Repercussions & Reflections

I waited for the afternoon newspaper to arrive,

The St. Louis Star-Times, flung like a grenade

onto our porch. I opened it to see photos of

starving P.O.W.s liberated from a prison camp

somewhere far away, on an island far away,

far away from our little house in the Heartland.

That newspaper is no longer with us, gone

like childhood, grandma, and even her Bible.

Entranced with newspapers, harbingers

of visual and verbal stimuli, I loved to look

at the photos and studied the Fronts– broken

lines and arrows in maps of the Pacific Theater.

Such a neat phrase: the Pacific Theater,

where ships and sharks jostled for attention,

and pictures of handsome young guys in

khaki uniforms caught my eye. A newspaper,

radio, and LIFE Magazine contained what

I wanted. Yet, photos die, as does a theater.

–Mary Kennan Herbert

The author’s poems have appeared in many literary and professional journals 

around the world. She was the invited poet at the 60th Anniversary 

World War II Conference at Siena College, in 1998.

Paul L. Atwood

University of Massachusetts-Boston

Note:This is an extensive review, longer than most, because I believe I cannot

do justice to the authors essential argument otherwise.

Who has never heard the question as to whether Jews are a distinct ethnicity or adherents of a religion? Israeli historian Shlomo Sand’s curious title intrigued me and I must say I found this book stunning since I had never thought along his line of reasoning,  which is compellingly presented and persuasive. Some readers, though, will find at least two of his central assertions shocking.  Though many Israeli Jews dub the Muslims and Christians” of Israel/Palestine, “Arabs,” according to Sand both groups are closer genetic descendents of the original Jews than are the European Jews, the Ashkenazim, many of whom are probably descended from non “Semitic” peoples who converted to Judaism at various times in the remote past.  Sand emphasizes, importantly, that many mainstream Zionist founders, including David Ben Gurion, and Zionist historians alike, have asserted much the same. Needless to say such contentions are condemned by those who believe Jews are a people unique and entirely apart from others (and this includes many who profess Christianity) who can trace their unbroken genealogy back to the biblical patriarchs, and who would never abandon their sacred ancestral religion for another, or deny a seamless heritage as Jews. But just as the fact of evolution threatens the power and control of all established religions, so such facts as Sands elucidates imperil the Zionist mythology he is at pains to delineate, as well as to question beliefs held strongly by Jews who are not necessarily Zionists that all of “historical” Israel should forever be the exclusive property of Jews. One cannot fail to be more than sympathetic to a people viciously persecuted for centuries for desiring a refuge and state of their own but what happens to the people they dispossess in the process of fostering that state? How does that wrong right the original harm? As currently configured the state of Israel seems doomed to an ever imploding cycle of violence and bloodshed that appears to be heading to an unpredictable chain reaction.

Unsurprisingly, despite being the son of Holocaust survivors, and notwithstanding his distinguished professorship in History at Tel Aviv University, Sand has been roundly denounced in some quarters for this meticulous and comprehensive study. Yet, Sand has followed many strands of research – historical, archeological, demographic, etymological, linguistic, and philological- to coherent and plausible conclusions.

At this point a reader might well ask why I, an American gentile, would concern myself with these issues, seemingly of interest or disquiet mainly to Jews and Israelis and Palestinians? The cold fact is that my own government is deeply involved, and utterly in a one-sided manner, in the politics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and, from my perspective, is shaping a disastrous future for the region and for the United States. Put basically, while the United States’ government voted in favor of the 1947 United Nations partition of Palestine that mandated the creation of two separate states – one Jewish and one Palestinian- every administration since has paid mere lip service to this guiding principle, and after 1967, while financing Israel’s military and its illegal occupation and settlement of land that is supposed to be the Palestinian state. Promised 44% of British Palestine in 1947, Palestinians now are reduced to living considerably less than half of that territory. Meanwhile, approximately 500,000 Israelis have settled on what remains, with more arriving almost daily. Though Washington professes that these settlements are illegal the U.S government continues to veto even feeble U.N. attempts to condemn these actions. While Israeli and American officials assert that threats to Israel’s security from those who would deny Israel’s right to exist are impeding the conditions of peace necessary for Palestinian statehood, that  does not explain the ongoing movement by Israel to take and settle ever more of Palestinian land.

Sands begins by noting that Zionism emerged as a reaction to, and parallel with European nationalism in the 19^th Century, though he is clear that despite more than 100 years of dispute no unambiguous definition or universally accepted categorization of nationalism has emerged. As nationalist ideology swept Europe “national cultures often tied the soft “people” to the rigid and problematic “race,” and many regarded the two words as intersecting, supporting or complementary.” Nationalist ideology played a major role in the outbreak of both world wars, reaching its most malevolent efflorescence in Nazism. So “The murderous first half of the twentieth century caused the concept of race to be categorically rejected” in favor of a new category – “ethnos.” But this term implies a sense of origin and closeness much as the concept of race. In reality, though championed by innumerable groups, ethnic purity is essentially unverifiable. Sand agrees with the French philosopher Etienne Balibar that “ethnicity… is entirely fictitious…it is in fact nationalization that creates a sense of ethnic identity in societies.” Zionism is the Jewish counterpart to European nationalism with the important difference that long-standing prejudice and persecution of Jews led the early Zionists to believe that Jews could never be safe in Europe. Thus, if Germans could trumpet their ethnic purity to the catastrophic loss of Europe’s Jews, then the Jewish “nationality” needed a nation of its own.

While the Zionist form of nationalism gained some traction in the early 20^th Century as the British, after the Balfour Declaration, sought to exploit it in order to foster their own rule in Palestine, it was the horrific Nazi genocide that catapulted the Zionist goal of a Jewish homeland into the consciousness of the two major victors in World War II, primarily to serve their own interests. Since many Eastern European Jews were communists or socialists, the Soviet Union favored resettling them in Palestine in hopes of fostering allies in the region. In the United States though much of the political elite wished to curry favor with the Arab oil potentates, among the American population, and even in other high official circles, anti-Semitism resulted in widespread unwillingness to allow many displaced Jewish refugees into this country. Polls taken after World War II, and even after the death camps had been exposed to the American public (the U.S. government had known about them all along), revealed that anti-Semitic opposition to Jewish immigration to the U.S. was still as high as it had been in the late 1930s.[1] Needing the Jewish vote in major cities, President Harry Truman recognized the new state of Israel in 1948 because as he said, he had “many thousands more constituents to answer to than Arabs.”

Anti-Semitism originated in Medieval Christian Europe and its extreme consequences were worst there. Throughout the mostly Islamic Middle East Jewish communities had been largely accepted and flourished alongside Muslims and Christians for nearly 1500 years. That began to change drastically during the early years of Zionism when Jewish Ashkenazim migrants from Europe began to settle in ever growing numbers in what was then Turkish, and subsequently British Palestine, in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

Zionist ideology parallels the belief of many Jews, Zionist or not, that Jews, no matter their place of residence, constitute a unique and separate people, united by a common religious and/or genetic relationship that can be traced back more than 3,000 years. While many Jews in Israel and the U.S. are irreligious, many accept the historical claims of Zionism, if not the religious dogma. Most observant Jews, as do fundamentalist Christians, take the following, based on biblical scripture, as substantial fact. The one and only “God” chose Jews to be the carriers of the divine message to all peoples, doing so via the patriarch “Abraham” to whom the divinity endowed the land of Canaan forever. After a centuries-long banishment from the sacred soil of ancient Israel as slaves in Egypt, “Yahweh” enabled Jews to retake Canaan from interlopers, and Jewish civilization reached its zenith under Kings David and Solomon in a widespread empire with its capital at Jerusalem. Jewish society floundered thereafter, succumbing to conquest by a succession of pagan empires. In the second century C.E., when Jews mounted a revolt against Roman rule, they were forcibly, and all but entirely, evicted from the land of Israel and dispersed throughout the Roman world, becoming the archetypal “wandering Jew,” eventually migrating into eastern and northern Europe, where, in various Christian communities they became victims of hatred and persecution as outsiders who had rejected Christ. Thus, according to this narrative, just as all other “nations” warranted a homeland, so in order to be free finally of anti-Semitism, and fulfill their destiny, Jews deserved once again to “return” to their ancient homeland. That some peoples in the modern world condemn Israel today, or wage war upon the new nation, is perceived as yet more evidence of the profound hatred that non-Jews have always expressed toward Jews, requiring modern Israel to become a garrison state, ever ready to defend the Jewish people from those who would destroy them once and for all.

The quintessential claim of Zionism, as well as general Jewish culture, is that Jews were the original inhabitants of what is now Israel/Palestine; that Jerusalem was always the capital of the Jewish people; that Jews were forcibly dispersed against their will to the four corners of the earth; that the world’s Jews are genetic descendants of the original inhabitants of ancient Israel and therefore the long-deprived heirs to their ancestral homeland.

Buttressed by massive evidence from multifarious sources, Sands contends that very little of these claims is true. The ideology is “mythhistory,” based largely on biblical texts, or what Sands calls further “the nationalization of the Bible.”

The Zionist assertion is as follows: According to the 1948 Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, “The Land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books.”

Or as one of the most important shapers of Zionist historiography wrote in 1947:

“God gave to every nation its place and to the Jews he gave Palestine. The Galut (exile) means that Jews have left their natural place…the dispersion of Israel among the nations is unnatural. Since the Jews manifest a national unity, even in a higher sense than other nations, it is necessary that they return to a state of actual unity…The Jewish revival…harks back to the ancient national consciousness of the Jews which existed before the history of Europe and is the original sacred model for all the national ideas of Europe…if we can today read each coming day’s events in ancient and dusty chronological tables, as though history were the ceaseless unrolling of a process proclaimed once and for all in the Bible, then every Jew in every part of the Diaspora may recognize that there is a power that lifts the Jewish people out of the realm of all causal history… (emphasis added).[2]”

For some of those who take the claim of divine origin seriously it follows that the holy people have been robbed of their sacred birthright and many Jews do celebrate with one of Israel’s “founding fathers,” David Ben Gurion, that “We can once more sing with Moses and the Children of Ancient Israel…with the mighty impetus of all the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) divisions you have extended a hand to King Solomon.”

Sands emphasizes that for many who identify as Jews, exile is the central element of Jewish identity as well as the core of the Zionist claim to the whole of Israel, encompassing Abraham’s departure from Mesopotamia to the land of Canaan, to the Israelites’ bondage in Egypt, to the Babylonian Captivity, the presumed Roman Diaspora and the Muslim conquest, all buttressed by scriptural authority. Ben Gurion again:

“When we went into exile our nation was uprooted from the soil in which the Bible had grown and torn from the spiritual and political reality in which it had formed…in exile our nation was disfigured and the image of the Bible likewise deformed. Christian Bible researchers, with their Christian and anti-Semitic aims, turned the Bible into a plinth for Christianity…”

Christians have, at least since the conversion of the Emperor Constantine in the fourth century C.E., claimed that Jewish exile was divine punishment for Israel’s failure to recognize and accept Jesus as the long-prophesied Messiah. Sands writes that: “The myth of the Wandering Jew, punished for his/her transgression [against Christ], was rooted in the dialectic of Christian-Jewish hatred that would mark the boundaries of both religions through the following centuries.” Thus, Sands argues, Jews who accept the exile story have fallen into the same anti-Semitic myth that Christians claim. Interestingly, though a minority, many “orthodox” Jews also reject the Zionist return to Israel. They believe that exile has been divine punishment, deserved, not for failure to recognize the Messiah, but because Jews have continually broken the Covenant with Yahweh as they await the Messiah, who has yet to come. In this conception, Jews must remain in exile until that Messiah does arrive. Then, and only then, they say, will Yahweh bless the return from exile. So-called “Christian Zionists” trace their doctrines to Protestant evangelical sects that arose in the 19^th century. They believe that the re-establishment of Israel fulfils divine prophecy that Christ will return only when the Jews are once again “in-gathered” in Jerusalem. Then Christ will reveal himself as the true long-awaited messiah to the Jews. It should be emphasized that these declarations do not constitute humanitarian concerns about the fate of the Jews since the subsequent chapter of the “Second Coming” is claimed to involve a choice granted by Christ to the Jews: Either convert to Christianity or die! In other words Christian Zionism prophesizes another genocide!

The Israeli victory in the 1967 “Six-Day War,” which brought the West Bank of the Jordan River under Israel’s control, also provided much new ground for archaeological research, initially intended to buttress the ancient scriptures. Ironically, as Sands puts it, the earth itself rebelled against mythhistory.  Many Israeli archaeologists thought their finest hour had come as new digs would finally “fuse the ancient nation with its historical homeland, thereby proving the truth of the text.” But excavations instead brought growing anxiety as discoveries forced cracks in the dominant scholarly culture. First to go was the orthodox chronology of the Old Testament. Peoples with practices associated with Judaism did not appear in the region until much later than the time-frame of the scriptures. Moreover, “Israelites” were clearly a small band with close ties to many other Canaanites, and evidence that Sand discusses showed that Jews supposedly living in the region continued to worship pagan gods, as did many other “Semites” outside of whatever boundaries the Israelites claimed.  Thus monotheism was hardly universal among Israelites.[3] Research also proved that Canaan was under Egyptian rule during the supposed time of the Exodus. This would mean that Moses would have led the enslaved Hebrews “out of Egypt…to Egypt?”  As is well known the Egyptians kept extensive records. If Hebrews had been enslaved in Egypt for four centuries there should be wide-ranging written evidence of that and there is none. The one Egyptian stela that mentions “Israel” refers to the Egyptian pharaoh’s crushing of a rebellion in Canaan in which “Israel” is listed as only one tribe among many others. Babylonian and Assyrian records are quite numerous as well, and depict other great rivals in the region in detail. If the ancient Jewish homeland was as broad and powerful as those who envision a reborn “Eretz Israel” such a mighty kingdom would figure prominently in these accounts and it does not. [4]

The stories of the patriarchs in the Torah, or Pentateuch as Christians call the first five books of the Old Testament, were written at different times by different authors centuries after the events claimed, who used the tales to shape a national or religious unity when Jews were separating and distinguishing themselves from other Canaanite tribes. Thus, just as “Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar tells us little about ancient Rome but much about England in the late sixteenth century,” so the Bible “is not a narrative that can tell us about the time it describes but is instead an impressive didactic theological discourse as well as possible testimony about the time it was composed.”

Many excavations remain ongoing in Israel today in the attempt to prove the existence of the rich, powerful and extensive kingdom under Kings David and Solomon comprising what many call Eretz Israel. One might suppose that the Book of Solomon describes his empire in detail but it does not. The glory that was Solomon’s Israel is a later embellishment. Sands asserts that a majority of archaeologists and scholars agree that “King Solomon never had grand palaces in which he housed his 700 wives and 300 concubines. The fact that the Bible does not name this large empire strengthens this conclusion. It was late writers who invented and glorified a mighty united kingdom, established by the grace of a single deity.”

Benjamin Netanyahu, currently prime minister of Israel, recently made a speech in which he declared that “The Jewish people were building Jerusalem 3,000 years ago, and the Jewish people are building Jerusalem today…Jerusalem is not a settlement.” According to the archaeological record, though, Jerusalem was initiated by pagans who worshipped a god called “Shalem.” The name actually means “place of Shalem.” At the time Jerusalem was first established a people practicing Judaism did not yet exist, and only rarely did later Jews actually rule in the city. Changing hands many times the city was governed by Egyptians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Muslims, Byzantines, European Catholics, Turks, and British to name only the best known. [5]

Illustrating the tragedy of modern Israel/Palestine Sands makes a profoundly convincing case that the people who are now perceived by many Israelis, American Jews, and many so-called “Christian Zionists,” as illegitimate occupiers of land to which Jews alone are entitled, are really the genetic descendants of the original Jewish inhabitants at the time of the rebellion against Rome that resulted in the destruction of the Second Temple and the foreclosure of Jewish rule in Israel, something that was always tenuous and short-lived given the numerous successive conquerors who occupied and ruled the land far more often than Israelites or Judeans did. There is more to say on the issue of genetics but for now let us note that even Ben Gurion affirmed that the Palestinians were in all likelihood descendants of the original Jewish tribes.

Many will be troubled by this assertion but the historical record is clear that Romans never dissolved entire nations or tribes, nor deported entire populations, not in ancient Israel or elsewhere.[6] Apart from the record the logic is simple. Romans colonized in order to exploit local resources. They needed native inhabitants to grow food and manufacture items for trade primarily to profit Romans, though of course the Romans, like American neo-colonists, also insisted their rule brought prosperity to the exploited too. A prime element of the Zionist and general Jewish narrative holds that at the time of the Bar Kokba Revolt (132 C.E.) the Romans effectively razed Israel to the ground, carrying off the bulk of the population as slaves, or otherwise banishing the rest. It is true that the relatively small number of “zealots” and their families who rebelled against Rome met a grim end, as the legend of Masada asserts, but the fact is that the peasants and artisans constituting the bulk of the population remained engaged in their traditional work. Once the land had been pacified Romans allowed locals throughout the empire to practice their native religions and customs so long as no disloyalty to the emperor surfaced and taxes were paid. And so a majority of the population of Jews continued to live in what the Romans had renamed “Palestine.” They no longer had the temple as their religious center, their high priests were banished, and they were not in control politically, but they remained. They were still there when armies from the Arabian peninsula arrived in the seventh century bringing Islam.

It is also well known that Jews were already dispersed throughout the Roman Empire, by choice, and before that in the Greek world. Thus large Jewish communities existed in every major city like Antioch and Damascus, Alexandria, Athens, and especially Rome itself, well before the anti-Roman revolts. Many Jews throughout the empire possessed Roman citizenship. For example, Saul of Tarsus, known to Christians as St. Paul, suffered beheading in Nero’s persecution of the first Christians, escaping the far more excruciating and ignominious execution by crucifixion, because he possessed Roman citizenship. There is no evidence that Jews outside of Israel objected to what Roman soldiers did in Israel, if they even knew. Many Roman Jews had never seen Jerusalem, and many thought of themselves as Romans, as did the millions of other Romans who practiced every conceivable religion. Importantly, many who practiced Judaism, or identified as Jews, were really converts, not descendants of those original Canaanite tribes, who, for unknown reasons, rejected traditional Canaanite gods and developed a monotheistic religion.

Many Jews today do not believe that Judaism ever proselytized, basically because that is the case today. Yet, many canonical books of the Old Testament such as the Book of Ruth, Second Isaiah, Jonah, and the apocryphal Book of Judith call for Judaism to accept gentiles. While the Book of Deuteronomy is quite severe in its proscription of intermarriage between Jews and gentiles a cursory reading of the Old Testament shows that the most prominent of the Hebrew heroes – Abraham, Isaac, Joseph, Moses, David, Solomon- all ignored the ban; thus technically their offspring were not Jewish. The Book of Esther is well known. According to that scripture courtiers of the King of Persia plan a pogrom against the Jews but the Jewish queen, Esther, and her cousin Mordecai, reveal a plot against the king and thus Jews become favored in the realm, leading many Persians to convert to Judaism. Sands quotes the Romanized Jewish historian Josephus to the effect that the Hellenized Jewish kingdom of the Hasmoneans (140-37 BCE) forcibly converted nearby Edomites.  Josephus also states that many in the Greek speaking city states like Alexandria and Damascus “have come over to our laws.”  He adds “Nay further, the multitude of mankind itself have had a great inclination of a long time to follow our religious observances.” Romans practiced virtually every religion of the empire. Roman historians like Tacitus and Cassius Dio, writers like Juvenal, and theologians like Origen, all noted mass conversions to Judaism. There was controversy among Rabbinical schools during the Talmudic period (beginning about 200 CE). For example one commentator declared that “Proselytes are as injurious to Israel as a scab,” thereby proving their existence. Sand quotes another: “All the proselytes enter Israel, yet Israel is not diminished.” Another statement from the period declares “Whoever brings one living soul into the fold is to be lauded as though he formed and bore him.” Sand does not speculate as to why such widespread conversions occurred but perhaps many Romans turned to Judaism for much the same reason they turned to Christianity. Remember, Christianity began as a reformist Jewish sect. Many denizens of the empire were disaffected by the muddle of gods and pagan immorality and opted for the two religions preaching monotheism and a righteous life. The conversion of Constantine to Christianity, however, marked the decline of Judaism in the Roman world. “When Christianity became the state religion in the early fourth century, it halted the momentum of Judaism’s expansion.” After this point an irreparable split occurred between Christianity and Judaism much to the injury of Jews.

Any religion claiming to worship the “one true God” would seek to convert others. The sheer numbers of Jews already living throughout the ancient Mediterranean basin cannot be accounted for by the slim numbers known to have lived in ancient Israel. Sand shows that in the ancient world Jews did convert many others to their monotheism, and throughout antiquity this often led to different practices distinguishing different groups. The well-known biblical division and conflict between the people of Judea and the Samaritans turned on relatively minor differences in ritual and interpretation of scripture. Even today the Rabbinate in Israel refuses to legitimize many practices of the Jews from North Africa, called “Sephardim,” and Jews from Yemen because their rituals and prayers differ from Ashkenazi orthodoxy. The Rabbinate also refuses to recognize the “Jewishness” of numerous immigrants from Russia today because their mothers cannot prove themselves to be Jewish, the religious and legal criterion. Drawing on accepted historical sources Sand shows that North African Jews are largely the descendants of the indigenous Berbers, and Yemenite Jews were largely converts too, though one can imagine that their original priests and leaders may have been the Canaanite Jews who converted them, especially the Cohanim, or priestly caste, some of whom may well have intermarried with converted women.

Sand also argues persuasively that many Jews, though certainly not all, who remained in Roman Palestine after the destruction of the temple eventually converted to Christianity for practical reasons when the empire itself adopted Christianity as the religion of the realm in the fourth century. Unlike Romans of the early empire, later Christian Romans were extremely intolerant of those who rejected the Christian “savior.”

When Arab armies moved north from the Arabian peninsula in the seventh century CE and conquered Palestine they were tolerant toward the “peoples of the book” i.e. Jews and Christians, but because Muslims alone did not have to pay taxes, many of those who had converted to Christianity, and others who had remained Jews, then converted to Islam. As Sand puts it “Exemption from taxation must have been seen as worth a change of deity, especially as he seemed so much like the former one.” In fact, he adds, the Caliphate was forced to alter this policy when mass conversion threatened to empty the treasury. Nevertheless, many, if not most, Jews, Christians, and Muslims were descended from the original proto-Jews, and remained living with each other in relative tolerance.

Sand draws upon many Israeli historians, including ones known to be committed Zionists and shows that in the early days of pioneer Zionism, before the rise of Palestinian nationalism, “the idea that the bulk of the local population descended from the Judeans was accepted by a good many.” Among these was Ben Gurion himself, who with many other early Zionists once hoped for an “integrationist” Israel in which Jews and fellahin might live together, That dream ended when Palestinians revolted against what they perceived as European colonialism during the period of the British mandate, a division that accelerated and intensified after Israel’s Declaration of Independence. Consider the following from Israel’s founding prime minister.

“The fellahin are not descendants of the Arab conquerors, who captured Eretz Israel and Syria in the seventh century CE. The Arab victors did not destroy the agricultural population they found in the country. They expelled only the alien Byzantine rulers, and did not touch the local population. Nor did the Arabs go in for settlement. Even in their former habitations the Arabs did not engage in farming…their whole interest in the new countries was political, religious and material: to rule, to propagate Islam, and to collect taxes…the Jewish farmer, like any other farmer, was not easily torn from his soil…Despite the repression and suffering the rural population remained unchanged.” [7]

Such statements from so exalted a source as David Ben Gurion very much call into question the widely held faith that Jews had been long gone from Israel since the time of the Roman destruction of the Second Temple, or that Jews would never convert to another religion..

Ben Gurion’s co-author in the statement above, Yitzak Ben Zvi, a rock-ribbed Zionist, later wrote that “The great majority of the fellahin do not descend from the Arab conquerors, but before that, from the Jewish fellahin, who were the foundation of this country before its conquest by Islam.” [8]

What else then are the fellahin but the descendants of ancient Jews who chose to convert to Islam? Does that choice negate their ancient claim to the land on which they have resided for millennia?

Sand marshals linguistic and philological evidence such as the fact that “many Hebrew place names remain, unlike the Greek and Roman names meant to replace them.” Again he quotes Ben Gurion: “The entire biblical terminology of Eretz Israel remains alive.” Moreover, the local dialect is “strewn with Hebrew and Aramaic words” distinguished from other Arab vernaculars. Jews and Muslims are buried in many older cemeteries. Importantly, the Palestinian populace does not see itself as Arabic. To them the Bedouin are the Arabs. They refer to themselves as the “fellahin.” Ben Gurion and Ben Zvi also argued that “the entire biblical terminology of Eretz Israel remains alive… as it had been, in the speech of the fellah population, adding that some 210 Palestinian villages still retained old Hebrew names and many fellahin practiced, in addition to Muslim law, a code of “fellahin laws” known as the “laws of the patriarch Abraham.”

One of the Zionist founders of Israel, Israel Belkind, wrote that “The historians are accustomed to say that after the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus, the Jews were scattered all over the world and no longer inhabited their country. But, this too, is a historical error, which must be removed and the true facts discovered.” According to Sands, Belkind believed that he and his fellow pioneers were meeting “ a good many of our own people, our own flesh and blood.” In 1967 the founder of the Department of Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University, Abraham Polak, wrote an essay entitled “The origins of the Arabs of the Country,” in which he argued that there was “considerable likelihood that Judeans did convert to Islam,” and urged that scientific study be devoted to this issue. His article was met with hostility and no university took up his challenge.

Sand devotes an entire chapter to the investigation of scholarship concerning the conversion of Yemenis to Judaism and of many Berbers of the Mahgreb (North Africa). When Arab armies conquered these areas they found numerous Jews, who, like Jews elsewhere in the Caliphate, were allowed to continue to practice their religion. Berbers may be the descendants of the ancient Phoenicians who settled Carthage and whose language was related to that of the Old Testament and who also practiced ritual circumcision. Thus conversion to Judaism would not have been a radical departure from existing beliefs and customs. Consequently many of these Judaized Berbers were among the Muslim armies that entered Spain in 711 CE, and who subsequently planted a large Jewish presence there. These Sephardim were hated by the Spanish Christian population precisely because they collaborated with the Arab Muslims in the conquest of the Iberian peninsula, and, of course, that was one major reason they were expelled or forced to convert to Christianity in the 15^th century when Spain and Portugal achieved independence. Many of these Sephardim later settled in the Netherlands, and became the source of the so-called “German Jews”

And then there is the matter of the Khazars. Interestingly, the Khazar king was known as the Kagan (today a well known Eastern European Jewish surname) and surviving documents prove that Khazars spoke a “Hunnic-Bulgar” language but wrote it in Hebrew script. Khazar elites also had Hebrew names. It is not altogether clear why the Khazars converted but analyzing a considerable body of evidence Sand concludes, “The desire to remain independent in the face of mighty grasping empires- the Orthodox Byzantine Empire and the Abbasid Muslim Caliphate- impelled the rulers of Khazaria to adopt Judaism as a defensive ideological weapon.”

In the early thirteenth century the Mongol invasion “swept up everything in its path and wrecked the political, cultural, and even economic morphologies of all of Western Asia and Eastern Europe” causing a mass exodus of numerous different peoples. The Khazars “advanced into the western Ukraine and hence to Polish and Lithuanian territories.”

In 1976 Arthur Koestler published a highly controversial book entitled The Thirteenth Tribe: The Khazar Empire and its Heritage, and argued that most Central and Eastern European Jews descend, not from Judeans, but from a Turkic people who occupied an extensive kingdom in what is now southern Russia and the Crimea.  Jewish himself, Koestler was immediately attacked despite the fact that many Jewish scholars had long studied and known about this Jewish kingdom, because such knowledge flatly contradicted the essential Zionist message that all Jews today are descendants of the primordial Jews of ancient Israel and Judea. Koestler uttered what had become taboo:

“The large majority of surviving Jews in the world is of Eastern European-and thus perhaps mainly of Khazar origin. If so this would mean that their ancestors came not from the Jordan but from the Volga, not from Canaan but from the Caucasus, once believed to be the cradle of the Aryan race; and that genetically they are more closely related to the Hun, Uigur, and Magyar tribes than to the seed of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Should this turn out to be the case then the term “anti-Semitism” would become void of meaning, based on a misapprehension shared by both the killers and their victims.” [9]

Koestler was well aware that he was treading dangerous ground and insisted that his argument by no means constituted a denial of Israel’s right to exist. Rather than being grounded in hypothetical origins or a mythological covenant between God and Abraham, he maintained that the Israeli state “exists de jure and de facto and cannot be undone except by genocide.” [10]

To which Sand responds:

“But it was no use. In the 1970s Israel was caught up in the momentum of territorial expansion, and without the Old Testament in its hand and the “exile” of the Jewish people in its memory, it would have had no justification for annexing Arab Jerusalem, and establishing settlements in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, and even the Sinai Peninsula. The writer who was able in his classic novel Darkness at Noon to crack the Communist enigma did not understand that the Zionist enigma was caught up in the mythology of an eternal “ethnic” time. Nor did he foresee that the post-1967 Zionists would resemble the Stalinists in their response- both saw him as an irredeemable traitor.”

Koestler was, of course, scorned and pilloried viciously by Israeli and American scholars and journalists but to do so they had to expunge from memory a vast corpus of Jewish scholarship that effectively buttressed Koestler’s case. One such scholar is Salo Baron, whom Sand describes as “Israel’s high priest of memory in the 1950s.”

But before and after the Mongol upheaval the Khazars sent many offshoots into the unsubdued Slavonic lands, helping ultimately to build up the great Jewish centers of Eastern Europe…together with these arrivals from Germany and the Balkans they began laying the foundations for a Jewish community, which especially in sixteenth century Poland, outstripped all the other contemporary areas of Jewish settlement in population density as well as in economic and cultural power.

Sand adds that readers today might be astonished to hear a Jewish scholar of Baron’s repute describe Khazaria as the “diaspora mother, the mother of one of the greatest of the diasporas- of Israel in Russia, Lithuania, and Poland.” [11]

Though numerous and respected Jewish scholars from Eastern Europe and Israel devoted much study to the subject of the Khazars, Sand says that since 1951 the subject has been all but verboten. “Any mention of the Khazars in the public arena in Israel came to be tagged as eccentric, freakish, and even menacing…There was anxiety about the legitimacy of the Zionist project, should it become widely known that the settling Jewish masses were not the direct descendents of the “Children of Israel”- such de-legitimization might lead to a broad challenge against the State of Israel’s right to exist.”

Sand then moves to an extended discussion of Zionism’s relationship to the nationalisms that arose in 19^th century Europe as one response to modernity. As he puts it: For the Jewish nationalists, “Judaism ceased to be a rich and varied religious culture and turned into something hermetic, like the German Volk or the Polish and Russian Narod, though with the unique characteristic that it comprised an alien, wandering people, unrelated to the territories it inhabited.”

This was partly a response to the assimilationism throughout Western Europe where many Jews were rapidly becoming secularized and identifying themselves as citizens of Germany or France. Yet this phenomenon was compromised by growing anti-Semitism. Just as European nationalists resorted to “race theory” so did the emerging Zionists. Sand quotes Nathan Birnbaum, whom he identifies as “perhaps the first Zionist intellectual” [He coined the term “Zionism” in 1890]:

“You cannot explain a people’s particular mental and emotional distinction except by means of natural studies. ‘Race is all’ said our great fellow national Lord Beaconsfield [Benjamin Disraeli]. The distinction of the people stems from the distinction of the race. The variety of the races accounts for the great diversity of nations…it is this difference which explained why the German created the Song of the Nibelungun and the Jew the Bible.” [12]

As late as the 1930s the leader of radical Zionist revisionism, Vladimir Jabotinsky, could say “And I persist in this view. The sense of national identity is inherent in every man’s ‘blood,’”[13] or later”…in the final analysis when all its shells arising from history, the climate, natural surroundings, and outside influences, have been removed the ‘nation’ is reduced to its racial kernel.” [14]

After World War II, as racialism was revealed as racism and as biology disproved the very existence of “race,” the emerging science of genetics was marshaled in pursuit of the exclusive “Jewish gene,” in Israeli universities and research institutes though this soon came up against difficulties such as why Ashkenazis suffered from specific diseases such as Tay-Sachs that were unknown to Yemenite or North African Jews. Scientific battles raged. One of the very first forays into genetics (actually eugenics) came in 1911 in an article published by a British biologist and Zionist in which he claimed that the reason that Ashkenazis were “fair” and Sephardim “swarthy” is that the latter have mixed far more with their neighbors. As for the Yemenite Jews, “they are not Jews. They are black, with an elongated skull, Arab half-castes…the true Jew is the European Ashkenazi, and I support him against all the others.” [15]

One study claimed to show that two-thirds of Palestinians and the same proportion of Jews shared the same three male ancestors 8,000 years ago. This was anathema to Zionist orthodoxy so a year later another study maintained that such a genetic affinity did not really exist. Yet another focusing on mitochondrial DNA claimed that Ashkenazi males descended from the Middle East but that the origin of their wives could not be accounted this way. Since mitochondrial DNA derives only from the female side, and “Jewishness” must be endowed by the mother, this proved problematic to efforts to confirm Jewish genetic solidity. Genetics may someday unlock secrets of human origins but, as Sand shows, it is not yet free from ulterior designs. More than a few Israeli scientists argue that ideology has trumped scientific methodology when it comes to “proving” the genetic exclusivity of Jews. [16]

Perhaps comparative genetic studies would resolve the matter. Numerous ossuaries from ancient Israel-Palestine exist and genetic material is undoubtedly available from that past. Such a study could compare the DNA of ancient inhabitants of the region with current “Arab Palestinians” and then with Ashkenazim. Genetic studies of African Americans are showing the exact regions from whence their ancestors came. One might think that similar studies among other groups would show similar evidence.

At this stage of inquiry most scientists agree that there is no such thing as “race” or even ethnic exclusivity. Any group claiming such would have had to be isolated from others for a very long duration and that state of affairs has simply not existed throughout the evolution of humans.[17] Sand agrees with the many Jewish geneticists and biologists he quotes that there is no more basis for ethnic unity among Jews than among Muslims, or Christians. “The bottom line is that for all the ‘scientific endeavors,’ a Jewish individual cannot be defined by any biological criteria whatsoever.” At this juncture of history, needless to say, the hatreds generated by the division of Israel/Palestine militate against either side envisioning the “other” as congenital relatives even though their own scriptures note the descent of Jews and Arabs from one patriarch, Isaac. Serious genetic studies perhaps would settle the matter once and for all though one doubts proof of any degree of consanguinity would matter to either side at this date.

So based on disproven racist rationales of the early twentieth century and dubious science today, the Israeli founders, and all governments since, nevertheless fostered the “ethnos state.” Even though Israel’s Declaration of Establishment asserts that the new state will foster its development “for all its inhabitants” this simply isn’t true for “Arabs” within Israel’s official boundaries, who possess second-class citizenship at best, whereas those in the occupied territories posses no guarantees whatever. So Israel’s claim to be “democratic” is undeniably vitiated. As noted, the First Arab-Israeli War served as the perfect opportunity to expel most of the Palestinian inhabitants, and calls for the further expulsion of the rest remain constant from Israel’s right-wing parties. Certainly if we compare Israeli “democracy” to the same claim of the United States we see a key difference. American “democracy” claims to protect the equal rights of minorities (something from which American Jews have certainly benefited, though far less so for others, like African-Americans and Hispanics) while Israel asserts that it is a Jewish state for Jews alone. In response to the “population bomb” of a rapidly increasing Palestinian population, Israel went so far as to amend its “Law of Return” to allow about a million immigrant Russians into the country, even though officials knew that at least 300,000 of them could not be considered Jewish under secular and rabbinical law.

Finally, Sand declares that “the ideal project for solving the century-long conflict and sustaining the closely woven existence of Jews and Arabs would be creation of a democratic bi-national state.  Further, he states that Israel must develop a policy of “democratic multiculturalism-similar to that of the United Kingdom or the Netherlands.”

The United Kingdom as a paradigm might seem not so far-fetched. For centuries the “English” (i.e. those who pretended to Anglo-Saxon purity) waged incessant war with the “Scots” and the “Welsh.” These peoples spoke different languages, and observed different religious dogma and customs, but they were almost certainly related genetically, in some cases closely, in others not so closely, as a result of the incessant invasions of the island over millennia, and intermarriage between numerous and diverse tribes who nevertheless had a keen interest in staving off as much violence as possible via intermarriage. Except for each’s regional accent can anyone glance at a Scot or Briton and claim to tell the difference? The UK functions with plenty of autonomy exercised by the “non-English.” The alternative was endless bloodshed. Nevertheless, the process took centuries. It would seem that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is now too explosive for such a lengthy duration, especially given the upcoming vote in the United Nations General Assembly for Palestinian statehood and the almost certain likelihood of its veto by the United States in the Security Council. The lethality of modern weapons can produce a bloodbath.

However, and ironically, the UK, and Netherlands, and Scandinavia as the recent horrors in Norway attest, are seeing a dangerous resurgence of the same sort of nationalism that produced the Holocaust, only this time it is directed at a different religion or “ethic” peoples, some of them “Semitic.”

In Israel’s case many Sephardim or Yemenite Jews are indistinguishable in physical terms from Palestinians and often suffer discrimination for this reason. I once had a student of Yemeni Jewish background who said he identifies now as an “Arab” because of the discrimination his family faced in Israel. Some Ashkenazis have relationships with “Arabs” and mixed marriages, while extremely opposed by authorities, do take place -as has always been the case since the dawn of the human species.

Because he sees a bi-national state in which Jews and Palestinians learn to live, if not together, then as equals co-governing the same space as the only hope for his homeland, Sand advocates that the Hok Hashevut, the Law of Return, be abolished and argues that this may be the only means by which the Jewish character of the state may be maintained. No Diaspora Jew would have an automatic right of return, nor could any Palestinians living in their own diaspora. Sand argues that to rectify the plight of the Palestinian refugees the Jewish National Fund should return the 130,000 hectares of land either seized or bought for symbolic amounts from Palestinians as the “primary capital from which to compensate” them but nevertheless allow those who wish to return to the ancient homeland to do so if not upon the exact lots they were forced to abandon.

Sand knows that his proposal appears today as “fantastic and utopian.” Yet there is still room for hope. On January 21 of this year thousands of Israelis marched in the streets chanting “Jews and Arabs refuse to be enemies.” One thinks of the “good Germans’ who decried Nazi race laws! Can the hatreds and distrust that have taken root and seemingly become endemic be overcome in such a fashion as Sand proposes? If not what does the future hold? “If the nation’s history was mainly a dream, why not begin to dream its future afresh, before it becomes a nightmare?”

Sand’s remarkable and courageous study has not received nearly as much attention in this country as it has in Israel where it remained on the best seller list for nineteen weeks. This is curious since domestically the issue of U.S. policies toward Israel has long been highly contentious. One suspects the hand of a subtle and insidious censorship at work.

I have never seen any indication that Israel intends to allow an independent Palestinian state to come into existence. Nor does the historical record show such an intention. Consider the Israeli Historian Benny Morris’s expose of the motives of the Ben Gurion government at the time of Israel’s establishment and the first Arab-Israeli war that followed. Morris shows indisputably that the new Israeli state used the war to cleanse as many Palestinians as possible from the territory mandated by the UN, and committed acts that by any definition would be categorized as terroristic, exactly the opposite of the myth that Palestinians fled because of the “natural” conditions of war and at the urging of Palestinian leaders. He documents atrocities of every kind including mass murder and rape of helpless women and the result was the expulsion of about 700,000 Palestinians into permanent refugee status.[18] The motive for such crimes against humanity? No Jewish state could exist in the middle of so many “Arabs.” The crimes and ethnic cleansing were plentifully justified by Ben Gurion but according to Morris they didn’t go far enough. Israel missed the most golden opportunity of all; the opening existed to rid every Palestinian from the land authorized for Israel as well as to annex the land sanctioned for Palestine itself. Morris’s revelations shocked the Israeli public but he was reviled mainly because he revealed these dark and previously concealed secrets not because they were considered atrocious. In an interview with Ha’aretz Morris further justified this ethnic cleansing by noting the fact that the United States had come into existence in exactly the same way.

If we take many of Israel’s architects’ words at face value we find that the recapture of “Eretz Israel,” was always at the forefront of their vision. As early as 1921, Aaron David Gordon, one of the principal founders of the Israeli Labor Party, stated categorically:

For Eretz Israel we have a charter that has been valid until now and will always be valid, and that is the Bible…including the Gospels and the New Testament…it all came from us: it was created among us…And what did the Arabs produce in all the years they lived in the country. Such creations, or even the creation of the Bible alone, give us a perpetual right over the land in which we were so creative… [19]

Reacting to the Twentieth Zionist Congress in 1937 Ben Gurion wrote:

“The Jewish people have always regarded, and will continue to regard Palestine as a whole, as a single country which is theirs in a national sense and will become theirs once again.   No Jew will accept partition as a just and rightful solution.” [20]

Speaking at the Congress Ben Gurion stated:

“If I had been faced with the question: a Jewish state in the west of the land of the land of Israel in return for giving up our historical right to the entire land of Israel I would have postponed the establishment of the state. No Jew is entitled to give up the right of the Jewish people to the land…Even if at any point, the Jews choose to decline it, they have no right to deprive future generations of it. Our right to the entire land exists and stands for ever.” [21]

But Ben Gurion became faced with just such a decision in 1947. At that time, speaking as Israel’s first prime minister he said:

“I am satisfied with part of the country, but on the basis of the assumption that after we build up a strong force following the establishment of the state…we will abolish the partition of the country and we will expand to the whole land of Israel.” [22]

The historical record since these words were spoken is absolutely clear. That is exactly what every Israeli government has attempted to accomplish.

The slogan “Congress is Israeli occupied territory” has become a not-so-amusing cliché by now but underscores what many Americans see as a disturbing mystery. Why does American policy support Israel virtually unconditionally while paying mere lip service to Palestinian nationhood? Even General David Petraeus, formerly the supreme commander in occupied Afghanistan, now head of the Central Intelligence Agency, declared recently that such knee-jerk support for Israel feeds anti-American sentiment throughout the Arab and Muslim world that endangers Americans. By implication, American policymakers and legislators seem to agree with many Israelis that Palestinian Muslims and Christians are illegitimate interlopers in the “promised land.”

Washington decided on its alliance with Israel as a Cold War strategy against Soviet influence among Arab and Muslim states but also as another measure to thwart Arab nationalism. In this latter effort both the U.S. and Israel cultivated Islamists in the hope that this would weaken Arab nationalist regimes. Obviously this has backfired tremendously to cite only the case of many mujahideen recruited by the CIA against the Soviets in the 1980s morphing into Al Qaeda and the Taliban.  Israel too sought to undermine the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) by aiding the Islamist organization Hamas and now claims that Hamas is the greatest obstacle to peace. Recently, however, Hamas declared that if a majority of Palestinians by consensus decided for an independent state on pre-1967 borders it would abide by that decision, even though that territory would be considerably smaller than the original U.N. mandate. All Israeli governments have opposed the very demand for an independent Palestine as the greatest obstacle to peace.

The mounting number of Israeli settlements on territory that is supposed to comprise the Palestinian state, and the continuing eviction of Palestinians from East Jerusalem are rendering the original intent of the United Nations mandate of 1947 all but null and void, never mind the issue of the return of those expelled in many wars since 1948. Despite verbiage to the effect that the U.S. honestly seeks to broker peace and bring about a Palestinian state, in reality its actions amount to cynical theater and makes the U.S. complicit in this charade.

Last year President Barack Obama demanded a halt to Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem to which Netanyahu answered by increasing permits for Jewish settlement on land that is supposed to be the independent state of Palestine. As is well known the United States provides Israel with the most foreign aid of any nation, though it is among the smallest, as well as separate military aid. Israel’s nuclear weapons are an open secret about which the U.S. winks and nods.  Many Israelis and Jews abroad note the threats of extremists to drive Israel “into the sea” but Israel’s conventional weapons alone make it the most militarily powerful state in the region, perfectly capable of providing for its own defense, even if all other Arab nations decided to attack at once, though that is more than unlikely. As is also well known, most Arab nations (despite the so-called “Arab Spring.”) are still governed by dictators and autocrats who are also propped up by U.S. aid, economic, military or both, and which have long since ceased to call for Israel’s destruction. Indeed, Saudi Arabia would bless an Israeli attack on Iran! While it was the UN itself that made Israel’s very existence possible, Israel, with American blessing, is the all time champion violator of UN resolutions demanding that it withdraw from illegally occupied Palestinian land and adhere to international law; something to which the US merely and egregiously pays lip service as it continually vetoes any international attempts to rein in Israel’s expansion. When the UN divided British Palestine in 1947 it accorded about 44 percent of the territory to what was supposed to become the new nation of Palestine. As a result of Israeli settlements in the West Bank only about half (22 percent) of the original land allotted remains, and this is shrinking daily and with indisputable American collusion.

As this piece is being written many nations which had previously abstained from officially recognizing Palestine as a state are now doing so. The Palestinian Authority, defying the U.S., has requested the U.N. Security Council to condemn Israeli settlements as a precursor to a UN vote in the near future officially endorsing such a state. However, documents recently published by Al Jazeera show that the PLO has been willing to give up claims against major Israeli settlements in the West Bank, moves that will undoubtedly be viewed as a sellout by the Palestinian people, and undermine what little credibility the PLO has left. Yet at the same time these documents show that Israel has had a far more compromising “partner” in the so-called peace process than it has ever admitted. But compromise is not what Israeli governments have wanted; the surrender of the Palestinian territories is. Meanwhile, though the U.S. position publicly has always been that the settlements are illegal, the Obama administration has indicated it will veto the U.N. measures just as all American governments have at least since the end of the 1967 Six-Day War and thereby block UN efforts to recognize Palestinian statehood.

The state of Palestine seems increasingly impossible to come into existence unless something changes radically, perhaps on the order of the prescription with which Sand concludes. After all the original Zionists, despite their oft condemned slogan, “For a people without land, a land without people,” knew that Palestinians numbered about 450,000 at the dawn of the 20th century, and envisioned a bi-national state in which Jews and Arabs would be equals. Reality has undermined utopian logic. Yet if conditions do not change the entire region faces a far bloodier and destructive future, all the more ominous with Israel’s introduction of nuclear weapons. The emergence of suicide bombers is obviously of great concern yet this extreme phenomenon underscores the depths of growing despair among Palestinians. To what length will such assaults reach?  The intensifying tension between Israel and Iran, deeply connected to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict because of Iran’s military support for both Hezbollah and Hamas, is among the three major “flash points” on earth today where a nuclear attack exists (India/Pakistan and the Korean peninsula are the others). Let us soberly take note of Seymour Hersh’s almost forgotten expose of Israel’s “Samson option” whereby, if Israeli officials believe the state is faced with destruction, Israel stands ready to vaporize each and every perceived enemy it can reach.[23] These are grave matters and no one can predict the outcomes but at every juncture the potential for disaster is looming…and not only for the Middle East.

---

[1] See David Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews (New York, The New Press, 2007)

[2] Yitzhak Baer, Galut ,New York, Schocken Books, 1947, 11, quoted in Sands, 101.

[3] Sand draws upon, Israel Finklestein and Neil Silberman, The Bible Unearthed, New York, The Free Press, 2001, 105-113.

[4] There has been speculation that the ancient Egyptian word “HabirU” refers to the Hebrews. According to one source the term  had no common ethnic affiliations, that these people spoke no common language, and that they normally led a marginal and sometimes lawless existence on the fringes of settled society. Another source claims that attempts to relate the Egyptian word to the ancient Hebrew word “ibri” have come to nothing. See, Carol F. Redmount, “Bitter Lives: Israel in and Out of Egypt,” in  Michael D. Coogan, ed., The Oxford History of the Biblical World, Oxford University Press, 1999, 98. Also, Anson F. Rainey, “Unruly Elements in Late Bronze Canaanite Society,” in  David P. Wright et al, Pomegranates and Golden Bells, Ann Arbor, Eisenbrauns, 1995, 483.

[5] www.juancole.com/2010/03/top , “ten reasons East Jerusalem does not belong to Jewish Israelis”

[6] See Adrian Goldsworthy, How Rome Fell, 2009, Yale University Press, 35-36.

[7] David Ben Gurion and Yitzhak Ben Zvi, Eretz Israel in the Past and the Present ,Jerusalem, Ben Zvi, 1979 (in Hebrew) 198. Quoted in Sand, 185-186.

[8] Yitzhak Ben Zvi, Our Population in the Country, The Executive Committee of the Youth Alliance and the JNF, 1929 (in Hebrew). Quoted in Sand, 187.

[9] Arthur Koestler, The Thirteenth Tribe: The Khazar Empire and Its Heritage, London, Hutchinson, 1976, 17,. Quoted in Sand, 239.

[10] Koestler, 223. Quoted in Sand, 239.

[11] Salo Wittmayer Baron, A Social and Political History of the Jews, Vol. 3, New York, Columbia University Press, 1952, 206. Quoted in Sand, 242.

[12] From “Nationalism and Language,” in Joachim Doron, The Zionist Thinking of Nathan Birnbaum, The Zionist library, 1988, 177. Quoted in Sand, 257.

[13] Ze’ev Jabotinsky, in Selected Writings: Exile and Assimilation, Tel Aviv, Shlomo Zaltzman, 1936, (in Hebrew) 143-144, Quoted in Sand, 261.

[14] In Gideon Shimoni, The Zionist Ideology, Brandeis University Press, 1995, 240; Quoted in Sand, 261.

[15] Redcliffe Nathan Salaman, “The Heredity of the Jews,” Journal of Genetics, 1911. Quoted in Sand, 267.

[16] See Nurit Kirsh, “Population Genetics in Israel in the 1950s: The Internalization of Ideology,” ISIS, Journal of the History of Science 94 (2003) 631-55.

[17] Alain F. Corcos, The Myth of Human Races ( East Lansing, MI, Michigan State University Press) 1997

[18] Benny Morris, 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2008.

[19] Zeev Sternhell, The Founding Myths of Israel, Princeton University Press, 1999, 71-72.

[20] Norman Finklestein, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, London, Verso, 2003, 10-11.

[21] Ibid, 102-103

[22] Nur Masalha, The Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Thought, 1882-1948, Washington, D.C., Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992. 107.

[23] Seymour Hersh, The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy, New York, Random House, 1991.

Submitted to the Boston Globe Op-Ed page

Paul L. Atwood

University of Massachusetts-Boston

Monday, November 7th, 2011.

I wrote a version of this op-ed piece and submitted it to the Boston Globe shortly after the Times article appeared. The Globe op-ed editor replied to me that “we’ll steer clear of this.” Walid Karzai has since been assassinated, reputedly by one of his own henchmen.

On October 28, 2009 the New York Times published a bombshell story depicting the intimate relationship between the Central Intelligence Agency and Ahmed Walid Karzai, arguably the world’s kingpin drug lord, and also the brother of Afghanistan’s president Hamid Karzai. The fact that the same story could have been published years ago is another troubling matter. Nevertheless the article raised profound issues about what the United States is really attempting to do in central Asia.

Since numerous reports have shown that the Taliban, ostensibly one of America’s greatest enemies, profits greatly from the sale of opium and uses the proceeds to buy weapons to kill American troops, and since other abundant reports declare that Ahmed Karzai is by far the biggest purveyor of opium in the region, there is most obviously a mutual relationship between Karzai and the Taliban and the Central Intelligence Agency. The fact that Hamid Karzai has done nothing to curb the opium trade or the cozy relationship between his brother (and now his replacements) and Islamic insurgents is but one element in the rampant corruption of his regime, and without question the worst.

Why so?  According to President Obama defeating the Taliban and thereby preventing Afghanistan from becoming a haven for al Qaeda again is a vital necessity to protect American lives and maintain national security. Yet far many more American lives have been extinguished by opium and its derivative, heroin, than anything al Qaeda has thus far matched. Aside from the threat posed by HIV, or some other pathogen, nothing menaces national security more than the drug epidemic that has plagued this country since the late 1960s when a tsunami of heroin surged across the nation from its sources in Laos and Vietnam. A mountain of evidence, some of it ferreted out by a U.S. Senate Special Committee on Narcotics chaired by Senator John Kerry, documents the CIA’s long standing association with the world’s leading drug traffickers. During the “secret war” in Laos, pilots for the CIA’s contract airline, Air America, jokingly referred to themselves as “Air Opium.” Proceeds from opium sales were used to fund the top secret war waged in Laos since the U.S. Congress had appropriated only a marginal sum for the venture. So much of the substance was produced that criminal enterprises in neighboring Vietnam transformed the stuff into heroin and fed profits directly to top officials in Saigon’s government, America’s allies. Among other victims, it soon addicted many American soldiers. When the warehouses in Southeast Asia began to burst heroin “mysteriously” found its way into America’s cities and towns. (See the PBS Frontline documentary Guns, Drugs and the CIA, if you can find a copy).

In the aftermath of defeat in Vietnam many in the U.S. government rankled at the humiliation. Blaming the Soviet Union for the rout (after all how else could little “yellow dwarves ,” as LBJ put it, have vanquished the American superpower?) Officials like Zbigniew Brzezinski contrived to draw the Soviets into Afghanistan and thus the “opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War.” The CIA then recruited tens of thousands of Islamic jihadists known as the mujahideen from across the Muslim world to fight the Soviets. Since this was the largest covert operation ever conducted by the U.S., and Congress surreptitiously gave only a small portion of its cost, much of this war was also funded by the opium trade, just as in Southeast Asia. The official CIA explanation is that the war against the Soviets trumped any effort to choke off the drug traffic. Meanwhile the trade flourished and many thousands of Americans and others died from overdoses. Michael Levine, a decorated agent of the Drug Enforcement Agency, has written a number of books in which he states categorically that the CIA deliberately stifled his and the agency’s efforts to halt the flow of opium and “got into bed with the biggest drug lords on the planet.” (See the Australian documentary, Dealing With the Demon, Vol. 2; also, Michael Levine, The Big White Lie: The Deep Cover Operation That Exposed the CIA Sabotage of the Drug War: An Undercover Odyssey)

Ironically the Taliban, when it first came to power, suppressed the trade, causing near panic around the world since hundreds of billions of dollars were now not flowing into various arms bazaars, or being laundered by banks and stock exchanges. The current war on the Taliban has resuscitated opium production. Today Afghanistan produces about 92 percent of global opium but much of it is managed by warlords who are associated with the Karzai regime, many of whom were agents of the CIA during the Afghan-Soviet War. Again, there is an intimate relationship between these growers and the Taliban though they are purported to be enemies.

The Times story dropped like a stone to the bottom of the sea, not surprisingly since a conspiracy of silence has for decades surrounded this issue. A few apologists have made noises to the effect that Afghanistan is a tough neighborhood and the U.S. has to deal with unsavory characters. Slogans like “if you like sausage you may not want to visit the slaughterhouse” surfaced. One thing is clear. The 1682 American soldiers and marines who have died in that tragic country have given their lives for an utterly putrescent regime that was handpicked by the U.S. in 2002 in order to foster an unstated and highly secret American agenda. Lest we forget, 14,342 American military personnel have also been wounded.

What is the real agenda? It cannot be “freedom and democracy.” Much outrage was expressed in this country over vote fraud in Iran yet American soldiers and marines are propping up a government for which it is alleged that one million fraudulent votes were cast.

Pepe Escobar, who writes for Asia Times, notes the undisputed fact that the names of the countries Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and Iran never appear in the establishment media in tandem with the word “pipeline,” while also emphasizing that the map of major American combat bases aligns perfectly with the proposed pipelines for major sources of oil and natural gas throughout the Middle East and Central Asia.

The CIA’s symbiotic relationship with the globe’s drug dealers should have alarmed and engaged many citizens, but the issue has now all but vanished, signifying that Afghanistan is not the only place where something is rotten.

(A more comprehensive, if dismal, perspective on this issue can be found in the following studies. Gary Webb, Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion; Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade; Alexander Cockburn, Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press)

Paul L. Atwood

This is an updated version of a lecture delivered October 21, 2010 at the

Institute For the Study of Societal Issues (ISSI)

University of California-Berkeley

Monday, November 7th, 2011.

The Great Recession is the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and, like the aftermath of Katrina, or the BP disaster, or the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, all are man-made disasters. Many signs point to worse tidings. Many of us who live in this the most advanced capitalist country are indoctrinated at an early age to believe our system is by far the most efficient and best ever created, especially if we are affluent and live well. We tend to believe it obeyed the laws of evolution toward ever higher form, more or less as we think of the human species itself. We go to lengths to ignore the fact that our system began as the brainchild of a minority that imposed its will by brute force against others who had good reason to oppose it. It is impossible to separate our republican form of government from our economic system. As former Secretary of State John Hay put matters as far back as the 19^th Century: “This is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people no longer. It is government of corporations by corporations.”  It has been the case since the American Revolution, and remains the case, that the American government has been owned and operated by the financial and corporate elites and government policies, and most definitely foreign policy, are largely their agendas set out for their interests. Bankers and immense industrial corporations largely run the global show, backed by the Executive, Congress and the Supreme Court, America’s gargantuan military power and the connivance of corporate media.

As a culture we deliberately ignore the brutal genesis of American capitalism, feeding ourselves Disney fantasies about religious freedom etc. The origin of the modern American corporation is to be found in the Plymouth and Virginia companies. These were established as profit-making entities and to make their claim upon the so-called New World these new enterprises required systematic plunder of lands and resources from natives, and their virtual annihilation in the original colonies, ethnic cleansing, cheap white labor in the form of indentured servitude, and ultimately the importation of African slaves. The American capitalist system was therefore premised at its outset by murder and de facto aggression, and human bondage, the very sins for which we condemn others today. Many of our early American heroes were slaveholders and war mongers par excellence.

Some of us are old enough to remember when we condemned the communists for their “slave societies,” believing that our own slavery was somehow an aberration instead of the absolute prerequisite to establish today’s American way of life. Our system’s continued success still requires these critical factors. We still have slaves but now we don’t have to see them. They toil on plantations, mines and factories hidden away in far continents, victims of centuries of western plunder, today camouflaged  as “globalism.” We employ terms like “neo-colonialism” but pretend this term does not apply to us What else was Cuba before Castro but an American satrapy? What else South Vietnam, South Korea, Dominican Republic, Iran before 1979, Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua and many others?  Why else has the US invaded Iraq and Afghanistan but to try to secure the world’s remaining second largest deposit of oil and to acquire oil and natural gas from Central Asia in the very backyards of our rivals China and Russia? As Edward Said asked, “if the principal product of Iraq were broccoli would the U.S. be in Iraq?”

Victims of our wars are dismissed under the Orwellian rubric of “collateral damage” committed accidently in the “fog of war.” While our government now goes to some lengths to ensure that the worst of such crimes are committed by proxies wherever possible, when all else fails we send in our own armed forces. As reports from Iraq and now Afghanistan and Pakistan and Yemen and Somalia and Libya show daily, our pilotless predators wreak a terrible slaughter on civilians. Our Army and Marine Corps do not exist to protect and defend our shores but to enter other nations and force them to our will.

We Americans hide from such uncomfortable facts largely by ignoring them, believing the lies we are told, or by fantasizing that we are a new chosen people, or the redeemers of a benighted world.  We have constructed a mass delusion that our way of life represents the most advanced civilization in human existence despite the fact that its perpetuation has required the deaths quite literally of many millions as it took shape, the wholesale violation of the very values we claim, and the destruction of the very resources and environment that made the “American way of life” possible in the first place.

Any trust in this system is really a kind of fundamentalism; many want to believe that all of this was ordered on high, perhaps encoded in our genes at the very dawn of humanity, its inevitability impressed in the Book of Time.

As in all fundamentalist faiths we have created a set of myths about why we go to war and these myths center on the falsehood that we do so to protect and defend noble values, and principles, and our superior way of life; never for the reasons others wage war, such as lebensraum, or to seize resources, or to prevent others from exercising their ‘right’ to self-determination should that impede our “interests.”

In American public culture enemies have always been presented as aggressors against an intrinsically peace loving people who take up the sword only, ONLY, because our antagonists have left us no alternative. Thus, it is always the other who bears the opprobrium for anything the US has done in the name of national “defense.” Think, say, of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the carpet bombing of South Vietnam, or the more recent destruction of Fallujah where white phosphorus, a chemical  banned under international law, was used on civilians to awful effect and depleted uranium has caused a plague of cancers. All of these were brought on by the iniquities of our enemies, or so we claim…

Yet not a single war in American history has at bottom NOT been one of choice. And we never go to war against any nation capable of wreaking havoc on us. No, we ravage only those who lie helpless before us.  The American way of war has been hailed culturally as “exceptional” and humane and just and necessary for the defense of profound human values and ideals, and thus a model for the rest of humanity…but the truth stands naked in the neo-colonies.

This has been especially true since the US assumed ownership of the Western capitalist system in 1945 and has used armed violence against many nations, either overtly or covertly, to expand it to the entire world, thereby building new roads so to speak, all leading to our New Rome.

In these almost innumerable wars, interventions, covert ops, assassinations etc. since the end of World War II the US has killed millions in places too numerous to list here, all of course in the name of progress and humanity.

The American empire that most Americans are persuaded does NOT exist began as an outpost of British imperialism, and now occupies the dominant position among the nations of our planet. One of the American goals of WWII was to knock Britain from its perch… to play Rome to Britain’s Athens as it were. Today American armed forces are in at least 170 of the 192 nations comprising the United Nations, and American ships, aircraft and satellites are deployed to every corner of the terrasphere, stratosphere, ionosphere, and outer space. The reach of American empire is a quantum leap in power beyond anything ever seen on planet earth.

Empire by definition is one core nation living at the expense of many others. Clearly, in terms of the distribution of wealth and resources, mal-distributed as they are domestically, most roads today lead to the United States.  Yet a “perfect storm” of merging crises is gathering force that has every possibility to undo the American imperial project and, indeed, prove catastrophic for human civilization across the globe.

Empire, and the American neo-empire today, has always relied at bottom on armed force and that in turn has always been dependent on advantages in the technology of war. Since at least the turn of the 19^th Century, when the emergence of modern capitalism fostered the Industrial Revolution, military and economic advantage has required access to ever greater quantities of energy. To a significant extent both World Wars were global imperial competitions for the control of oil. Until 1945 the US was self-sufficient in energy but used so much petroleum supplying its war machine and those of the United Kingdom and Soviet Union, that in order to maintain our enormously bloated way of life we became dependent on oil in other nations. Since then the American armed juggernaut has been deployed often, if not primarily, to protect access to petroleum in other people’s countries, to fuel our army, navy and air force, to safeguard the trading routes and shipping lanes to transport the black gold, all for the benefit of American living standards.

Our swollen way life is inconceivable without oil, and other hydrocarbons. Yet, the absolute reliance on the substances is slowly but indisputably poisoning and suffocating the very systems they enabled to arise, and the day draws near when the Age of Oil will end because of declining reserves and increasing costs.

Consider Peak Oil. A concerned geologist at Columbia named Hubbert began to worry about how long oil would last and he predicted that American production would peak about 1973. He was correct. Since 1859 the US has used half of its oil and now the other half will be consumed in the next 50 years, though it will undoubtedly be so expensive well before that many will have to choose between heat and food. He also predicted global oil production to peak about now and most analysts agree that his prediction is correct.

Americans have always relied upon ingenuity and technological fixes to solve problems but in this case the likelihood that hydrogen, biofuels, solar or cold fusion will ever replace petroleum and natural gas is slim. The U.S. is the Saudi Arabia of coal but reverting to that fuel will entail other collateral damage. Some, like James Lovelock, argue that nuclear power could save the advanced nations from total collapse but opposition to that is widespread especially after the events in Japan last Spring.

Thus, intensifying competition for access to fossil energy reserves is inexorably leading to increasing armed conflict, and, ironically, the armies in conflict will not be capable of combat without the very energy they are fighting to protect, thereby hastening the disappearance of this energy source, and therefore exacerbating the very problems that in truth cannot be resolved by war. A case in point is the fact that American and NATO forces in Afghanistan now consume a million gallons of fuel per day!

The release of carbon and other byproducts of burning coal, oil, and gas has altered the world’s ocean and atmospheric systems, while the industrial processes have also ravaged landscapes, rivers, overturned settled ways of life, and polluted cities. The net result is increasingly catastrophic climate change, just as climate scientists have predicted, leading to intensifying social problems like drought, floods, famine, increased disease, and the mass migration of populations. All of these are sure to lead, in turn, to more armed violence globally, and will unless a massive shift in consciousness takes place with an equal commitment to change.

While there are numerous Cassandra voices prophesying these outcomes the real issue before us is whether we have the will to see and take the necessary action before it is too late.

President Obama was elected primarily on the basis of his promise to end the war in Iraq. Is anyone fooled by his withdrawal that is not a withdrawal? His administration has just announced the total withdrawal of all American forces by December 31, 2011. And what of the uncounted but very numerous cohorts of “contractors,” like Blackwater/Xe, many of whom are highly paid former Special Forces operatives with “trigger time” who will employ their martial skills while remaining in Iraq? These amount to a privatized army at a cost far greater than the pay scale for regular troops. For what other purpose will these mercenaries remain than to ensure that this long coveted, yet incipient neo-colony remains in the American orbit and provides its only natural resource?

One of the first measures undertaken by the Bush Administration was to create a National Energy Policy Development Group headed by the chief spokesman of the oil industry, one Richard Cheney. No access to their records or discussions has ever been allowed but their actions surely indicate that the energy chief executives are mightily aware of Peak Oil. Their policy? Not conservation; no crash program of alternative energy sources, no commitment to work with the international community for peaceful solution. NO! The policy is clearly to invade other countries and seize their energy reserves and/or the means to transport them. For all President Obama’s rhetoric there really is no Plan B.

In the last few weeks the U.S.-NATO induced civil war in Libya has been won by rebels opposed to the ousted and now departed Gaddaffi. The rationale provided by the United Nations and President Obama was that a “no fly zone’ was necessary to prevent the slaughter of Libyan civilians and that would be the limit of American intervention. The 7-month long bombardment of Libya’s cities has resulted in a massive humanitarian catastrophy, the very outcome the intervention was supposed to prevent.

It is clear that even before this  intervention was  announced to the public the U.S already had CIA and Special Forces operatives on the ground in Eastern Libya. The intelligence analysis institute STRATFOR recently published a map of foreign oil concessions in Libya. The vast bulk are in Eastern Libya, now  liberated from Gaddaffi’s grasp and soon to be made more profitably available to Western energy conglomerates. As South Carolina Senator Lindsay Graham put it nakedly “Let’s get in on the ground. There is a lot of money to be made in the future in Libya. Lot of oil to be produced. Let’s get on the ground and help the Libyan people establish a democracy and a functioning economy based on free market principles. The “humanitarian” pretext stands naked in its hypocrisy. No such intervention has been deemed necessary in Bahrain or Yemen, or conspicuously, Saudi Arabia where repressive governments have killed numerous civilians demonstrating against those governments for the obvious reasons that these countries’ dictatorships cooperate with the American agenda in the region.

President Obama was elected on the strength of his opposition to the War in Iraq and his promise to end it. Yet in his recent speech declaring the Iraq War at an end he asserted that the original purpose was to disarm terrorists, the false claim made by his predecessor. Thus Obama has adopted the very narrative of the Bush deceptions. Bear in mind that Obama has always been in the camp of that section of the elite who saw the invasion as a blow to a very specific international order that would weaken the American position and overall agenda in the world. Read his speeches made as a senator before his candidacy. He feared the real American agenda to keep consuming the lion’s share of vital global resources was endangered by Bush’s cowboy tactics, and could lead to conflict with people who could do real damage, like Russia and China. His actions as president show he is not morally opposed to bombing and killing barefoot civilians who employ donkeys or camels as their mode of transport. That has continued unabated at his command. He claims to lose sleep over the deaths of American troops. Bob Woodward’s recent book declared that Obama is serious about withdrawing from Afghanistan in July of 2011. Now the date has been moved up to 2014. At best Obama seems the captive of the real government behind the scenes.

If you’ve never heard of Col. Fletcher Prouty that would not be an accident. He testified before the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, otherwise known as the Church Committee during the mid-1970s that revealed, among other things, the CIA’s assassination squads and its secret alliance with the Mafia. He blew minds with his description of the Secret Government behind the scenes. Prouty was a distinguished career military officer who in the last third of his career was deeply involved in the so-called intelligence community. He was go-between for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the CIA, and he reminds us that the CIA emerged directly from Wall Street at its birth in 1947. Prouty was a consummate insider who spilled the beans. At the time his remarkable book The Secret Team was deep-sixed by the very secret team he revealed. It has recently been re-published by a small press and is available.  Read it and learn how our government’s foreign policy is really shaped and by whom and for what. As Prouty shows, this intelligence, military, and “national security” network is really a combine of  those entities known popularly as High Finance, the Military Industrial Complex,  and Big Media.

Prouty emphasizes that this secret government behind the scenes is NOT a tiny cabal comprised of the Illuminati or Tri-lateral Commission or Bilderbergers, or Council on Foreign Relations though they do play roles. Rather, each faction of the Financial-Military-Industrial- Intelligence-Congressional-Media Complex has self-interests, large-scale benefits, and its future existence to protect. No one is initiated into these agencies unless vetted very carefully, and that would be especially true of party nominations for president. While disputes arise between factions and can be intense, on rock bottom interests, like access to energy reserves and control of resources and markets, and on maintaining the dollar as the world reserve currency, each collaborates with the others in symbiotic and synergistic relationships. The clearest example is the war (Iraq and Afghanistan, and Pakistan, Iran, Somalia, Yemen, Libya and Venezuela are essentially the same war!). Virtually all factions of the Secret Government support it, if for somewhat different reasons.

An example is the recent revelation that the Federal Reserve Bank printed 40 billion dollars and sent it to Iraq in 2003 where most of it promptly disappeared. This action clearly indicates that the nation’s chief bankers were part of the broad conspiracy among the behind-the-scene elites to invade Iraq, for conspiracy it was since Iraq had nothing to do with the events of 9-11, as the Bush Administration claimed. Masquerading as a government agency the Fed is really the nerve center of a consortium of the nation’s largest and most important banks. Fed officials acted in secrecy as always Why they acted as they did should be thoroughly analyzed and revealed.

This Secret Team has certainly never served the people, though it claims to do so as our national defense team (against enemies it creates!). For at least the last century its members have come to believe the president is its servant and most definitely not the other way around. As even ultra-conservative spokesman George Will said publically on a Sunday talk show: America has always been ruled by its aristocracy. It has never been about democracy but about which section of the elite will rule at any given time. Or as Noam Chomsky avers: There is only one political party, the Corporate party, with two separate wings.

Of course this Secret Government’s chieftains, no matter their past history, believe themselves to be omniscient and infallible. To take just the current crisis, the CIA itself fostered the rise of Islamic extremism during the Cold War because it believed this force would obstruct communism and prevent Arab and Muslim nationalism from achieving independence of western control, especially over oil. The CIA actually fostered Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran as the strategic answer to Iranian communists; as well as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt to thwart Nasserism, or Arab nationalism; and the mujahideen in Afghanistan who morphed into the Taliban and al Qaeda. As the CIA itself said the eruption of Islamic militancy in opposition to the hand that fed it was “Blowback” of the first magnitude. When the Carter Administration national security chief, and current background adviser to Obama, Zbigniew Brzezinski, armed the Mujahideen in 1988 in order precisely to draw in Soviet troops, Brzezinski infamously declared: “That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it?… I wrote to President Carter: ‘We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War’…What is more important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?”

Stirred up Moslems indeed!

President Obama said clearly during his campaign that he would focus on Afghanistan in order to prevent the return of the Taliban and al Qaeda, thereby enhance American national security, and ensure that another 9-11 could never be planned and orchestrated from that country. We know now of  a serious split between al Qaeda and the Taliban prior to 9-11 because of the latter’s fear of American retaliation. We know, also, that the Taliban have no desire to attack the United States itself, only those Americans on Afghan soil. American actions are clearly destabilizing Pakistan, thereby portending a far greater threat in terms of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. So what is the United States REALLY seeking to accomplish in Afghanistan? Again, the claim of a “humane” intent is preposterous. American actions in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, especially attacks by pilotless drones that kill numerous civilian by-standers, do more for Al Qaeda’s and the Taliban’s recruiting than anything  done by themselves.

If Bob Woodward’s recent book, Obama’s War, is to be believed the president desires to withdraw from Afghanistan but is being thwarted at every turn by the military, the CIA and even Hillary Clinton. I’m sure that Obama, having been cultivated and financed by major financial corporations still wishes to gain American access to the energy reserves of central Asia but the issue is whether that goal will be utterly compromised by policies based on raw force. It appears that the devotees of military solution are winning that argument but it is a doomed prospect and one that is fraught with danger.

When the Red Army finally left Afghanistan in the early 90s that tragic place descended into civil war while the US washed its bloody hands and walked away. Even so, as the Taliban came to dominate and as it committed terrible atrocities like public beheadings, and stonings of women, the CIA, Enron, and Unocal continued to negotiate with these extremists for a pipeline to carry oil and natural gas through Afghanistan to Pakistan and the Indian Ocean. If the Taliban were to regain power over all of Afghanistan and offer a guarantee for the pipeline, I’m quite sure the US would crawl right back into bed with them no matter their brutality  with no shame and excuses aplenty for public consumption, just as was the case in the 1990s. But given the damage wrought by US armed intervention today a deal with the Taliban is probably all but impossible, and the US will never be able to impose its own  puppet able to guarantee the original US goal.

The real issue facing the so-called “advanced” nations and now China, India and the Asian tigers is that cheap oil is running out. Most oil industry experts and executives realize that we have all entered the age of Peak Oil. Extracting oil will become ever more difficult and expensive and at some future point will be so costly that it will cause essentially a collapse of globalism with real depression here in the US. The fact that oil commerce is denominated in dollars while the value of the dollar steadily declines also presages a future in which the dollar may be toppled as the world currency, thus leading to widespread inflation and certain critical shortages of basics.

Widespread suffering will be endemic, unless an alternative source of energy is found able to sustain our way of life. But that is extremely unlikely. Coal and natural gas can compensate to some degree but since our luxurious and wasteful way of life is based on oil and since we see our many profligate luxuries as necessities, the industries that support them will fail, and that will lead to mass unemployment, cold winters indoors and the absence of air-conditioning in summer, not to mention starvation in what we like to think of as the “backward” nations, and hunger here since our supermarket cornucopia requires hydrocarbon for fertilizers and pesticides. Miracle cures like bio-fuels and hydrogen are wishful thinking. Nuclear power could maintain the electrical grid but the recent meltdown in Japan may make that hope insurmountable despite Obama’s continuing support for a nuclear renaissance.  Green technologies are unlikely to fill the void on time to avert the falling economic and political dominoes, if ever.

The US government’s real energy policy up to now has been to support energy corporations to exploit oil as usual and gain control over such reservoirs still existing. Congress is the creature of oil and other hydrocarbon corporations and their financiers…largely to protect their profit margins, and there is no plan for the day when the Age of Oil ends with a crash. Again natural gas and coal can maintain some of the richer nations at a much lower standard of living but this will result in widespread social upheaval leading to more international tension…not to mention an intensification of global warming

American foreign policy is premised today on garnering as much control over shrinking energy resources as possible…and to protect this access strategically. The various military commands are deployed primarily for this reason. Note that a new military command with responsibility for Africa has been created. The opportunity to create new military bases for AFRICOM is one of the prime reasons the U.S. is now in Libya. Note the recent incursion of American “advisors’ into Uganda and Sudan. Nigeria now provides a third of American needs, and Angola and other smaller nations have reservoirs that are targets for U.S. control. Obviously our attempt to gain control of the lion’s share of Middle East oil and especially of oil and natural gas in the Caspian and Central Asian regions will bring us into serious conflict with those nations that see these as their back yard – namely China and Russia and India and Pakistan. Imagine our response if China were to inject 150,000 troops into Mexico, the number two supplier of our domestic needs, or Venezuela, with the clear intention of siphoning these reserves to themselves?

Al Qaeda does not constitute an “existential threat” to the US and most real terrorist threats can be dealt with by police methods as the last decade has shown. It is well known in Washington but not among the public that the Taliban told al Qaeda not to attack the US from Afghanistan before 9-11. The fact that al Qaeda did so created a break between the two groups. The Afghan Taliban itself cannot threaten the US, and has never declared any intention to do so. But when Americans kill Muslims in Muslim lands we do far more to create terrorists than anything al Qaeda could do on its own. Meanwhile, attacks on Pakistan have promoted a separate Pakistani Taliban, and that faction has vowed to wreak vengeance on America, though its capacity to do so remains limited. The Pakistani Taliban, coupled with American air assaults, could destabilize Pakistan, and perhaps foster a takeover by Islamic fundamentalist junior officers. Recall that Pakistan possesses nuclear weapons.

Meanwhile, the public is frightened and off balance and paying through the nose for endless deployments. None of this 4 trillion dollar war (as Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz, and Harvard professor Linda Bilmes now estimate) has been paid. Our children, and grandchildren, if they are lucky to have a future worthy of the name, will spend their working lives paying off these debts at jobs that won’t reflect degrees in higher education.  Meanwhile, the various elements of the secret team are currently reaping the benefits of deficit spending and the national debt and they feel sure that eventually the real price will be paid by those who sacrifice their lives and by taxpayers forced ever more into bankruptcy, foreclosure and unemployment.

The current wars will fail to achieve their goals. Premised as they are on lies they are in fact crimes against the peoples of the region, crimes intended to take advantage of their weaknesses and reward American energy and financial corporations and secondarily we citizens of the empire who insist on maintaining a failing way of life. It is the same ancient game of beggar our neighbors to advantage ourselves. In neither Iraq nor Afghanistan will the US achieve control of shrinking energy reserves for essentially the same reason it could not control Vietnam, the very war waged upon their peoples ostensibly to “liberate” them recruits more opponents. Moreover, the attempt to do so will result ever more tensions with the Muslim world and the other nations that need energy too.

In other words, the global climate is heating up in more ways than one. The conditions for another global war are present, and let us not ignore the fact that the last one was waged with toys compared to the present.

President Obama has said that he wants to see a “nuclear free Middle East. That would require the nuclear disarmament of Israel. Yet Obama goes along with the pretense of all his predecessors and refuses to acknowledge that Israel has these Weapons of Mass Destruction. If, indeed Iran is building nuclear weapons why wouldn’t it given the fear of Israel’s, or of America’s in the Persian Gulf, of Russia’s to the north, of Pakistan’s to the east? A world in which some nations declare their entitlement to such horrific weapons is a world in which many others tremble and come to reason that their only protection lies in possessing such themselves. As international tensions rise over shrinking resources, and the ravages of climate change, the more likely a hair trigger mentality will arise. Hiroshima was the handwriting on the wall. As these demonic weapons increase sooner or later they will be used.

That is, unless American policies take a turn toward sanity, and come to focus on what our rhetoric has claimed we stand for all along.

Congressman Barney Frank has stated that the current economic crisis could be resolved by simply reducing the size and mission of the military. To be sure, the U.S. could defend itself against any existential threat with a tenth of our current military budget. Such a redirection of resources could ameliorate economic crisis significantly but only for a time. The issue still remains the energy future, especially depletion and the effects of discharging hydrocarbon effluents into the atmosphere in the first place, and the growing likelihood of spreading violence. By all measures the American government and the public appear intent to hang on to our way of life no matter the consequences. That way of life is inherently profligate and unsustainable. We have altered the climate to the extent that ravaging events like the recent floods in Pakistan, vast forest fires in Russia, Hurricane Katrina, water shortages, and desertification are mere warnings. The worse all such conditions become the more social and political instability with severe danger of armed violence.

Our policies in the future must center on a crash program of conservation of energy, even if this means draconian limits imposed by law such as smaller more fuel efficient vehicles, and heating devices, and restrictions on air-conditioning and banning plastic containers etc. Both the nuclear power and coal industries are ramping up pressure since they know that natural gas, which at present provides most electricity, is also depleting and we need to educate people to be aware of what will happen without secure electricity. Simultaneously we need a Manhattan Project “cubed” and focused on alternative energy. Above all the crying need is for international cooperation in conservation, for cooperation into research into alternative energy sources, and mutual disarmament treaties and agreements to avoid conflict over shrinking resources. The alternative is the worsening probability of a third global war. Yet at present we have only Plan A: Armed intervention.

Alternatives can occur ONLY if the public awakens to the coming storm. We cannot depend on the corporate media to educate us; they are allied with their major clients, not the public, and they are deliberately withholding bad news for fear of stampeding the stock markets into panic. We must get the word out ourselves and make it clear that we will not accept or cooperate with business as usual from Congress or the presidency. That will have to mean more militancy throughout this nation than seen since the 1960s, or really even the 1930s.  Unfortunately I fear this will require even deeper crisis before we begin to awaken to the danger ahead.

Bibliography

 

Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, Behind the War on Terror: Western Secret Strategy and the Struggle for Iraq (New Society Publishers, 2003) Following the U.S. declaration of a “war on terror,” Washington hawks were quick to label Iraq part of an “axis of evil.” After a tense build-up, in March 2003 the United States and Britain invaded Iraq, purportedly to protect Western publics from weapons of mass destruction (WMD). But was this the real reason, or simply a convenient pretext to veil a covert agenda? Ahmed shows that economic considerations prompted US-UK to invade Iraq. The US has become vulnerable to energy shocks with domestic production unable to cope with increasing demand. This has led to occasional blackouts in places like California. Prior to Iraq war America’s oil inventories fell to the lowest level since 1975 with the country on the verge of drawing oil from ‘Strategic Petroleum Reserve.’ Iraq under Saddam Hussein was becoming what author says a ‘ swing producer.’ In other words he was turning oil tap on and off whenever Baghdad felt that such a policy was suiting its interests. Hussein even contemplated removing Iraqi oil from the market for extended periods of time which would have sent crude oil prices soaring.

Robert Dreyfuss, Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (NY, Metropolitan Books, 2006) In an effort to thwart the spread of communism, the U.S. has supported–even organized and funded–Islamic fundamentalist groups, a policy that has come back to haunt post-cold war geopolitics. Drawing on archival sources and interviews with policymakers and foreign-service officials, Dreyfuss traces this ultimately misguided approach from support for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the 1950s, the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, the ultra-orthodox Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia, and Hamas and Hezbollah to jihads in Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden. Fearful of the appeal of communism, the U.S. saw the rise of a religious Right as a counterbalance. Despite the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the declared U.S. war on terrorism in Iraq, Dreyfuss notes continued U.S. support for Iraq’s Islamic Right. He cites parallels between the cultural forces that have promoted the religious Right in the U.S and the Middle East and notes that support from wealthy donors, the emergence of powerful figures, and politically convenient alliances have contributed to Middle Eastern hostilities toward the U.S.

 

William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order (London, Pluto Press, 2004) This book is a gripping account of the murky world of the international oil industry and its role in world politics. Scandals about oil are familiar to most of us. From George W. Bush’s election victory to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, US politics and oil enjoy a controversially close relationship. The US economy relies upon the cheap and unlimited supply of this single fuel. William Engdahl takes the reader through a history of the oil industry’s grip on the world economy. His revelations are startling.

Zbigniew Brzezinski The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives (NY, Basic Books, 1998) President Carter’s former National Security Adviser, and now an informal adviser to President Obama, bragged that he had drawn the Soviets into their debacle in Afghanistan: ”What is most important to the history of the world? Some stirred up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?” As his title indicates the fate of nations and their peoples are relegated to game theory. If America is to play the game of geo-strategic chess who are the pawns?

 

Richard Heinberg, The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies New Society Publishers, 2005) The world is about to run out of cheap oil and change dramatically. Within the next few years, global production will peak. Thereafter, even if industrial societies begin to switch to alternative energy sources, they will have less net energy each year to do all the work essential to the survival of complex societies. We are entering a new era, as different from the industrial era as the latter was from medieval times… Heinberg places this momentous transition in historical context, showing how industrialism arose from the harnessing of fossil fuels, how competition to control access to oil shaped the geopolitics of the twentieth century and how contention for dwindling energy resources in the twenty-first century will lead to resource wars in the Middle East, Central Asia and South America…he also recommends a “managed collapse” that might make way for a slower-paced, low-energy, sustainable society in the future.

 

Michael Klare, Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet (NY, Holt, 2009) Looking at the “new international energy order,” author and journalist Klare (Resource Wars) finds America’s “sole superpower” status falling to the increasing influence of “petro-superpowers” like Russia and “Chindia.” Klare identifies and analyzes the major players as well as the playing field, positing armed conflict and environmental disaster in the balance. Currently in the lead is emerging energy superpower Russia, which has gained “immense geopolitical influence” selling oil and natural gas to Europe and Asia; the rapidly-developing economies of China and India follow. Klare also warns of the danger of a new cold-war environment.

James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency :Surviving the End of Oil  etc. (NY, Grove Press, 2005) It used to be thought that only environmentalists and paranoids warned about the world running out of oil and the future it could bring: crashing economies, resource wars, social breakdown, agony at the pump…Americas dependence on oil is too pervasive to undo quickly…meanwhile we’ll have our hands full dealing with soaring temperatures, rising sea levels and mega-droughts brought on by global climate change. (The Washington Post).

 

James Lovelock, The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning (New York, Basic Books, 2010) Presents evidence of a dire future for our planet. The controversial originator of Gaia theory (which views Earth as a self-regulating, evolving system made of organisms, the surface, the ocean and the atmosphere with the goal always to be as favorable for contemporary life as possible) proposes an even more inconvenient truth than Al Gore’s. The eminent 91-year-old British scientist challenges the scientific consensus of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It is too late to reverse global warming, he says, and we must accept that Earth is moving inexorably into a long-term “hot state.” Most humans will die off, and we must prepare havens. He points out that sea levels are rising significantly faster than models predicted. Lovelock advocates solar thermal and nuclear power as the best substitutes for burning fossil fuels, and he suggests emergency global geo-engineering projects that might cool the planet. But Lovelock also avows today’s ecological efforts are futile. This is a somber prophecy written with an authority that cannot be dismissed.

L. Fletcher Prouty, The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World (Skyhorse Publishing 2008) A retired colonel of the U.S. Air Force, served as the chief of special operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Kennedy years. He was directly in charge of the global system designed to provide military support for the clandestine activities of the CIA. Prouty’s CIA exposé, was first published in the 1970s, but virtually all copies of the book disappeared upon distribution, purchased en masse by shady “private buyers.” Certainly Prouty’s amazing allegations—that the U-2 Crisis of 1960 was fixed to sabotage Eisenhower-Khrushchev talks, and that President Kennedy was assassinated to keep the U.S., and its defense budget, in Vietnam—cannot have pleased the CIA.

Michael Ruppert, Confronting Collapse: The Crisis of Energy and Money in a Post Peak Oil World (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2009) Ruppert confronts the stark realities of a world of declining oil production, poses vital questions of our complex oil-dependent supply chains and challenges us-people and politician alike-to build a sustainable world with what remains of our resources.–Julian Darley, Author, High Noon for Natural Gas, Founder of Post Carbon Institute

 

Michael J. Sullivan, American Adventurism Abroad: Invasions, Interventions, and Regime Changes Since 1945 (Wiley Blackwell, 2007).

Traces US foreign policy from the late 1940s through the past six years of America’s ‘war on terror,’ and examines the impact of its repeated militaristic meddling into developing nations. Intended as a reference tool for undergraduates the author estimates that at least 7.1 million human beings have died as a direct result of these U.S. operations, most of them civilians.

 

By

David Finkel

A Review

Travis Weiner

Note: The reviewer served with the U.S.Army’s 101st

Airborne Division in Iraq.

The simplest way to describe The Good Soldiers [1], by David Finkel, is to say that it is primarily a book about a certain Army unit in a particular place and time during the Iraq War. Unfortunately, mere words such as those cannot do it justice, because in all its complexity and subtlety it is as close to perfection as a book about Iraq and the military– or any other subject for that matter – can get.  I often find myself simply telling people to read the book instead of trying to describe it (or Iraq) to them. Nevertheless,  I will do my best to convey what it represents in terms of different perspectives on the American Way of War. In so doing, from time to time (when it will serve to corroborate and emphasize the realism of what is described in the book) I will relate select experiences that I had in Iraq as well. As will be addressed at the conclusion of this essay, it is my opinion that this book represents its own unique perspective on the American way of war, but that it borrows heavily from the ‘dissenter’s version’ (which we shall see upon closer examination).

Finkel was embedded with a unit that was part of the ‘surge’ (a troop increase designed to get Iraq under control) before, during, and after their year-plus long deployment to East Baghdad. The unit was the 2^nd Battalion, 16^th Infantry, which is stationed at Ft. Riley, Kansas.  In the beginning of 2007, Iraq was at the apex of its “out of control spire” – the Baghdad area in particular. Sectarian and insurgent violence had been rampant when the surge that began in the beginning of 2007 started to curb it and the first effects of its success became visible (fewer insurgent attacks). The 2-16 was being sent in as part of the surge, to ‘turn around” the war, so to speak. Its purpose was to provide security so that the Iraqis would have the ability to take over much of this security, without having constantly to fight for their very existence. The 2-16’s commander felt – and told his soldiers – that their actions during the deployment would very likely be considered part and parcel of what snatched the Iraq war from the jaws of defeat.

Exactly what Finkel was trying to get across with the book is a complex matter. The only semi-obvious thing that Finkel wants the reader to see about the Iraq conflict is that it contained infinite complexities, absurdities, and tragedies. That it was fought by men and women who people wouldn’t give a second glance to in the civilian world, but who displayed a level of bravery and sacrifice of which many “patriotic” types could only dream. The characteristics of the 2-16’s unique conflict were largely a result of the convergence of technology, advancements in warfare, and the composition of our contemporary army.  Finkel described what the war was like for the 2-16, what it cost them, and how the ‘results’ or ‘success’ of their stated mission juxtaposed with their perceptions of the during that particular time period (2007-2008).

Indeed, the improvements in the physical landscape of a given area in Iraq, and gaining the population’s trust – both essential to the mission – could only be had if security could be provided first and foremost. Of course, that depended in large part on the relationships (trust) and visible-improvements in the infrastructure of a given area. A catch-22 in other words, which is in large part Iraq incarnate. The 2-16 was to find this out for themselves in due time.

Truly to emphasize the nature of the counterinsurgency fight in which the 2-16 found itself, Finkel switches seamlessly back and forth between numerous themes. The detailed actions during the various missions of the unit, the stated goals of that mission, the familial relationships and personal thoughts of the soldiers and officers, the different Iraqi civilians and allies that they dealt with along the way, are all addressed in turn.

The central problems the characters faced primarily had to do with reconciling their own beliefs about the mission and their faith in the army’s higher command compared with what they were witnessing firsthand on a daily basis. This is a central theme of the book. The gap between what they are being told their mission was, and what they experienced on a day-to-day basis, is significant – and is expressed in detail by numerous soldiers and officers.

Killing is handled – and described in the book – in a way that is first and foremost brutally honest. And like any honest depiction of war and conflict, it is absent the simplistic sugarcoating that it receives from so many other sources. It is juxtaposed between two themes. The first is the automatic, standard infantryman’s reaction due to the training and culture to which all are exposed.  This is represented in the following description from Sgt. Frank Gietz:

“….and for some reason or another I just stood there and brought my weapon up and shot, and I remember seeing one individual’s head just, it was weird, like a pink mist came out the back of his head when I shot, and inside my head I was like ‘Great, one down’ (pp 69).”

And the second revolves around the feelings of emptiness and guilt that often (but not always) follow after killing has occurred, not always explicitly about the killing itself but often tied to the circumstances in which it occurred. A soldier named Jay March, for example, is forced to kill an insurgent who ran into a house in front of a little girl who was hiding in the corner of the room:

“I can see the little girl [in a slideshow of memories, in his head], the face of the little girl…and as much as people say that they don’t care about these people and all that, I don’t care about these people – but I do, at the same time, if that makes any sense….I’ve seen a girl that’s as old as my little brother watch me shoot somebody in the head. And I don’t care if she’s Iraqi, Korean, African, white – she’s still a little girl. And she watched me shoot somebody (pp 122).”

As mentioned, characterizations of the warriors are in this case particularly complex. They span the spectrum from the cautiously optimistic officers to the increasingly-bitter and cynical enlisted personnel. Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Kauzlarich is by far the closest to representing the ‘Idealist’ perspective. He is a true warrior, a true believer as it were. He truly believed in the mission at the beginning, and still had not abandoned it completely like many of the other central players toward the end of their unit’s tour of duty –though his thinking had changed significantly. To his credit, he preferred to lead from the front and constantly went out on missions; getting blown up a number of times in the process. However, many of the enlisted personnel eventually got to the point where they didn’t give a shit about the mission – all eventually came to hate (to varying degrees) the country, its people, the war in general, and in a few cases Kauzlarich himself.

The reader sees the mild evolution of Kauzlarich, however, from fierce idealist and optimist at the beginning of the tour, to mild cynic at the end. For example, the counterinsurgency manual (laden as it is with constant references to ‘winning over the population”) which was to become the infantryman’s ‘new’ bible, became covered in dust in his operations center, along with the soccer balls that he initially thought would be good to give out to the children (pp 27). He grew increasingly impatient with his Iraqi partners as well; with their laziness, their neediness, etc. He found himself saying ‘fuck em’ from time to time (pp 152).

Cummings is someone whose optimism disappears both sooner and to a greater extent than his boss’s. He too starts out cautiously optimistic, a result of his original motivations for joining the army, which included a love for the United States and a desire to defend his admittedly sentimental version of it (pp 43). Initially, he too cares about the Iraqi people and honestly wants to help them in every way he can. But he quickly develops an utter hatred for them, based on his consistent experiences with their corruption (locals not making a construction project work), incompetence (the Iraqi army and police were particularly poor, as usual), and the non-stop attacks that caused devastating casualties, conducted by insurgents that neither he nor anyone in the 2-16 could discern from the local populace. He eventually gets to the point that he is completely fed up:

“I’m offering peace and a shit-free life [repeated attempts to re-start the sewer project in the 2-16’s area of operations was meeting constant set-backs, and continued attacks were damaging its vital and fragile infrastructure] and you want to fight me? Fine. Live in Shit (pp 151).”

This is but one of his constant expressions of resentment, exasperation, and later outright hatred for the local populace and the country in general. Another tragic –albeit excellent – example of the evolution in the thinking of the ‘idealistic officers’ would be Nate Showman, a young lieutenant. Originally in charge of Kauzlarich’s Personal Security Detail (PSD), he was soon given a platoon in the battalion during their tour. Showman – who was initially thought of and described as a ‘little Kauzlarich’ for his relentless idealism and ambition – comes dangerously close to giving up hope, when, toward the conclusion of the tour and after a series of devastating casualties in his platoon remarks:

“I think it’s difficult for them [his platoon], and difficult for me, to hear about these strides we’re making, these improvements we’re making, when we know – when I know – for a fact, that this place hasn’t changed a damn bit since we set foot here in February (pp 184).”

As far as the soldiers go, they took much less time to come to their conclusions about the war, the country, and its populace. Take this excerpt, from Sergeant Jack Wheeler, in which he is getting some things off his chest after not being able to sleep well. He has recently had two confirmed kills during CQB (close quarters battle, a room-to-room distance), and also had to watch one of his friends die from an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) attack:

“I starting thinking about what happened, and then I start thinking about why I’m here….they say on TV that the soldiers want to be here? I can’t speak for every soldier, but I think if people went around and made a list of names of who fucking thinks we should actually be here and who wants to be here, ain’t nobody that wants to be here. There ain’t probably one soldier in this fucking country, unless you are higher up and you’re trying to get your star or you’re trying to make some rank or a name for yourself….because there’s no point. What are we getting out of fucking being here? Nothing.” (pp 117)

In terms of the enemy, the characterizations are not explicit simply because for the 2-16 it was so difficult to tell the difference between the enemy and the civilian population. However, the portrayals the enemy does receive are exclusively due to the tactics that he uses against the 2-16, which consist of a willingness to engage in any and all tactics to defeat the American forces. We see the frustration of the commanders in that their attempts to improve the school system, the sewers, etc., are met with repeated attacks by an enemy that is infuriatingly indistinguishable from the larger civilian population…unless of course he his firing at the Americans. I cannot stress enough the authenticity of the descriptions by Finkel of the rage and alienation from and toward  the locals that the troops experience; I experienced it myself. The descriptions in the book are so powerful that we are led to feel the frustration and extreme anger that the 2-16 feels toward the enemy for his illogical actions in fighting the US, and in destroying the humanitarian aspirations of the 2-16. To be fair, Finkel makes no explicit or characterizations of this enemy, but simply by recounting the tactics that the enemy did use we are led to believe that those tactics – if not his cause, which is up for debate – were completely barbaric.

Other characters that are on display are the allies of the Americans – most prominently, the interpreters and the Iraqi Security Forces (the Iraqi Police – the ‘IP’ – and the Iraqi Army – the ‘IA’) and the civilian population at large.

Interpreters such as ‘Izzy’ – Kauzlarich’s personal interpreter – are characters in the book that we grow to love, for they are the noblest of people doing an impossible job for very little pay. Izzy constantly makes trips home to his family (pp 265), in which he has to evade potential followers and the subsequent kidnapping and murder that would ensue were he spotted by the wrong people. He constantly hears comments of ‘traitor’ from the local populace when out on missions with Kauzlarich. He survives a suicide bombing in his neighborhood in Baghdad. An interpreter that we worked with the first time I was over there, KJ, who lived with us for much of the tour, reminded me a lot of Izzy, especially the descriptions of his personality, and the troubles he faced (having to get searched at the chow hall, for example). He would constantly go back to Baghdad to visit his family and we used to marvel at the fact that he managed to stay safe every time. I guess it finally caught up with him, as I found out a year or two ago that he was finally killed in a suicide bombing, much to my utter dismay. And so, rather than changing my perspective on the tragedy of some of the circumstances our ‘allies’ face in helping us conduct our wars, Finkel’s descriptions of Izzy and others only served to solidify my already strong convictions in this matter.

Regarding the IA and the IP, consider this excerpt from the book:

“…..the fact was that the ISF (Iraqi Security Forces) were a joke. Every one of the soldiers knew it. How could they not? Just about every time an EFP exploded, it seemed to be within sight of an ISF checkpoint, and did the Iraqis manning those checkpoints not see someone emplacing an EFP, and unspooling some wire? (pp 85).”

This is backed up by my own experience: seeing them (the IA) carrying their weapons backwards on patrol. Seeing them crying and hugging each other after being peppered (meaning lightly hit, non-life threatening) with shrapnel. Seeing them clean their weapons with gasoline and WD-40 (this corrodes the weapons and renders them ineffective). And finally, seeing the Iraqi Police tossing live bodies (badly injured, but still alive) into the back of a pick-up truck during a massive car accident on the main highway in Iraq, mixing them up with those Iraqi’s who were already dead. To be fair, not all of the IA or the IP are of such poor quality, but in my admittedly limited experience such a large percentage are that it calls into serious question the ability for them to be effective against the insurgents/foreign terrorists.

Interestingly, Women are only members of the narrative in brief segments throughout the book. These consist of a female doctor at the aid station who works diligently to save many of the casualties, a female interpreter that tries to save one of the soldier’s lives after an IED (Improvised Explosive Device) attack and then helps Kauzlarich when Izzy goes on leave, and most prominently, the wives and girlfriends of the soldiers. There are hints at the dual roles that wives and girlfriends play. They can be, and often are, simultaneously the source of the greatest stress and the greatest inspiration to their significant others downrange. Often, officer’s wives take it upon themselves to provide the example for the younger girlfriends and wives, trying to be an example and an inspiration for how a relationship should work in that situation. This is not to say that they do not feel stress – indeed, they do – but merely that they do not show it or at least try not to.

Consider Kauzlarich’s wife Stephanie, who wasn’t going to tell Kauzlarich any of her problems (of which she had many, like any normal wife of a deployed soldier), because she knew that he (Kauzlarich) needed her to be upbeat (pp 195). In this way the book breaks with the ‘idealist perspective’ in particular, for showing that the reality of how women support their intimate partners while they are deployed soldiers is anything but simple. Rather than always blindly supporting them in any way possible, they just as often leave them while deployed, or stand them up on leave, as not.

Certain familiar factors must be considered when deciding what, if any, perspective on the American way of war the book falls under. And these are who fights, why they fight, how they fight, and how they are treated when they get back home (on this last point, because the book ends when the tour ends it will have to go unanswered).

Soldiers from lower Socio-economic backgrounds – drawn more and more heavily from the criminal and drug addict milieu – feature prominently. Their motivations for fighting range from sadism to boredom, to money for college – but rarely are patriotism and love of country the main reasons (they are much more likely to manifest themselves with officers, as with Showman and Cummings). As regards their actions while deployed, particularly in the 2-16 they were remarkably disciplined most of the time. Driven by circumstances entirely beyond their control, their composure is constantly pushed to the limit by repeated attacks and roadside bombs, yet they for the most part continued to observe their rules of engagement (designed to protect the civilian population). They watch their buddies get torn up by IED’s, mortar attacks, and gunfire, and yet do not lash out at the population with deadly force because of it. However, again through no fault of their own, their lack of cultural knowledge or empathy toward the civilian population caused them to constantly offend and scare that population, in doing everything from ransacking houses to destroying infrastructure during firefights. Again, this stresses the complexity and gray area of the perspectives-their discipline in following the rules of engagement speaks to the ‘idealist perspective,’ and yet various other actions speak to the ‘dissenters perspective.’

The way the Finkel presents the book, he seems above all to want to convey the cost of the surge, in the most detailed and sobering way possible – in particular devoting much material to the gruesome details of the injuries sustained, and the aftermath of the soldiers trying to cope with (and sometimes a fight just to stay alive) the life-changing injuries – and then to leave it up to the reader to decide whether it was ‘worth it’ (indeed he has said as such in numerous post-book interviews). Considering this fact, it is difficult to label it with representing a particular perspective on the American way of war. In my opinion, it is its own unique perspective simply because of the endless complexities of the war, the 2-16’s circumstances, and each soldier’s motivations and actions. But, without a doubt, it borrows heavily from the ‘dissenter’s perspective’ more so than the other two.

The most appropriate way to close would be to point out an excellent metaphor that the book provides, intentional or not. It is its description of General Petreus’s testimony before Congress regarding the progress of the Iraq war, and the surge. The hearing began, and after numerous politicians had spoken to him, regarding their concerns, it was now his turn to speak in answer. But, when he began to speak, no one could hear anything (there turned out to be a microphone malfunction), but it took everyone a while to realize this-‘we can’t hear you general,’ said the politicians. This reminded me of the film Forest Gump, when the title character begins to try to describe the Vietnam War for the crowd at the Washington Mall, and the microphone is dead, people call out ‘we can’t hear you!” (There turned out to be an audio malfunction caused by a ‘hawk’). Why do I mention these two things? Because, what better way to describe the book, and the Iraq and Vietnam wars, then the continuing and numbing silence that now surrounds these wars? Because, really, what can be said? What possible words could do justice to all of the horror, boredom, insanity, hilarity, fear, rage, guilt, numbness, etc., tied up in them? That feeling that you were in the Twilight zone? That all logic, good, and meaning had been suspended and everyone was just trying to get by, fighting his own war, counting the days until his leave and the end of his tour, only going outside the wire because his buddies were doing the same and he did not want to be a coward, and certainly did not want a dishonorable discharge, but a situation in which someone who actually believed in the mission – or cared for the Iraqis in any way – was so rare that such a person was mocked incessantly (unless it was an officer of course)?

And so my overall assessment of the work is that it is the best book I have ever read about  any war, period. It elicited emotions in me so powerful, that I cannot really describe them. The book has definitely contributed to the evolution of my thinking regarding the American way of war. Personally, it is a document that I could not have written better myself in conveying to those who did not experience it the various complexities of what fighting in Iraq was. It was confusing, boring, terrifying, enraging, and depressing, all at once and to varying degrees. The fact that he has so perfectly encapsulated this all into a book, while weaving a story line, is beyond description in terms of its importance in contributing to our thinking about the American way of War.

 

---

[1] Finkel, David. “The Good Soldiers.” Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. New York. 2009. Print.

Travis Weiner

Note: The author was currently enrolled as a student at UMass, Boston.

Growing up I became fascinated from an early age with military history and military culture. Certainly, my family was not ‘traditionally’ patriotic-and we were not a military family by any means. The concept of patriotism when I was younger was not something I gave much thought to, but if pressed I would have said that at its pinnacle, it involved military service. I would now say that is part of it, but it is much deeper than that as well-but more on that later. And so I read, watched, and listened to everything and that I could get my hands on regarding the military. I read both fiction and non-fiction books, memorizing various names, places, and battles. Such books as John Keegan’s The First World War, and The Second World War, Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down, Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried’ and If I Die in a Combat Zone’ Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, and later on Phillip Caputo’s A Rumor of War’ and Michel Herr’s Dispatches all had a significant effect on me. Movies such as Platoon, The Thin Red Line, Saving Private Ryan, Black Hawk Down, Born on the Fourth of July, Dead Presidents, etc., all did as well. Though I did not comprehend it at that time, the juxtaposition of the hard non-fiction history books and movies with the more nuanced and subtle anti-war fiction, non-fiction, and films was an interesting one.  What I perceived as less-than-enthusiastic depictions of war and combat in these works still only served to further mythologize the military and war for me, and to fill in me a longing to be a part of it.

I decided to join the army after I graduated high school in 2004. The reasons were too numerous to mention, suffice to say it was not for (what I discovered to be) the more normal reasons: money for school, to get out of jail,  to get away from a bad household and/or a dead end life, or the motivations of bored, restless, or psychotic individuals. Upon completion of basic and infantry training, I was stationed at Ft. Campbell, Kentucky. with the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault). I completed two tours of duty in Iraq, from 2005-2006 in Southwest Baghdad, and from 2007-2008 in Iskandariyah. I finally got out of the army in the beginning of 2009, shortly after my second tour. My current perspective on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan can best be described as complex, given my own personal experiences.  There is the (somewhat) logical and detached military mind of my past, which seems to at times be doing battle with the raw emotion and rage at what I perceived back then (and somewhat today) to be a betrayal by those at the highest levels of civilian and military command. It is an ongoing process that I’m trying to work out. But going into it, I think I was ambiguous about the Iraq conflict.

Before the First tour, while I acknowledged that Iraq may not have been invaded for the right reasons, I thought that service to one’s country  did not necessitate that a soldier make a decision about a particular war. Rather, the dictates of service forbade it, with the theory that politicians would take care to  put us in conflicts only when absolutely necessary. Thus, the willingness to fight wherever and whenever was both demanded and depicted as something to be proud of. However, and while I can only speak for myself, I will say that over there the ostensible mission of  killing the bad guys, saving the women and children, and defending freedom was an illusion that was quickly shattered for me. I hesitate to over-simplify my time there and what we did, as I think we did our best and definitely did some good. At the lower (and in some cases mid-levels) of command, most of us were for the most part doing everything we could in the best way we knew how, minus a few inevitable bumps along the way in a year-long deployment.

To say the least, it was often bizarre and surreal. Much time during the 1st tour was spent chasing insurgents on intelligence tips that were too late or bad altogether (resulting in helicopter raids that involved dealing with-for the most part-crying women and children), in addition to looking for-and getting blown up by-IED’s and Mortars that the insurgents we were trying to catch were emplacing/firing constantly, along with occasionally taking/returning small arms fire. We would spend vast amounts of time on ‘route security,’ living in HUMMV’s for days and sometime weeks on end which would quite literally drive us mad, all the while trying to prevent the emplacement of IED’s and deny the insurgents freedom of movement. We ran Traffic Check Points for months, trying to stop the smuggling of weapons and explosives-and yet, with lines that stretched far into the distance and temperatures exceeding 115 degrees, we never had the time nor inclination to thoroughly search or examine their vehicles. Most of my commanders would say that we controlled and held a given amount of space, and caught/killed many insurgents, denying them freedom of movement and as such completing the mission and discounting my claims.

While there were some important humanitarian and infrastructure projects that we completed, and while we did capture/kill some insurgents, none of this was  enough to justify our time there in my eyes-especially considering what they did to us (WIA/KIA-wise). The second tour was spent mostly training and supervising the deployment of the ‘awakening councils,’ former Sunni-insurgents who now acted as town police forces/militia, and though we took some casualties and some significant things happened, it was nothing compared to the 1st tour.

Most of the men I served with I consider brothers for life (though not all, for there were certainly a ‘shitbag’ or two among us). They are men who sacrificed more in a year then most do in a lifetime. Some of these men were the toughest, smartest, most shining examples of all that is good about humanity and our country if we were to use it justly. Indeed, I watched some of them become wounded. It is in fact the politicians, and the career-savvy highest level commanders, who I despise for putting us in that situation to begin with.  The highest trained and motivated of soldiers had no power to alter their circumstances, such as SSG Bieve of 3rd Platoon, a former Ranger Battalion member who was blown up by an IED and became a KIA, or my team leader SGT. Triplett, also a former Ranger Battalion member, who was lacerated by shrapnel in both legs and sent back home to the United States.  The larger reasons for these sacrifices are ones I neither accept nor fully understand.

I remember reading the book Fiasco by Tom Ricks during my second tour and, in addition to enraging my psychotic squad leader, it  also enraged me (albeit for different reasons humorously enough) because it exposed the lies, deception, and incompetence of those planning and running the war. It was, without doubt, a war that was not fought on any pre-text of American security, though it was claimed to have been just that. Whether in the name of ‘human rights’ (made soon after the WMD/terrorist connections were exposed as lies) or whatever else, the attempt to justify it became more and more ridiculous.ify it. The ‘human rights/liberation’ argument in particular was made all the more laughable by the simple fact that many, many other countries are much more ruthless to their populations-and harbor many more terrorists then Iraq ever did-and yet we do not invade them! Indeed, some are our allies!

These conclusions were not easy to reach. After all, we had all literally shed blood, sweat, and tears in Iraq, and for many guys the idea that it literally was for nothing more than keeping each other alive and the small differences that we made was something most of us simply could not accept. The fact that I know in my heart that in all likelihood I created more terrorists then I killed, that I did not defend America, that I did not fight the good fight, that I am not a hero, that I am not a defender of democracy in any way shape or form, and that I was the end result of the naive’ and criminally dangerous policies and planes of borderline fascist-Neocon-chicken hawks is not something that sits well with me. The fact that I was a target for insurgents who were like ghosts, and who I would have given anything for one clean shot at, is something that is so frustrating at times I can’t even think about it for very long without getting extremely upset.

And yet I have people tell me all the time that I did and am all of the things that I am not, and didn’t do. This is something that fills me with emotions I don’t even know how to describe. I often think of a quote I heard once, but for the life of me cannot remember the origins of: “The only thing worse than being a fraud, is being a fraud but having people not realize it.” I think Iraq, like Vietnam, will go down in history as one of the most tragic American strategic mistakes ever to be made (though it was so utterly deliberate, I suppose it is up for debate whether it can realistically be called a ‘mistake’). I think that no matter how pacified that country becomes, it will never be what we envision; that is, anything resembling an America-style democracy. The culture and values of that population are so different from ours that they might as well be aliens (I don’t mean that negatively). We had-though it is getting better-very little understanding of all of the complexities of that society, some of them maddeningly ridiculous and draconian. Imagine everything from neighbors having gunfights over stolen livestock, to sheiks embezzling their Awakening Council members’ (all of the men doing good work and making our lives easier the second tour) money, and you will get an idea of what I’m talking about. The fact that more civilians have died since the invasion than Saddam ever killed, and that more terrorists have been created since the invasion-both truly undisputable facts-does not help matters. All of this is particularly tragic in light of the fact that so many serving in that country, civilian and military, worked and are working so hard to ensure that the aforementioned is NOT a foregone conclusion. Again, when so many resources, and so much good will, training, and money are squandered in that hellhole under those circumstances, it is truly a tragedy of the highest proportions. I may be wrong about Iraq- it may turn out to be relatively stable, peaceful, and prosperous. But unless it does, in my mind anything short of that will come to be an unacceptable trade-off for the lives that we lost and the bodies that were shattered while we were over there.

I hoped I would be deployed to Afghanistan and briefly considered re-enlisting for the reason I originally supported the conflict was that I perceived it as a direct response to an attack on US territory-an attack against Al-Qaeda strongholds and by extension the Taliban that ‘harbored’ them. I considered the initial response soon after 9/11 to be a just one given the circumstances. In the subsequent months and years that followed I considered it to be a just war as well, unlike most of the wars of the past that this country has engaged in. Recently that view has been altered slightly, after hearing legitimate criticisms of the conflict from such individuals as Andrew Bacevich (who advocates a strict ‘counter-terrorism’ approach fought mostly by special operations forces) and various Army buddies who have served over there.  I think that the purpose of what we are trying to do there is noble, in preventing a ruthless and draconian regime like the Taliban from re-gaining power, and in trying to provide Afghanis with opportunities and education they would not otherwise have. However, this can be said of many despotic regimes in the world; and in Afghanistan, where our original mission was accomplished (destroy Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and deny them a base of operation) only to see it slip away, frankly it all appears to be up-in-the-air; specifically whether our goals, actions, and the reality on the ground are lining up in any meaningful way. I think it remains to be seen. Considering that my old unit-including one of my own former soldiers-is over there right now in the heart of it (Kandahar province and that accompanying offensive) serves to further complicate matters, in that I have feelings of guilt and shame for not going with them, and not staying in.

I am considering the fact that because we abandoned the country after the Russians left, and again in 2001 after we toppled the Taliban (because of force requirements in Iraq, we did not deploy enough troops to provide security and humanitarian assistance, and pulled half of some of the highest level special operations task forces out to hunt insurgents in Iraq), there is a growing amount of evidence that we lost our opening, blew our chances, and that the best thing we can do now is cut our losses and get out. However I do not think that this is for certain -it all remains to be seen in the not-so-distant future.  Sooner rather than later, the ultimate question of whether the longest war in our history can ever be won will be realized, and we should act without delay at that point.

My views on war, and on war in American culture, have been altered significantly-though not completely-from before I entered the service to the time after I exited. My views before Iraq were that all war was fascinating, relevant, and important. That it was an endeavor of the most honorable and significant tradition that a man could engage in, immortalizing him in lore, mythology, and history that nothing else could come close to. My views after my service were that it is more likely than not an infinitely complex, gray and messy endeavor-not the one that our culture displays. Right and wrong, honor and shame are more often than not interwoven in an unrecognizable tapestry during war. Of course I can only speak of my own experience-but I feel there are common strains that apply to most war. While all of those positive qualities I mentioned were possible, and do occur in small and sometimes big ways in the military and in war, it is unfortunately a complete crap shoot in that not all of those things are guaranteed to be experienced by each combatant. Indeed I did not experience most of what I expected, and “my war”-or more accurately my counter insurgency, because that’s really what it was and not a traditional war-was not how I envisioned it. For some, that is not necessarily the case, but it is common knowledge among combat veterans that it is the case the vast majority of the time. Whether the dichotomy between my expectations and reality were simply the result of my own unique experience, or due to a complete fantasy of war and the military which I previously held onto, I do not know. One thing is for certain however: even seemingly just wars or military actions are often just the opposite, at a frequency of which is truly startling. This can be seen in the Vietnam war-based on a staggering amount of evidence it was one of the biggest mistakes and avoidable tragedies in our nation’s history. I tend to compare and contrast that to “just” wars like WWII. Though it is apparent to me  from further readings of history that our reasons for entering that war were not as noble as many believe, nevertheless I still believe that the alternative to not-entering that war could have been, likely would have been, much worse than not entering at all. The same cannot be said for nearly all of the wars in our nation’s history.

Regarding ‘opponents’ of the current war, I feel obligated to mention that my own mother was part of Military Families Speak Out for virtually my entire enlistment, marching and protesting at various times. However, she remained fiercely respectful of me, my unit, and all of my buddies and comrades -all the while being deeply critical of the administration’s handling of the war. I always respected her for that, and though she was constantly asking if what she was doing was at all undermining our morale or confidence overseas, I told her to do what she felt was right, and that it was OK. Such reflects my feelings regarding most of the opponents of the current war; I have no problem with their opinions or politics, only occasionally their tactics/the contexts in which they display those beliefs. However, by and large those who claim to be ‘counter-protestors’ to the anti-war movement-those who often question the patriotism or realism of the anti-war movement-are often themselves the unpatriotic ones. One of their most enraging tactics is their tendency to ‘speak for the soldiers’: that is, the claim that criticizing the war is undermining the soldiers and that the soldiers do not appreciate it. What I can say to that is that among an Infantry Company, roughly 120-140 men-a good deal of whom I knew personally-just as many were ambivalent regarding the war or thought it ‘fucking retarded’ (as we would say) as supported it or who thought it was just. But when you are trying to get through it and watch each other’s back, and complete the mission, you don’t spend much time ruminating on such things. Suffice to say that there is no way that all or even most of the soldiers hold those opinions or get offended in the ways that the ‘pro war’ movement (as the media has at times dubbed them) would claim.

It may be a cliché, but one of the most patriotic and American things a person can do is question his/her government-because it indicates that citizens are paying attention, that they are involved, and that  they are willing to sacrifice their time for something they believe in-whereas many others are not. Putting a yellow ribbon on your trunk, the ‘gesture of choice’ for so many Americans, does not qualify someone as a patriotic American-ironically it is the protestors in the streets who are greater patriots then those who merely partake in the aforementioned gesture, and deem it adequate. That being said, there are small segments of the anti-war movement who have little-to-no understanding of geopolitical realities and dynamics, nor war in general, preferring to take the extreme pacifist rout and criticize the military and the soldiers themselves. This I find deplorable because it is based on an ignorance and laziness, on par with the so called ‘flag waving’ patriotic Americans. They, like the very people they claim to have issue with, have chosen the shameful rout of dressing up a debate about policy, war, and right and wrong with their real reasons-that is, the underlying motivations of different cultures and lifestyles and the confusing hatred and fear that it seems to engender among these fringe groups.  In the interest of fairness, I feel obligated to mention that there are people who demonstrate in favor of the war who do so in a respectful manner, and many military experts and veterans who have earned the right to have such an opinion.

Along these lines, I think that dissent about the American way of life in general is something we could use more, not less of, in the United States. We enjoy a standard of living that most in the world cannot fathom-and most of us here have no appreciation for. Witnessing the poverty of subsistence farmers in Iraq-where electricity and running water are luxuries-it struck me that we live in one of the luckiest countries in the world, standard-of-living wise. Now I am profoundly grateful for our standard of living. But I categorically reject the notion that our way of life is only attainable through our current practices-be they foreign incursion or domestic in nature-and I believe there is ample evidence to back this up as well.  When dissent is for a good reason/cause, and respectful most importantly of the facts-but also of the opposition-then it is an inherently good thing, one of the last true good things that we have with regard to our public discourse. However, when it is reactionary, lazy, and not based in science or reality, and when it merely masks cultural/personal/religious differences, then it is one of the most despicable and embarrassing things in our culture these days. There are numerous examples of both of these types of dissent within our daily culture, but unfortunately, there seems to be more-of the latter recently.

In conclusion: when I was young, I thought that the military, and war, was black and white. Now, I know that it is not. I only experienced one war, albeit a very different one than others in history (due in large part to technological advantages and geographical circumstances). And while I can only speak of my own experiences, I now suspect that war is never a good thing-it is never glorious, though some psychotics would disagree. There are opportunities for honor and courage within war, and some do attain these in the heat of battle. But they are few and far between.  This echoes what the vast majority of combat veterans told me prior to my enlistment, something which I ignored at the time. Perhaps that is a fundamental aspect of war in American culture-a culture that mythologizes war in movies, books, and video games, and glorifies it when it is anything but glorious.  Our culture  refuses to address the complexities or the horrors of war that are inextricable from the excitement of it. Perhaps this is the only way to keep the system going-just as everyone prefers a good drama over a bland documentary, it wouldn’t be entertaining for kids to watch footage of a HUMMV getting blown up and seeing the gore that results from that, with no enemy dead to show for it, only maimed US soldiers. Regarding war, the only thing realistically up for debate is whether some wars are absolutely necessary or not. And of course, some are necessary; though so few in our history-with the ‘wars of choice’ heavily outweighing the ‘wars of necessity’-that it almost makes one ashamed to be an American at times.  For the rest of my life, I have to live with the fact that much of what I strove for and wanted to be a part of, much of what I wanted to accomplish personally in the military, was not achieved. Some of this was well within my control-deciding to get out instead of remaining in and going to Afghanistan, and other special schools, etc. However, some of it was not, such as the nature of our collective experiences during the 2005-2006 deployment, which really was the turning point when I was made deeply cynical and embittered-and I realized I would never stay in the Army. I don’t know what it feels like to be proud of your service and what you did-the only pride I feel is that we ‘sucked,’ got through the deployment, always tried to complete the mission, and are part of a brotherhood for life that no one who did not go through it can ever understand.

All of that being said, I continue to believe that some of what the military and war offer us is positive and necessary-the discipline, training and knowledge; the extreme skill and courage of some of our soldiers (special operations soldiers in particular) and more are all something that many could benefit from-minus the unjust wars, of course. And I do not-even after all this-regret my enlistment. I was lucky enough to leave with a body and mind intact, friends for life, and a valuable skill set and experiences to draw on, perhaps the most valuable of which was a real-world education, a shattering of childhood illusions. As I mentioned, I met some of the most influential people of my life while in the Army, whom I won’t soon forget. The greatest tragedy is that what I, and the army as a whole, was and is capable of – truly helping the helpless, and killing the bad guys- did not come to pass. It was not to be for me or (for most of our country’s history for that matter, as I am discovering).  While I contend that the unfortunate reality of the world and of human beings necessitates the formation and maintenance of some kind of military, and some kinds of military actions, the ones we have been engaging in as of late do not resemble anything close to what is right, what is just, and what America should be standing for and/or pursuing in any way shape or form. The resources-be they financial or personal-that have been spent on wars in recent American history are beyond comprehension, especially when compared to more pressing domestic and environmental concerns calling for resources of their own. It truly boggles the mind that they should have been allowed to occur. Will we as a society ever learn? Is it circumstantial, the result of truly deceitful conniving by politicians and leaders, or something in our own biological nature? Hopefully we will find out before it is too late for all of us.

-by Sara Terry.  NY: Channel Photographics, 2005.

In a foreword, photographer Sara Terry tells how she first went to Bosnia five years after the 1992-95 war, with the conviction that what happens after a war can be just as newsworthy as war itself.  This book is made up of reports from the aftermath, in photographs whose color and compositional elegance sometimes seem almost ironic, given the human and material devastation that is often their subject.  Aftermath brings us intimately close to the lives of people learning to be human again amid the lacerations of war.  And, as Terry says, the book is a way of testifying “that war is not the final word on who we are as human beings, nor the final image of our spirit.”

Terry spent four years of repeated visits shooting pictures for the project, giving herself enough time to allow not only her eye but also her heart to sink into what she was looking at, especially where such sinking was hardest to do.  Nearly seven years after the war ended, corpses and bit of clothing and personal objects were being exhumed from mass graves.  While Terry’s pictures are striking throughout, the section that dwells on the exhumation is the book’s energy center.

On her first visit in 2001, Terry befriended two Polish forensic anthropologists, Piotr and Ewa, who were in Bosnia to help sort what was exhumed, for possible visual identification by relatives or for subsequent DNA testing.  In one of several photos in this group shows Ewa holding up in her own white-gloved hand the “decaying hand of a long-dead boy.”  The viewer’s first response is shock.  At one level, the image is macabre.  But Terry’s note helps us see that in this photo there is also a living hand, Ewa’s, which, as it draws parts of the dead from the anonymous pit, draws them back into identity and life. In Ewa’s words, “These people have been stripped of their identity. . . .We are trying to return their identities to them.”  The acts of these anthropologists witness “an unyielding faith in the human spirit.”  So do Terry’s photos.  They are the opposite of “snapshots.”  They linger, as if the camera too lingered, presenting in the end not a picture of a surface but of something deeply meditated.  They present themselves to us in this same way, surfaces opening to contextual depth.

An instance is the opening photo, Terry’s only black and white shot.  It presents what, as the viewer first enters the book, is a kind of puzzle.  In it, a middle-aged woman is peering down at what might be a collapsed tent of damask, in whose folds we see dark scraps of something.  The lighting is exquisite.  The woman’s white babushka is sharply lit, as are the parts of the damask we can see, before, at about the same height as the bent woman’s head, they vanish into darkness.  The woman is clumsy as she bends, and she is obviously intent.  The light is somber, except for the two highlighted areas.

But our purely aesthetic response is short-lived.  We are looking at the book’s first depiction of a scene that shatters the decorum of conventional funerary scenes.  The simple dress of the grieving peasant woman, her face invisible, has a Tolstoyan quality.  We can only imagine what her face says:  does she think she recognizes something?

Then, whatever was our first aesthetic response, is wiped away in the flash when we see that the fabric is body bags, unzipped so that part of their contents is visible.  When we look closely, we can make out a hand, a thighbone – remains of the ethnic cleansing of 1992, exhumed much later.  Ultimately, the picture expresses love, the woman’s love for her dead husband, brother or son, but also the photographer’s love for the woman and for the emotions she is feeling, whether or not she finds what she’s looking for.

In another photo, Terry depicts the anthropologists at work, in what looks like a ruined auditorium.  In the foreground, Ewa, walking with umbrella and briefcase, appears to be through for the day.  The others, one seated and another crouched on the floor, are examining and perhaps making some kind of record of what they are looking at.  The floor is nearly covered with objects laid out on separate sheets or towels.  There’s a piece of paper pinned to each towel, presumably to describe the circumstances of the death and exhumation. Sometimes a scrap of cloth was the only way for loved ones to identify the dead.  In witnessing this work, Terry pays her homage.

*  *  *

In a very different picture a golfer is putting on a small green in a scene nearly pastoral, where peace reigns and this man, dressed in natty golfing garb, can return to a pleasure lost to him during the fighting.  Until Terry’s note tells us that the putting green has only recently been cleared of mines.  In the background, there is higher grass, equally green, that has not yet been cleared.  The tranquil image we began with becomes something more precarious.

The photo of the golfer illustrates an interesting feature of Terry’s book.  At least until we’ve accustomized ourselves to it, we can’t always be sure what we are looking at until she tells us in a note.  The trick is to take in the photo as it first presents itself, then read the note and return to the photo.  There’s a debate among photographers over whether an image dependent on a caption has full authenticity.  Thqat debate seems irrelevant here.

The photo en face with the golfer might also seem nearly Edenic.  Boys are running and tubing in a river.  On the far bank a farmer is watering his ox.  But two of the boys, in the foreground, stand against a guardrail facing the viewer.  One of these boys is quite close.  He’s wearing a kind of Mao-blue shirt, and he is looking at you in a certain way, as if maybe you’re the one come to save him, though there’s also skepticism in his look.  Sticking out from a bag behind him, we see the feet and one hand of a doll.  His companion holds a smaller doll.  The boys, we learn from the note, are among those returned to their villages years after they were forced to flee.  Even though they couldn’t be over nine, they have seen what they have seen.  And we know that it won’t go away soon, perhaps never. Yet they play in the Garden of Eden.

A still more complex Eden emerges from Terry’s photos of the Mostar Bridge over the Neretva River.  There had been a bridge here almost always.  The old Ottoman bridge was destroyed during the war, and the new one was completed in the summer of 2004.  In the first of this series, we see a boy’s bare legs from behind.  He is standing outside the bridge railing, probably looking down at the river, one of whose banks is rock, the other, what looks like industrial reconstruction.  In an instant the boy will jump into the blue river, so framed.  Boys had always jumped from the Ottoman bridge over the Neretva river.

The one about to jump is practicing for the annual jumping and diving contest for which the bridge is famous.  In a few days the custom will resume with the 448^th of these contests.  In another photo in this series, a boy is poised in air, having leapt.  Of course he is motionless, as is the crowd strung across the bridge to watch.  In his figure, life is brilliantly renewed.

I know that I’ll keep on thinking about and revisiting the images that Terry gives us – images in which disaster and hope are only precariously in balance.  You can see this in the last photo in the book, an especially lovely one.  It’s echoes the picture of the golfer in that the frame is perfect morning light, with floating cumulus above the green-ridge opposite shore.  In the foreground on the near bank, a woman looks down at the river.  She faces away from us, her head and shoulders wrapped in a big scarf, black with white oak leaf patterns making the design.  The scarf, along with the bunch of carnations in her right hand, lends her a kind of tranquility appropriate to the scene.  Then you learn from Terry that the woman has come to the place where 2,000 Muslim men and boys were executed.  She’s about to throw her carnations down into the river, making a ceremony for her own dead.

If a coffee table book is something you leaf through, this is the furthest thing from that.  Aftermath is a book that wants to be taken in slowly.  The reward is that you find yourself very close to scarred lives and a scarred land that are  making their hard recoveries with resilience equal to the forces that crushed them.

A version of that theme also appears in Terry’s photo of a man on crutches, dressed in black and wearing a warm cap.  He’ s walking just to the right of a white dividing line down the middle of a street that looks as if it has been rained on, just next to the white line.  His head’s turned to the right, so he seems to be gazing at bright red nylon café chairs tipped against tables.  Fifteen yards ahead of him walk a man and a woman.  Their backs are turned toward us, but from behind they look comfortably dressed and free.  They give intensity by crisis to the drooped and twisted figure of the injured man. On the back of his coat, two blonds, in red, sit back to back, over the caption, “Pretty.”  The nudes provide, though their red is less intense.

The left lane is empty – just wet, cracked asphalt, with a row of granite blocks marking the edge, some of them covered with graffiti.  But in the foreground, in the direction opposite from where the man’s looking, and balanced against the café chairs leaning against tables, there’s a vivid splash of blood red on the asphalt, with big red drops appearing to fly from it.  Terry tells us that the splotch is a “rose” of Sarajevo, marking one of the many mortar blasts and the people who died in them.  The mortar blast leaves a pattern that looks like a flower, and these flowers were filled in with red as commemoration to the war dead.  There are white café chairs in the returning sun at the end of the street.  That’s where the couple is going.  Maybe it’s where the crippled man is going too, carrying his own rose of Sarajevo on the back of his jacket in two red nudes, seated back to back over the word “Pretty.”  Their color offers a kind of a bridge between the café chairs and the splash of paint.

A university student said to Terry:   “Everyone thinks it’s great that the war is over.  But we Bosnians often say we have yet to survive the peace.  This peace.”  Aftermath offer images of this peace, often bright and regenerative, yet still studded with vestiges of war.  There are memories that can never heal:  they can only be sealed off as a tree seals off wounds and infections so that it can go on living.

-by Barry Brodsky

In 1974, I found myself living in Brockton in a federally subsidized housing project called Battles Farm Village, going to UMass-Boston on the GI Bill, and working as a tenant organizer for a statewide housing organization.

While at a meeting one night, I met someone who worked at something called The Boston Community School. He told me about the school’s mission – bring classes to adults who otherwise couldn’t afford to attend them. I told him about the tenant union I was part of in Brockton, and he said to check with the tenants and see if they were interested in having a class taught at the project. Back home, several people said they’d love to learn more about the history of community organizing in America, and did this school have a class like that? I relayed that message to the school.

A few days later, I got a phone call from Howard Zinn. He told me he taught at Boston University, was volunteering with the Boston Community School, and that he would love to meet on a weekly basis with tenants active in the tenant union to discuss the history of community organizing.

For the next 12 weeks or so, Howard drove down to Brockton one night each week to deliver a lecture and then talk with the men and women cramped into a living room about ways people band together to fight for their rights. I attended three or four of the sessions. I still remember him talking about eviction blockings during the Great Depression, and about a citywide rent strike in New York City. He brought readings for people to study for the next session. He did it all for a cup of coffee (or maybe tea, I forget) and a piece of pastry each week.

People rotated apartments in the project, and would usually put out a flyer inviting their neighbors: the flyer would read something like “Come hear BU Professor Howard Zinn tonight in my living room” and describe the subject of the evening’s discussion. There was a core of about a dozen people who attended every session, and then there were others, like me, who would show up occasionally.

And then one week sessions were over. One of the tenant reps told me that Howard had wrapped up the night before. I felt badly that I missed most of the sessions, but during the next couple years, when we’d have a meeting and some issue or other would come up, it wasn’t unusual for one of the tenants, in the midst of a heated debate, to say something like “remember when Howard talked about…” and a lively discussion would ensue comparing the current situation to some historical event they had discussed with Howard in someone’s living room.

I started writing plays in the 1980s and was delighted to find Howard was also writing plays. I went to see his play “Emma” and hoped he would be there, but he wasn’t. I saw him speak a few times at rallies and events, but never approached him to remind him of those classes he taught in the living rooms of Battles Farm. I wanted to tell him how much it meant to all of us, and how empowering it is to know that what you’re doing is part of the flow of American History. I have a feeling, however, that he already knew.

-by Noam Chomsky,Resist Newsletter

It is not easy for me to write a few words about Howard Zinn, the great American activist and historian who passed away a few days ago.  He was a very close friend for 45 years.  The families were very close too.  His wife Roz, who died of cancer not long before, was also a marvelous person and close friend.   Also somber is the realization that a whole generation seems to be disappearing, including several other old friends: Edward Said, Eqbal Ahmed, and others, who were not only astute and productive scholars but also dedicated and courageous militants, always on call when needed – which was constant.  A combination that is essential if there is to be hope of decent survival.

Howard’s remarkable life and work are summarized best in his own words.  His primary concern, he explained, was “the countless small actions of unknown people” that lie at the roots of “those great moments” that enter the historical record – a record that will be profoundly misleading, and seriously disempowering, if it is torn from these roots as it passes through the filters of doctrine and dogma.  His life was always closely intertwined with his writings and innumerable talks and interviews.  It was devoted, selflessly, to empowerment of the unknown people who brought about great moments.  That was true when he was an industrial worker and labor activist, and from the days, 50 years ago, when he was teaching at Spellman college in Atlanta Georgia, a black college that was open mostly to the small black elite.

While teaching at Spellman, Howard supported the students who were at the cutting edge of the civil rights movement in its early and most dangerous days, many of whom became quite well-known in later years — Alice Walker, Julian Bond, and others – and who loved and revered him, as did everyone who knew him well.   And as always, he did not just support them, which was rare enough, but also participated directly with them in their most hazardous efforts — no easy undertaking at that time, before there was any organized popular movement and in the face of government hostility that lasted for some years.  Finally, popular support was ignited, in large part by the courageous actions of the young people who were sitting in at lunch counters, riding freedom buses, organizing demonstrations, facing bitter racism and brutality, sometimes death.  By the early 1960s a mass popular movement was taking shape, by then with Martin Luther King in a leadership role, and the government had to respond.  As a reward for his courage and honesty, Howard was soon expelled from the college where he taught.  A few years later he wrote the standard work on SNCC (the Student non-violent Coordinating Committee), the major organization of those “unknown people” whose “countless small actions” played such an important part in creating the groundswell that enabled King to gain significant influence, as I am sure he would have been the first to say, and to bring the country to honor the constitutional amendments of a century earlier that had theoretically granted elementary civil rights to former slaves – at least to do so partially; no need to stress that there remains a long way to go.

On a personal note, I came to know Howard well when we went together to a civil rights demonstration in Jackson Mississippi in (I think) 1964, even at that late date a scene of violent public antagonism, police brutality, and indifference or even cooperation with state security forces on the part of federal authorities, sometimes in ways that were quite shocking.

After being expelled from the Atlanta college where he taught, Howard came to Boston, and spent the rest of his academic career at Boston University, where he was, I am sure, the most admired and loved faculty member on campus, and the target of bitter antagonism and petty cruelty on the part of the administration – though in later years, after his retirement, he gained the public honor and respect that was always overwhelming among students, staff, much of the faculty, and the general community.  While there, Howard wrote the books that brought him well-deserved fame.  His book Logic of Withdrawal, in 1967, was the first to express clearly and powerfully what many were then beginning barely to contemplate: that the US had no right even to call for a negotiated settlement in Vietnam, leaving Washington with power and substantial control in the country it had invaded and by then already largely destroyed.  Rather, the US should do what any aggressor should: withdraw, allow the population to somehow reconstruct as they could from the wreckage, and if minimal honesty could be attained, pay massive reparations for the crimes that the invading armies had committed, vast crimes in this case.  The book had wide influence among the public, although to this day its message can barely even be comprehended in elite educated circles, an indication of how much necessary work lies ahead.

Significantly, among the general public by the war’s end, 70% regarded the war as “fundamentally wrong and immoral,” not “a mistake,” a remarkable figure considering the fact that scarcely a hint of such a thought was expressible in mainstream opinion.   Howard’s writings — and, as always, his prominent presence in protest and direct resistance — were a major factor in civilizing much of the country.

In those same years, Howard also became one of the most prominent supporters of the resistance movement that was then developing.  He was one of the early signers of the Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority and was so close to the activities of Resist that he was practically one of the organizers.  He also took part at once in the sanctuary actions that had a remarkable impact in galvanizing antiwar protest.  Whatever was needed – talks, participation in civil disobedience, support for resisters, testimony at trials – Howard was always there.

Even more influential in the long run than Howard’s anti-war writings and actions was his enduring masterpiece, A People’s History of the United States, a book that literally changed the consciousness of a generation.  Here he developed with care, lucidity, and comprehensive sweep his fundamental message about the crucial role of the people who remain unknown in carrying forward the endless struggle for peace and justice, and about the victims of the systems of power that create their own versions of history and seek to impose it.  Later, his “Voices” from the People’s History, now an acclaimed theatrical and television production, has brought to many the actual words of those forgotten or ignored people who have played such a valuable role in creating a better world.

Howard’s unique success in drawing the actions and voices of unknown people from the depths to which they had largely been consigned has spawned extensive historical research following a similar path, focusing on critical periods of American history, and turning to the record in other countries as well, a very welcome development.  It is not entirely novel – there had been scholarly inquiries of particular topics before – but nothing to compare with Howard’s broad and incisive evocation of “history from below,” compensating for critical omissions in how American history had been interpreted and conveyed.

Howard’s dedicated activism continued, literally without a break, until the very end, even in his last years, when he was suffering from severe infirmity and personal loss, though one would hardly know it when meeting him or watching him speaking tirelessly to captivated audiences all over the country.  Whenever there was a struggle for peace and justice, Howard was there, on the front lines, unflagging in his enthusiasm, and inspiring in his integrity, engagement, eloquence and insight, light touch of humor in the face of adversity, dedication to non-violence, and sheer decency.  It is hard even to imagine how many young people’s lives were touched, and how deeply, by his achievements, both in his work and his life.

There are places where Howard’s life and work should have particular resonance.  One, which should be much better known, is Turkey.  I know of no other country where leading writers, artists, journalists, academics and other intellectuals have compiled such an impressive record of bravery and integrity in condemning crimes of state, and going beyond to engage in civil disobedience to try to bring oppression and violence to an end, facing and sometimes enduring severe repression, and then returning to the task.  It is an honorable record, unique to my knowledge, a record of which the country should be proud.  And one that should be a model for others, just as Howard Zinn’s life and work are an unforgettable model, sure to leave a permanent stamp on how history is understood and how a decent and honorable life should be lived.

Larry Aaronson

Former Chair of Social Studies Department

Cambridge Rindge and Latin School

“You wanna read a really good American History book? Read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. I will knock your socks off!” -Will Hunting (Matt Damon), “Good Will Hunting”

The world famous historian, retired BU professor, playwright, poet, novelist, and “radical” peace and civil rights activist, died Jan. 26^th, the same day President Obama delivered his State of the Union message. Howie was 87, active until the day he died, struck down by a massive heart attack. His famous history book, The People’s History of the United States, has sold well over 2 million copies, and counting. Last Dec. 11^th, “The People Speak,” produced in part by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck (’88 and ’90) appeared on the History Channel. Before moving to Cambridge in the mid-70’s, Matt Damon grew up next door to the Zinns. Both households equally sharing progressive politics, they became life long “family.” September ’81, Kyle Damon, Matty’s older brother, enrolled in my US History class. It was Kyle’s freshmen year, my “rookie” year at The Pilot, the very first year “A People’s History” appeared.  This was pure serendipity, all to the delight of their mom. Soon after I was invited over for dinner with the Zinn’s. The rest is history.

Howard Zinn’s history book A People’s History of The United States, has a compelling connection with CRLS. Rindge was one of the very first US urban high schools to allow teachers to use the controversial revisionists history book. I was one of the very first history teachers allowed to teach Zinn’s revisionist history in an American public high school. The year was 1981, less than a year after the book appeared. I taught 20-some years at The Pilot School, the progressive alternative school program housed in CRLS. I taught extensively from “The Peoples’ History” for the next two decades.

I submit there is a direct correlation between the introduction of Zinn’s book and the extraordinary awakening of student leadership in Cambridge Rindge and Latin during the 80’s and lasted until early 90’s. The change in the political activism in the school was palpable. Student leaders angered by US indifference to the Apartheid in South Africa, drove out all Coca-Cola dispenser machines from CRLS when they learned the corporation lied about their divestment policy. Students’ response to the California jury’s acquittal of the LAPD’s beating of Rodney King was to organize with teachers and alumni to produce their own revisionist multicultural curriculum writing project (Onesimus), dedicated to combat racial, gender and class prejudice and stereotypes in our schools. When a former CRLS student was senselessly murdered outside a housing project, students established Students Against Violence and For Equality (SAVE). When local educators, parents and civic leaders feared the worst– a rampaging AIDS epidemic, youth peer leaders organized a condom distributions program in our school’s Teen Health Clinic, one of the very first such projects in any public school in America. Student activists also helped establish Project 10 East, the second in-school support youth program for GTLB community in the country, another first! I actively joined my students in their endeavors.

Howie died promoting his latest project, “The People Speak.” He wanted it to inspire students to find their voice and take courage to fight for social justice and human rights. How will we be able to get this curriculum into our public schools?