a case of war, has guided Israel in all of its five wars – and has also kept its armed forces almost continuously busy in between. Egypt’s air force, including radar stations, has been destroyed several times in the middle of ceasefires – simply because they existed. In a perfect lightning strike, Israeli bombers destroyed the almost completed French nuclear reactor in Baghdad, thus enforcing against Iraq the “principle” that nuclear power plants in Arab hands are “inadmissible” – because this would at least give rise to the remote possibility of an Arab nuclear bomb. (The fact that Israel itself possesses nuclear weapons is one of the most open secrets in Middle Eastern military affairs). And against Saudi Arabia, which as a US protégé and vassal is reasonably safe from the Israeli war machine, the government of Israel is trying to claim to the American administration that it has a self-evident prerogative of unrestricted military supremacy in the entire Arab world by intervening against the planned delivery of military aircraft and radar equipment which its own armed forces have long possessed; although this military equipment is clearly and exclusively aimed against the alleged “Soviet threat to the Gulf region,” it could at least establish a degree of military equality on the Arab side, and for this reason alone has the quality of a military challenge for Israel.
Israel thus bases its dealings with the Arab states on a criterion that otherwise only becomes decisive in war: Israel wants to retain unconditional control over each of these states; none of them should be allowed to make sovereign decisions regarding military means of power independently of Israeli permission; in this way, Israel denies them their sovereignty. Conversely, this means: by taking every Arab means of power that could pose a threat to its own armed forces as a reason for war, Israel finds itself in a permanent war against its Arab neighbors; this state of war is the normal state of this nation.
2.
The official Israeli justification for this simply points the finger at the other side: Israel must surely protect itself against the intention of its Arab neighbors to destroy the Jewish state, and it must do so by taking effective military precautions! This is considered quite plausible, although the attribution of blame is quite obvious. After all, the Arab enemies of Israel have long been able to claim good reasons for this kind of precaution on a massive scale. Their “experience” extends to military strikes that expanded the territory occupied by Israel by a considerable amount and made a mockery of the once so grandiloquently invoked “Arab cause.”
However, an understanding of the armed conflicts in the Middle East does not get any closer to the truth about the conflict between the parties involved on the ground if it accepts the “legitimate interest in self-preservation” for both sides. Nothing more comes from this than a non-partisan awareness of the “procedural state of the situation” over there, although it can’t be overlooked that this “awareness of the problem” in no way wants to make an objection to the political purposes of states that are at war with each other. An observer who is “neutral” in this way is more likely to venture the moral silliness of considering the whole thing a metaphor from the world of theater, a “tragedy,” than to offend the political subjects of war with one accusation: namely, that their wars and victories are the calculated means of their political projects and therefore also cast a bad light on their state purpose. On the contrary, the idealism of politics celebrates its greatest triumphs where it abstractly recognizes the antagonism between several states as a problem – separate from its reason in the respective state program – and firstly finds its “solution” difficult, but secondly places it entirely within the responsibility of politics – as if politics were not at work in war!
Such considerations are in any case useful as a contribution to “forming political will” among enlightened subjects of first and second rank powers of the democratic world. After all, they allow themselves to adopt the diplomatic hypocrisy of those who have brought their own nation and its (“our”) interests massively “into play,” especially in wars of the “Middle East” brand, and at the same time do not like to quantify their commitment in terms of money and weapons. They all want to be committed to “solutions,” peaceful and just ones at that! In this way, Western politicians spare themselves not only nasty tones toward Israel, which is doing its duty as a solid partner and in its own interests, but also criticism of the Arab rulers, whose usefulness is also maintained and increased despite all the defeats inflicted on them. If critical objections are raised in the free West with its democratic press, then “our interests” is the binding standard – and the actors in the Middle East only ever violate this to a very limited extent; and even Israel’s enemies are considered with lasting respect for “legitimate” rights, which they are prepared to grant and invoke. Why they are such enemies, what makes their concerns so bloodily incompatible with those of Israel, is just as little a topic for “balanced political statements” as “our” stance on Israel.
3.
Arab nationalism, or rather the competition between Arab states carried out under this title, has not become the dominant subject of world politics in any nation; it is found nowhere as an autonomous author and executor of material national interests in other countries and their rule; and the common ground of their alliances, which they at best achieve on this basis, is correspondingly insignificant.
After all, since the oil price increases following the fourth Israeli-Arab war in October 1973, the public in the “free world” has wanted to know that at least some of the Arab states, namely the oil exporting countries on the Arabian Peninsula and in North Africa, are playing a leading role in world politics. Their national raw material became so interesting and expensive for a few years, their possession of . “petrodollars” swelled so quickly and to such an extent that sound imperialist common sense could only recognize this as a violent misappropriation of the good money and hard-earned wealth of the “Western industrial nations” and accuse the undesignated foreign (co-)beneficiaries of the oil business of being “blackmailers” who could suddenly control the economic and thus also the political future of the “oil consuming countries” as they saw fit. This disparaging assessment of the revenues of some Arab governments from the oil business – as if they were not entitled to strive for the highest possible revenues for their “export hit” – does, however, reveal quite a lot about the alleged extortionist role of the “predatory oil sheikhs,” as they were dubbed for several years at the time. In the case of the – rightly so-called – “oil states,” it is not a wealth produced in the country itself that is pushing for possible uses in foreign countries, i.e. for opportunities to make business use of foreign countries. Conversely, nothing is “subject” to national sovereignty but a natural resource which, solely through its use in and by the economies of other, first and foremost “developed” capitalist states, acquires the status of a raw material for getting real wealth which can cost “one” anything at all. In the nations whose leaders together make up the “world economic summit,” the sovereign power has at its disposal a production apparatus and a people that create real wealth, and a national money and a state-guaranteed credit system that make the unlimited increase of private property and state resources the supreme “objective constraint” of national wealth production. Conversely, for the oil sovereigns, nothing but their sheer sovereignty over their national territory and its mineral resources is the basis and source of their financial resources – namely, because they allow foreign interested parties to remunerate them for handing over their geological blessings. The decisive economic relationship between the oil-exporting states and their customers is therefore clear in this respect: the profitable use of oil by the capitalist national economies, namely profitable for their capital accumulation, is the unquestionable, permanent condition for every bit of money that flows to the oil states, and thus the material basis of their sovereignty itself, which they turn into money in the form of concessions or sales to foreign companies. In every phase of their history, the oil states have experienced how many and important resources capitalist nations have at their disposal to turn natural resources under foreign sovereignty into a largely freely available means of business. It was the capitalist oil companies that established oil as an important means of capitalist business by setting a monopoly price on oil products far above their production costs and well below the prices of other energy raw materials. They were also the ones who ensured higher oil prices when the oil sales they expanded threatened to reach the limits of the supply capacities that could be utilized at the previous minimum price. With their business expansion calculations, they created the economic leeway that the OPEC states in 1973 and still for a few years to come could never have created, but only exploited with the oil price increases they agreed to and enacted. And they are also the ones who, with their policy of developing new oil and other energy sources that are profitable at the increased monopoly price, as well as the slower or faster distribution of the oil produced, disprove the illusion of some producing states that the oil price is a source of income that they can decree, the income from which depends on their business policies – and which could possibly even be used as a political weapon. The half supply-boycott of the Arab oil states in 1973 did not work at all as a means of political blackmail, nor did the resulting increase in oil revenues free these countries from their economic position as an important boundary condition for the business activities of a handful of capitalist nations and their oil companies; on the contrary: With a few exceptions, their “economic development” projects have left them so indebted to the countries that buy their oil that even a slight decline in their exports becomes tantamount to international insolvency; meanwhile, this misfortune is now even threatening the financially strong Saudis – and when dealing with the lack of money of oil states, the feared effects on commercial as well as national banks, on their credit lines, become the supreme criterion for dealing with the industry. The infamous “oil weapon” has always existed only as an insubstantial threat and as a political ideal of the Arab states. The “solidarity” of agreements that have been kept has regularly failed due to the competition between the national need for money and favorable special relations with the capitalist “economic nations.” Today, the “oil weapon” no longer even has a diplomatic appearance. The governments of the most important oil exporting countries in Arabia, above all Saudi Arabia, have at best some financial and a certain amount of political influence on their neighboring states that have not been blessed with such natural fortunes. However, this relationship also has nothing to do with the imperialist impact of economic utilization on a foreign country. The dollar holdings accumulated by Arab oil sovereigns on Western stock exchanges and “money markets” do not become capital through investments in other Arab states. Their domestic economies not only lack money for a vibrant business life, but also pretty much everything that is now one of the minimum requirements for a worthwhile national business – from a proletariat trained to work hard by the wage system, to a market for long-term large-scale business, to well-established companies with experts, to a globally competitive production apparatus for the requirements of national accumulation. For this reason, these countries have never appeared as subjects of economic and correspondingly well-founded political interests that any foreign country could align itself with to its advantage. Nothing is more irrelevant in the international business transactions of capital and in the ploys of political blackmail than their sovereign judgment about what is important in today's world – a political fact that is summed up very clearly in the practical lack of consequences in their hostility toward Israel. Conversely: they themselves only count to the extent that they are deemed important by a significant imperialist interest. These states attract such an interest as neighbors of the oil exporting countries whose raw materials the NATO partners have long since declared to be a primary security interest of their war alliance; for this reason alone, they are subject to constant scrutiny as a possible security risk. Egypt is also of interest as the owner of the most important access route from Europe to the Indian subcontinent and, together with some other states, as a neighbor of the Indian Ocean, which has also long been declared a priority “security zone” of the Western world because of its important shipping routes. The Arab countries are also interesting as neighbors of NATO’s declared main enemy: their concern to entench the Soviet Union politically and militarily on its “continental shelf” in a way that is escape-proof makes every region on and near the Soviet border – without any Soviet involvement! – fundamentally at risk from Soviet power, which must be secured by creating a “deterrent” that is as “balanced” as possible. Finally, for the Western European NATO partners, this strategic appreciation of the Arab world is summarized in the claim to have a secure “counter-coast” in the entire Mediterranean region that not only does not endanger “NATO’s southern flank,” but reliably shields it. And this imperialist claim on the Arab world is not merely an interest that the responsible sovereigns could subject to a free assessment in accordance with their own national claims, but has always been the business basis of their sovereign power itself.
4.
The states of the Middle East came into existence at the beginning of this century as the work primarily of British but also French colonialism. In dismantling Ottoman rule and asserting their own control over the entire Arab region, the two major European powers brought in native rulers – in both senses of the word: They had Bedouin princes, ambitious viceroys and other local rulers, supported by money, weapons and officers, wage a good part of the necessary wars to get the area under their own control – partly against the will of the Turkish overlords, partly in coordination with them; and they thereby turned the feudal authorities into accomplices or even administrators of their interest in a truly sovereign rule, which was no longer concerned with occasional loot, but with complete access to land and people, with a regular state monopoly on power. As rulers over a piece of British or French colonial power and always under their mandate and control, the feudal family heads transformed themselves into statesmen with the tasks and means of power of a bourgeois sovereign – tasks and means of power that had their economic basis and political purpose not in a corresponding surplus and in the corresponding bourgeois interests of the native inhabitants of the country, but precisely in the claim to rule of the responsible European powers and their capitalist societies. And this new quality of their rule, however limited and merely formal their sovereignty was at first, had consequences.
Internally, this kind of rule creates a society of native officials from the civil administration and the military apparatus who, on the one hand, are just as separate and alien to the ruled people as the colonial power they serve: The leaders of the Arab world long since ceased to be the owners and beneficiaries of the pre-bourgeois rule which they had been brought into by their people; conversely, their people did not at all bring them the coherence and conflict of a bourgeois class-society and the corresponding need for a political authority, according to whose standards and “objective constraints” the power they serve is established. On the other hand, they always took from these standards the elementary wrong equation of modern bourgeois state power that their people would be free and happy with a rule that sees itself responsible for the violent concerns of their class society as “problems” that need to be solved by politics. None of their subjects, but especially the military and civilian elite recruited by the colonial power, worked their way to the national point of view, according to which their own rule is the greatest benefit and highest right of the people. They therefore set themselves the goal of creating a nation, separate from their people and against their “natural” interests, and pursued the project, with and by their subjects, of making them the functional basis of their national sovereignty. So, on the one hand, the people were blessed with “development” projects that were intended to open up a long-term, functioning source of money for the state, but in fact regularly destroyed the traditional modes of production of the affected tribes and peoples without bringing about a competitive new economy – unprofitable investment ruins were also the rule where lost millions in grants from “petrodollars” maintained the appearance of profitable industrial activity. On the other hand, the economically underutilized masses – if they exist at all: some desert states do not even have a population available for their projects – can serve the ideal of a sovereign nation, a unity of government and people capable of external action; and so some simple men can also work his way up a career in the army to participate in the peculiar society of politicizing state functionaries and their national standpoint.
The army is particularly important in these states, precisely because it is not the means of violence of the political sovereign of a class society with material interests of global reach, but rather is itself the sovereign power and also its entire social “base.” Established as part of a colonial world rule, it lacks the base in even the most modest imperialist claims of a bourgeois state power, but it is far from having the power and freedom to invent national concerns and advance them without restraint, both domestically and, especially, against other states. Above all, these quasi-bourgeois military states have no shortage of enemies against whom they can measure themselves and give substance to their sovereignty.
Enemy No. 1 are the foreign authors, clients and guarantors of their own modernized political power, at least as long as they continue to appear directly as clients and controllers. Because a nationally conscious authority never notices the contradiction between its sovereign project-making and the subsistence mode of its “people” and their pre-political interests; rather, it considers itself to be a successful program for the happiness of the people simply because its rule is no longer foreign – as if it were no longer rule at all. So the military and civilian official elite of these countries always appear as an anti-colonialist fighting force – and in most cases have consequently found their Enemy No. 2 in the old feudal ruling families which the colonial powers had initially incorporated into their ruling apparatus as allies and partners. Against the kings and Bedouin princes who had been elevated to quasi-sovereign rulers, their most important subordinates, usually officers trained at British and French military academies, imposed their own nationally-conscious rule and attributed to this action all the ideals that bourgeois society had once held to be a moral seal of approval for its violent political emancipation: It was said to have been a national “revolution” – even if the “working” people were not even admitted to the event as spectators and a critique of national rule was certainly not on the agenda. Under the title of “socialism,” a unity between the people and the leadership was invoked which had previously been hindered by nothing but the self-interest of the old masters and their colonial patrons. Instead of a material basis, the equation “socialism” = national unity was given an ideal content, which the masters drew from the historical treasure trove of traditions rooted in their own subjects. Everything is supposed to be and remain genuinely “Arab” and “Islamic” – and the dispute over the validity of old and new characteristics cannot be avoided. Every alternative state interest in the neighborhood is subjected to fundamental scrutiny as to whether something completely different is spreading in the name of its own sacred principles. For Arab nationalists, these principles do not have to be relativized by the borders once drawn by colonial powers! So for Arab anti-colonialism, the logical Enemy No. 3 is the neighboring states that allegedly oppose the alleged eternal and inalienable right of the Arab “people” to a new, completely autonomous and national rule. For the advocates of “Arab socialism,” these are by no means just the remaining feudal kingdoms – which, for their part, have long since come around to the position of national reconstruction and prove with their petrodollars that their advocacy of “the Arab cause” is the only or at least most credible one. Every government sees itself as the epitome of the alleged popular desire for an Arab “rebirth,” demands a corresponding hearing from its neighbors – and thus has fully sufficient reasons to make its own military power the supreme purpose of its policy and the decisive “objective constraint” of its nationalism.
All Arab states, not just the “revolutionary” ones, have formed their national standpoint and the enmities necessarily associated with it in dealing with the unique incursion of British colonialism of creating space for the Zionist settlement and state foundation project in the middle of the main Arab part of the Ottoman Empire; all other disputes with which they give content to their nationalism are therefore subordinated to the struggle against the Enemy No. 4 created by it, Israel. By exporting a complete Jewish community to Palestine, the British government had hoped for something like a permanent, self-sufficient colonial force that woulf be absolutely reliable for the sake of its self-preservation; an ideal base with all the advantages it had learned to appreciate about the settler “states” under British sovereignty on the edge of the Indian Ocean. Only a few hundred thousand resident Arab families, who did not count for a world empire, were harmed by this, as well as the political ambitions of a few feudal extended families in Jerusalem, who were of no further importance. However, all the rulers of the region who had been won over by the European colonial powers to fight against the Ottoman Empire and had been equipped with the corresponding means of power also saw themselves affected. The basis of their power, the British – shared with France – sovereignty over the entire region and their interest in loyal allies, confronted them here as a harsh restriction of their sphere of rule and thus as a fundamental rejection of their claim to autonomy. If the predetermined limits of their jurisdiction were already a colonial nuisance to the governments that had attained semi-sovereign power – no matter how much they owed their uncontested, semi-sovereign jurisdiction to the interests of the colonial powers in the first place! – the Zionist occupation of Palestine and the resulting state of Israel had to appear all the more as the epitome of colonial supremacy, which made their sovereignty into a farce. Consequently, “revolutionary” Arab nationalism has always found the primary content of its false anti-imperialism in the “anti-Zionist” struggle against Israel – false, because it derives from the nationalist fiction of a popular longing for a rule exercised by Arab military leaders, of all things, and its principled opposition to the simple survival interests of the peoples concerned refers to the old colonialism and the new imperialism exactly the wrong way around: as if it were not their sovereign rule, constituted and equipped by foreign interests, that was the reason for the less than cheerful existence of their subjects, but rather the incompleteness of national autonomy. In the survival and powerful rise of the Jewish state, the Arab sovereigns have before their eyes the dependence to which they owe their own existence; and as solid nationalists, they does not make them self-critical, but enemies of Israel.
In doing so, the practice of their enmity has become a single proof of their powerlessness – that is, of the fact that they are rebelling against a continuing business basis for their own power and not dealing imperialistically with an obstacle to their interests. The Arab states are not in a position to use Israel the way imperialist states treat friend and foe like, for example, the FRG treats its unloved real socialist neighbor state on German soil. Their nationalism has no other “option” than military hostility – and that is precisely why this is such a weak affair compared to their enemies. Even the procurement of the necessary equipment requires economic power that the member states of the Arab League do not have. In order to even be able to arm themselves against the protégé of the “free world,” they have to look for an alternative foreign partner. Some Arab states found one in the Soviet Union for a time, but have found that the global political calculations of this “partner” did not provide a sufficient basis for their war program against Israel. The Soviet Union was never interested in eliminating the Israeli-Arab dispute in favor of “Arab socialism” – why should it be? – but rather to exploit it as a means of imposing itself on the West as an unavoidable adversary in world politics. For Arab nationalism, its opposing calculations have led to correspondingly bitter defeats, so that its most important representatives, imperialistically instructed by their damage to the brink of annihilation, are returning to their more viable business basis: the strategic interest of the West, which in any case offers their power more freedom and in any case spares them Israeli attacks.
So in the end, Israel turns out to be the Arab sovereigns’ “convincing reminder” of the dominant global political purposes, namely those of the West, according to which states are all considered important or irrelevant, endowed with freedoms or hindered and harmed. By actively ensuring the nullification of any power that the Arab states acquire for themselves outside the imperialist world order from their main enemy, the Jewish state is, from the first hour of its existence, the negative guarantee that these countries will remain what they are intended to be, and what they are then also honored by the West with loans and gifts of arms for being: dutiful participants in that world domination of “freedom” that is fighting its only great opponent in the Soviet Union.
5.
So Israel, as a Jewish state, as an exception in the context of the Arab world of states, is per se a fundamental nuisance for each of the sovereigns who are fighting out their special competition there – and not only that. Israel does not merely want to be this exception – the way the Zionist idyll of the “homeland” for oppressed Jewry would like to see it as and the classic Zionist pseudo-comparison between the dozens of sometimes huge Arab states and the one tiny “Eretz Yisrael” would like to make plausible. The Israeli state demands recognition for itself and its ethnic purpose and thus for its exceptional status within the Arab world; and that is what makes it so annoying for the responsible sovereigns. What is demanded is not merely the “generous gesture” of giving the Jews a few thousand square kilometers. That the regional super power, whose supranational constitution and national utilization is at stake, fails any unity, commitment, assertiveness; that it can set limits for them within their very own area of responsibility; that the object and ultimate goal of the Arab competition between states has no global political weight: for the Arab sovereigns, admitting that is the content of the recognition of Israel that this state insists on. By claiming its indisputable right to exist, the Jewish state expects all Arab states to surrender the content that each of them seeks to give its sovereignty. And this is, not at all metaphorically, a war program – which Israel has never left the Arab states to wonder about, but which Israel’s national leaders have been particularly clear about from the outset and, despite all the “peace processes,” are still not fooling anyone. Israel’s claim to stand outside the regional competition of the Arab states is synonymous with the will and the need to stand above it, i.e. to be superior to the competing national champions of the “Arab cause” and their shared power. It wants to be sovereign in a way that is utterly incompatible with the sovereignty of its neighbors; so Israel can’t count on a calculated recognition of its sovereignty, which is the basis of normal diplomatic relations, but must force it. This state creates a world of enemies for itself – and must consequently, for the sake of its self-preservation, keep all its enemies in a state of permanent capitulation, so to speak. And that is why, since the founding of this state, war has been its normal case.
Peace is only possible for Israel’s neighbors and opponents on the condition that they abandon the ideal of an “Arab nation,” and that they rely on means other than their unity for the goal of national greatness and importance, and thus distance themselves from their efforts to ever play a significant role in world politics through their own power. In practice, the Jewish state proves to them the impotence of even their most solid alliances – until they decide to no longer seek their political opportunities in uniting their region into a subject capable of acting, but rather “on the side of,” i.e. in dependence on, other nations: Israel’s sponsors and protecting powers. To their and Israel’s satisfaction, the most important power among all the Arab states, Egypt, has already completed this fundamental reorientation (Saudi Arabia has long been a partner and friend of the West when it comes to money and weapons!) and turned itself into a compliant “developing country” and deployment base for the “free world” – no sooner, but then the Jewish state relativizes its powerful practical objection to sovereignty in an Arab neighbor that it does not control.
Thus, by defining the event for war for an entire region and dictating the terms of peace, Israel is the order-making power for the Arab world of states – “order” understood in the political sense, i.e. in the sense of clear relations of subordination. On the one hand, it executes this order-making power in its own state’s existential interest; as an ethnic Jewish state, which thereby makes an entire region of the world its enemy, Israel is either a warring state that creates “order” or nothing at all. On the other hand, however, it is already clear: this state is what it is neither through its own power, nor is the preservation of its national distinctiveness as such the essential world political result of its military self-assertion, and therefore not the ultimately decisive purpose of its preservation. For the sake of its self-preservation, Israel places the Arab striving for independent importance under a permanent threat of war; it carries out this threat whenever it detects even the possibility that an Arab sovereign might escape its control; and in doing so, it enforces a claim to world domination in terms of quality, which it is ultimately neither the subject or beneficiary of: It obtains funds and weapons from the “free world,” and with its national intransigence it represents only a part and a national imitation of the uncompromisingness with which the “free West” in its capacity as NATO insists on its global supremacy against its declared main enemy, the Soviet Union, and its real and conceivable accomplices.