American Foreign Policy & Its’ Link to Terrorism in the Middle East

By Khalil T. Azar

This book is a study that explores how American foreign policy is linked to the development of terrorism in the Middle East, mainly using the Palestine-Israel conflict as a case study. It discusses questions that consider how American foreign policy in the Middle East is managed. What values and what political systems produce this policy? Who influences this policy? What is the relationship between the countries in the Middle East, especially Palestine and Israel, to America? This book will specifically focus on how American foreign policy was influenced by American presidents from Woodrow Wilson to George Bush II.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jul 8, 2011
• ISBN: 9781463425036

Khalil T. Azar

Khalil T. Azar, was born in El-bireh – Palestine in 1946. He received his BA and earned his M.A. Liberal Art Studies, in political Science from Indiana University South Bend.

Book preview

I

Introduction

This book is a study that explores how American foreign policy is linked to the development of terrorism in the Middle East, mainly using the Palestine-Israel conflict as a case study. It discusses questions that consider how American foreign policy in the Middle East is managed. What values and what political systems produce this policy? Who influences this policy? What is the relationship between the countries in the Middle East, especially Palestine and Israel, to America? This book will specifically focus on how American foreign policy was influenced by American presidents from Woodrow Wilson to George Bush II.

What is the role of the international community in these relations? How have historical decisions of American presidents influenced those foreign policy makers in relation to the Palestinians? Where is American hostility toward Palestinians noteworthy in different arenas? The role of AIPAC (American Israeli Public Affairs Committee) influenced American foreign policy. This study will discuss how the September 11th, 2001, attack on America relates to the causes of terrorism, its definition, its distinct categories, and how foreign policy was developed. It will discuss how state terrorism, individual terrorism, and international law are related to American foreign policy. Was the resistance to oppression, to occupation, and to the concept of terrorism legal? Where does Israel fit in this position and how is America implicated? American war in Iraq is an issue of terrorism and the innocent civilians killed in Palestine and in Iraq, and the causes of terrorism. The root causes of terrorism implicate Zionism in its different forms and plans. This study will bring possible solution for a peace based on UN resolutions with a conclusion that directs the reader to a goal for the citizenry of the concerned.

This book explains American policy’s path and goals in the Middle East (M.E.). Eric Watkens asserts that American policy in the Middle East historically has been driven by two main goals: securing oil for US industry and establishing Israel as a Jewish homeland. Although American policymakers claim to adopt an even-handed approach in dealing with the Arabs and the Israelis, their practice traditionally favors Israel.1 One could ask therefore why America chose to side with Israel in the Middle East conflict.

The foreign policy of a superpower like America is planned and executed according to what the constitution allows policy makers to do, or not to do. It limits authorized actions with foreign nations by the president to certain areas. The president is the most influential person forming American policy. His policies are produced, by the American political system, and its values.

This American foreign policy choice produced enemies, some of whom turned to terror in response to a biased American foreign policy that supported economically, militarily, and diplomatically the Israeli occupation and its oppressive policies over the Palestinian population. American support for Israel filtered into American culture more broadly and hence has further increased the hostility in the region towards America.

American involvement is based on a value system of looking down on Arabs and Muslims in the region. This view is produced by an accumulated history of both past historical foreign policies and practices. It is also reflected by internal policies through the American cultural system and influenced by its main components such as the media, other institutions, and the value system.

American foreign policy shapes relations with populations in the Arab and Muslim world but it also creates economic, social and political conditions there that may provoke terrorism in that world, whether by state or non-state actors. Recently, the Bush administration has embarked on a dangerous course away from older American foreign policy strategies of deterrence and containment toward preemptive action. This vision is leading policy makers to defy long-standing rules of international conduct and to turn instead to unilateral actions and imperialist policies.

To understand America’s role in the Middle East region, one must know the history of America’s involvement there; cumulative foreign policies of always siding with Israel, imposing sanctions on Iraq, supporting repressive regimes, and keeping the American’s military on Arab land have created deep animosity towards America throughout the region. The argument is that American foreign policy in the region has helped to create the fertile ground for the development of terrorism there and that one cannot develop policies to prevent terrorism there without also radically reshaping America’s foreign policy agenda in the region.

Studying terrorism in our time is necessary in order to maintain world peace through a system of international law that is based on the legitimacy of the international community. It is essential that we draw up efficient ways to counter terrorism not just by working to prevent future attacks, but by addressing and remedying the causes of terrorism, through fine-tuning foreign policy strategies that would eliminate some of the precursors of terrorism by ensuring cooperation, justice, and fairness in the distribution of global resources. One of the goals in this study is to propose new directions that American foreign policy could take in the Middle East in order to begin to realize the above transition. This includes harsh critic and the forbidden ones.

Defining terrorism is difficult because it entails the risk of taking sides in political conflicts. A definition of terrorism must be comprehensive in order to avoid double standards, and it must encompass all forms of the act irrespective of the perpetrators, targets, places or times. The definition must distinguish between acts of terror and acts of resistance (the legitimate right of oppressed peoples to resist oppression by all means). Some of the Palestinian organizations deemed as terrorists today use armed resistance methods but their motives—ending the occupation of their people and founding a Palestinian state—are legitimate.

The confusion between terrorism and resistance is exacerbated by a skewed definition of terrorism used by the American government which emphasizes terrorism as the actions of only non-state actors and downplays terrorism sponsored by states. This can be seen, for example, in American arguments at the United Nations that condemn Palestinian resistance (an effect of their occupation by Israel) as terrorism, while viewing Israeli violence towards Palestinians (the cause of Palestinian resistance) as legitimate acts of state security.

Terrorism involves acts of violence that are meant to achieve either a change in or the maintenance of the status quo in a society by instilling fear; that fear then generates alarm of future attacks perpetrated by individuals, groups, or governments against a civilian population, their symbols of power, and property. The term is most commonly applied to ideological groups working to effect change in a society, but states can also be terrorists, such as the Argentine state which disappeared large numbers of its population during the dirty war of the 1970s and 1980s. Particular religions, nationalities, or civilizations, are not terrorist by nature, although terrorists have often sprung from extremes in secular ideology, religious beliefs, ethnicity, or nationalism, using these attributes to make their claims for their particular political platforms and social programs. When considering the genesis of terrorism, scholars have noted that perceived political grievances of occupation, poverty, extreme religious influence, and military oppression provide fertile ground for terrorism.

Many scholars have alluded to a link between the failure of foreign policies and subsequent terrorism. In the aftermath of the 9-11 attacks, many scholars noted that the attacks were not unimaginable acts of a lunatic but rather foreseeable outcomes of American foreign policy actions in the Middle East (Anonymous 2004, Khalidi 2004, Hersh 2004, and 9/11 Commission Report, 2004). Frederick Gareau (2004), in State Terrorism and the United States: From Counterinsurgency to the War on Terror, goes even further and argues that American support of repressive governments in Latin America and the Middle East enabled those regimes to practice terrorism against their own populations.

This study will use the Palestine-Israel conflict as a case study because this conflict serves as the root conflict for the development of later terrorist groups in the Middle East, including, most recently, El Qaeda. This conflict also amply demonstrates how the label terrorist can be manipulated by interested parties to the conflict in order to mask state involvement. In the eyes of most Americans, the Palestinians are the terrorists, while Israelis are seen as innocent victims of terror, an identification fostered by constant American support of all Israeli governments and condemnation of the Palestinians. Most Americans have no knowledge of the Jewish terrorist groups (such as the Lehi and the Stern Gang) who bombed and attacked the British to force them out of Palestine.

The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) came into existence in 1965 because of the United Nations’ decision to create the state of Israel on Palestinian land after WWII. Exhausted by their battles with Jewish groups, in 1947 the British turned the problem over to the United Nations, where the Soviets and Americans banded together to force their desired solution on the Arabs. Their solution was the partition of Palestine to create a Jewish state along the Mediterranean coast. In voting for partition, member countries of the U.N. legitimized a group of people, Jewish immigrants, taking over Palestinian land. The actions of the U.N. created turmoil in the region between Israelis and Palestinians and resulted in an ongoing cycle of violence. Zionists (Jewish nationalists) had received significant economic, military, and political support in their efforts to take over Palestine from the colonizing power of Great Britain during the time of the Mandate, 1922-1947. After statehood, America stepped into the role of protector and promoter that Great Britain had evacuated. America has since funneled billions of dollars, in military and social support to Israel.

Palestinians struggled against their dispossession from the moment it occurred, seeking first to use international law and diplomatic channels. Abandoned by the Arab states, they eventually came to realize that these efforts were doomed to failure. The PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) was established to use armed resistance to change their status quo. The principle of ‘armed struggle’, derived from the right of resistance, was accorded universally to all peoples suffering national oppression. The study will be exploring how the American government has interacted (or not) with the PLO since its inception.

It will start the research by reviewing the history of the conflicts, with particular attention to American foreign policy attitudes toward the Palestine—Israeli conflict. The discussion will provide an overview of the precursors and plights that have led to terrorism in the region. The thesis will thus be divided into sections; starting with an introduction; a brief history of American Presidents relations to Palestine after WWI; a discussion of political and military developments there since 1948 with focus on American involvement in these developments.

The study will tap on the history of American-Israel and American-Palestine relations will include works such as Michael Suleiman, U.S. Policy on Palestine: FromWilson to Clinton; Avraham Ben-Zvi, The United States and Israel; Nasser Aruri, Dishonest Broker: The Role of the U.S. in Palestine and Israel; and Noam Chomsky, Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians. It will also be drawing from historical and political works about Israel, about the Palestinians, and about the role of America in the Middle East.

After the introduction, it will be a brief history of unfolding American foreign policy vs. Israel and Palestine. It will discuss chronologically how American foreign policy toward Palestine and Israel developed in the period from WWI until today. The end of WWI saw the defeat of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires by the victorious allies, the British, French, Japanese, and Americans. During the period of 1917-1922 the Ottoman Empire was split into pieces. That split, and its disastrous consequences for the native inhabitants of Palestine, reverberates into the present. It explores how American Presidents from Woodrow Wilson to George W. Bush developed their administration’s foreign policy vs-a-vs the Israel/Palestine situation. Next, it will discuss how the Israeli lobby AIPAC influenced American foreign policy in Congress in favor of Israel.

The next section investigates religion and its’ influence on American foreign policy, and how it has been induced by policymakers, the Religious Right groups, Christian Zionists, and the neocons as they are close to the center of power.

The next section looks at the American foreign policy practice of a double standard which influences negatively on the region. A double standard in areas of human rights and others creates enmities, racism, and violence. America uses a double standard in its foreign policy when it deals with the Middle East, between Arabs and Israelis. It is counter productive. It’s against American values; it fosters violence, and creates enemies.

There is the influence of media on American foreign policy in the Middle East which is enormous. For example, this media influence on the American public to support the war on Iraqi agenda was destructive. The biased American media’s aim to influence citizens’ views on political, economic, social, commercial, religious, or many other fields on the Middle East was devastating. This media influence creates enemies, victims, and blowbacks, when its not truthful.

Then American foreign policy in the Middle East is influenced by oil. Access to oil and oil supply to the American society is the cornerstone of American Middle East foreign policy. The importance of Middle East oil stems from the American dependence on oil, which is high. Oil importance is also due to its impact on the global economy. American foreign policy is influenced by added importance of the energy policy to the industrial economies of the world and the global economy that America leads.

The next section explores how denial of the past causes future terror. It points out that the Israeli—American denial and evasion to the ‘truth’ is at the crux of the Palestinian historical case in the Middle East conflict. The continuance of Israeli avoidance to the truth by hiding Palestinian identity and by eradicating their culture and villages is causing terror and making Palestinians suffer in refugee camps. It discusses how Israel handles the truth, its leaders escape their near past, evading a problem of their creations that are recognized by the international community. Even when Israel ‘state terrorism’ is reported by Israeli and American media, it is stifled by official Washington. Israel’s denial of the ‘other’ allows them commit genocide against the Palestinians with impunity. America supports what Israel denies, and ignores what the Palestinians grievances.

Next the study discuses the events of 9/11 and how it was created. This section’s claim is that those forces (such as McWorld and Jihad), ideas (such as clash of civilization), and policies (such as foreign policy) as tools of American foreign policy that created the world before and after September 11, 2001, and refer to the historical period before the attack.

The following section discusses the legal aspect of international legitimacy. This section discusses international law and its implication on the international community, its impact on world peace, and how peace can be achieved by cooperation and by correcting the injustices that occurred in colonial times. Colonial powers should remedy these injustices on the basis of an international law that is inclusive of all nation states, in order to combat the root causes of terrorism in the M.E.

It then turn to a discussion of how to define terrorism and how American policymakers have perceived terrorism in the Middle East, what Palestinian and Israeli terrorism amounts to, and how it is perceived by others. The bias in American foreign policy in favor of Israel has also shaped how the American government and Americans view the problem of terrorism in the region. Israeli state terrorism goes unremarked while Palestinians overall are labeled as terrorists in American popular culture. These views, in turn, bolster the pro-Israel tilt in American foreign policy.

It concludes by considering the consequences of American foreign policy and how America’s foreign policy failure has caused blowback leading to more violence, destabilization, and enemies in the region. Possible solutions are presented to the Middle East conflict. It offers suggestions for how America could play a lead and a more productive role in the region.

II

Unfolding American Foreign Policy vs. Israel and Palestine

The Settlers’ colony of the Puritans at Massachusetts Bay in the 1630s established the early American political, economic, and social system. The belief in American Exceptionalism began with John Winthrop’s admonition to his colleagues that, We should be as a city upon a hill. The world’s eyes would be on the settlement, he added, so they must stay together in the community as one person.2 They stayed together, gaining their independence in 1776 from Britain. They were united after a civil war in 1861-65, moving on to become a power in the international arena. Americans saw and still see their country as the Promised Land.

To this view Americans added a Crusader’s view, a desire to take control of Palestine, the Christian holy land, from (infidels) Muslim hands; a view they inherited from Europe about Islam. Adopting the tenents of what has become known as Orientalism,3 European powers saw the Middle East as a backward area with peoples incapable of launching their own country’s development or creating stable political institutions. Middle Easterners therefore, had to be guided, supervised and instructed by Europeans on how to manage their own affairs. Popular 18th-century literature read by many Americans reinforced this view that Islam fosters political and social tyranny and opposes progress.4 American Exceptionalism fit well with the new cultural view of Orientalism, and these combined views influenced American policymakers and subsequent foreign policy. American Exceptionalism fits well with the new cultural view of Orientalism because both were based on Judaeo—Christian cultures and shared the same roots and historical bias that created the enlightenment and the industrial revolution. The other for both was Islam and the East. This other, a great previous civilization that gave impetus to the European enlightenment, was easily forgotten as the source. David Lamb wrote that,

[f]or seven hundred years, the writing of Ibn Sina (980-1037), or Avicenna, as he was known in the West, remained the basic text for European medical students, and the ninth-century philosopher of the Arabs, Al-Kindi, eloquently argued that the search for truth was the most exalted of human endeavors. In mathematics, the Arab sifr, or zero, provided new solutions for complicated equations. In medicine, Al-Razi was the first to diagnose smallpox and measles and to use animal gut for sutures, and Ibn al-Nafis, a Syrian, discovered the fundamental principle of pulmonary circulation. In agriculture, the Arabs learned how to graft a single vine so that it would bear grapes of different colors, thus laying the foundation for Europe future wine industries. Arab shepherds made the bagpipe that one day would return to Palestine with the British army, and an Arab author, Ibn-Tufail wrote what many consider to be the first real novel. Hay ibn Yagzan (Alive, son of Awake). The Arabs brought the techniques of irrigation, navigation and geography to Western Europe, and architects, using horseshoe-shaped arches and cubical supports, redesigned Spain with airy, mosaic-tiled buildings that had graceful patios and a feeling of openness. The missionaries carried the basis of that style to Mexico, then to Southern California, where it remains today as a mark of affluence in many contemporary homes.5

American policymakers secured special treatment for their merchants, missionaries, and other citizens visiting the orient. According to Wharton, Citizens of the United States, by virtue of the provisions of the treaty of 1830 with Turkey enjoy, in common with all other Christians, the privilege of extraterritoriality in Turkey.6 American dealings with the Orient were also fostered by the Paris formal agreement of 1856.7 In this agreement, the Ottoman Sultan was forced to agree to certain terms, called the capitulations, which gave Europeans more rights than they had previously had in the Empire. New forms of property ownership, particularly individual private property rights, were also instituted through this agreement.8

The capitulations assured American citizens religious freedom in the Ottoman Empire, further reinforced by Article LXII of the agreement of Berlin in 1878.9 These assurances applied to foreigners who were Christians as well as to native Christians who resided in the Empire.10 Palestine and its holy places, then part of the Ottoman Empire, were of concern to the United States because Americans were visiting the Christian holy sites and were engaged in religious and educational work within the Ottoman Empire. American foreign investments and the importance of its trade relations with the Empire also produced concerns.11 Americans were anxious to have access to the lucrative Mediterranean spice trade. From these visits ‘images of the Muslim world’ appeared in the news and writings back in America, coloring other Americans’ knowledge about the Middle East.12

According to Christison, American policy can be attributed

[t]o the extent, then, that early twentieth—century policy makers in the United States thought about the Palestine situation at all, it was within a frame of reference in which Palestine stood forth as a biblical land destined for reclamation by Christians and Jews and in which the native Arab inhabitants were unimportant.13

Through the next decades, what characterized American foreign policy vis-a-vis Palestine was a divided executive policy with the Presidency and the State Department… pulling in different directions.14 Prominent American Jews could be found on both sides of the issue. Men like Henry Morgenthau and E.R.A. Seligman supported the non-Zionist position of the State Department. Jewish leaders like Louis Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter used their personal ties to American President Wilson, to push a pro-Zionist policy. In the end, personal ties triumphed and the Presidents finally tipped the scale in favor of Israel and Zionism.15

III

American Policymakers from Wilson to George W. Bush

Woodrow Wilson

Woodrow Wilson, president of the United States from 1913-1921, led America during World War I (1914-1918). He has, therefore, one of the first American Presidents to get directly involved with Palestine. During WWI the Arabs in the Ottoman Empire were promised self-determination by the allies if they would fight on the allies’ side to help defeat the Ottoman Empire. The Arabs, believing the allies’ promises, did indeed fight, but they did not receive the promised self-determination when the Ottomans were defeated. According to Lesch, after World War I and the subsequent peace negotiations, the French, British, and U.S. governments all made declarations that indicated support for self-determination for the peoples of the Ottoman Empire.16 Instead, the only people to receive self-determination were European and Jews who colonized Palestine.

America became a power in the international arena at the end of WWI. Wilson started the trend of affirming that Palestine was the Jewish national home. Wilson, the idealist, revealed a pragmatic bent during the 1916 Presidential election campaign when his attitude on Palestine changed from disinterest to vocal pro-Zionism.17 The change of heart was a maneuver calculated to please a numerically small but active circle of Democratic Zionists led by Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis.18 A pro-Zionist position helped Wilson gain their support and get reelected.

By 1917, in England, Lord Balfour could deny the existence of the Palestinian people by avoiding referring to them as anything positive, merely calling them ‘the existing non-Jewish communities,’ when in fact they constituted over ninety percent of the population of Palestine at the time.19 The promulgation of his Balfour Declaration, on 2 November 1917 ostensibly looked with favor upon the creation of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine, stirred the recently founded American Jewish Congress to greater cooperation with the European-led World Zionist Organization on the issue of supporting an English trusteeship in Palestine.20 The realists of American diplomacy considered Wilson’s support for Balfour rash and ill-advised. While the British pressed him for a commitment, his friend and adviser, Colonel Edward M. House, cautioned the President of the danger lurking for him, as well as for the United States, if he succumbed. Secretary of State Robert Lansing couched his argument in stronger terms. The Secretary was irritated because he had not been consulted as to the course of action that should be taken subsequent to the announcement of the Balfour formula.21 Signing on the formula was to establish a Jewish home on conquered Arab land.

Wilson and his administration’s stand on the M.E. conflict were known to many students of history. Davidson indicates that there is little evidence in this period of strong resistance to Zionist plans from any level of America’s bureaucracy. Despite its later opposition to the Zionist enterprise, the State Department did nothing at the time to counterbalance Wilson’s tilt toward Zionism.22 Wilson actually did not care deeply about the political fate of Palestine. His endorsement of Britain’s 1917 Balfour Declaration was a gesture made without a great deal of thought; it was the easy choice. The endorsement supported Britain’s objectives in World War I, and the gesture showed Wilson to be responsive to his American Zionist friends.

Suleiman in his book, U.S. Policy and Palestine: From Wilson to Clinton, points out that, Woodrow Wilson’s

idealism and the call for