Joel Beinin talking:
Bernie has been evolving. If we remember the summer of Israel’s assault on Gaza, when he tried to shout down people in a town meeting who asked him to be more critical of Israel, he was toeing the Democratic Party line. He has now backed off from that. He wants to be more balanced. He has appointed Simone Zimmerman as his Jewish community outreach coordinator. She recently wrote an op-ed in Haaretz, the leading liberal daily of Israel, saying that we should talk about boycott, divestment and sanctions; very friendly to Jewish Voice for Peace. A lot of what he’s saying is still a good bit away from where I think he should be. But compared to Hillary Clinton, who pretty much parrots the Likud line, he’s in a different place.
Israel in fact provoked Hamas into the firing of the rockets. It’s not the first time that Israel has provoked Hamas into firing rockets after a period of relative quiet. The testimony of Israeli soldiers who gave evidence to breaking the silence say that Israel used an insane amount of violence and firepower in invading Gaza, and that the levels of destruction of civilian infrastructure was insane. That’s very different than what Hillary Clinton is saying.
wrote a letter to Senator Sanders. What I tried to do was to say, “OK, great that you’re against the influence of billionaires in American politics. You talk primarily about domestic politics, and I agree with all of that. But there’s also a very pernicious influence of billionaires in foreign policy, and perhaps nowhere more so than Israel-Palestine.” Sheldon Adelson, the Adelson primary, all the Republican candidates traipsed to Las Vegas to get his endorsement. And on the Democratic side, Haim Saban is a huge contributor both to Hillary Clinton’s current campaign and to past campaigns of Bill Clinton and to the Clinton Foundation. And both of them are single-issue people. They care only about Israel. Haim Saban said he’s prepared to spend whatever it takes to get Hillary Clinton elected president. And the policies that Hillary Clinton advocates, as we heard in the clip, reflect Haim Saban’s views.
Hillary Clinton was giving you the standard cant. Nobody says Israel has the most powerful military between Morocco and Pakistan. They really don’t need any more armaments. They have 200 nuclear weapons and so on. And moreover, yes, there have been terrorist attacks against Israel. None of them, altogether, represent anything remotely resembling an existential threat to Israel. They’re unfortunate. It’s a tragic loss of civilian life when that happens. But from a security point of view, it’s not a big deal. On the other hand, Israel has aggressively attacked its neighbors in 1956, in 1967, in 1982. On balance, Israel has been the aggressor for most of its historical existence. Hillary, I don’t know if she knows the history, doesn’t care about the history. She says what candidates need to say in order to get elected. Bernie Sanders is inching his way towards a more reasonable position. He is pointing out that Israel is expanding settlements. He mentioned in the interview with the New York Daily News that the settlements are actually illegal, although he wasn’t clear that every single one of them is illegal according to international law. And that’s not a matter of who thinks international law means what. But he’s moving along. It’s clear that the millennials who support him 85 to 15 are more critical of Israel, and he’s getting closer to their views.
Saudi Arabia, which has been enjoying some of the largest arms sales in the—in U.S. history, and, as well, Egypt. It’s important because it’s the sale of U.S. arms that often fuels conflicts. If the United States didn’t sell any arms to just those three countries, plus the other Gulf Cooperation Councils, the Arab oil monarchies, then all of those countries would have to deal with each other in a more reasonable, diplomatic way. Those arms sales don’t, in fact, contribute to anybody’s defense. Saudi Arabia is essentially incapable of using the American weaponry that it buys. There’s always American advisers to help them do it. And when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, the Saudis couldn’t repel that invasion on their own, even though they had tons of military hardware. Those sales are a boon to American military industry. So, basically, what’s happening is American taxpayers are subsidizing the profits of the Lockheed, Douglas—McDonnell Douglas, Northrop Grumman and so on, and those are the real Israel lobby. They are the ones who want that grant of $3 billion-plus a year to go to Israel.
Israel gets a little bit over $3 billion officially, grant in aid, military aid. Egypt gets now, let’s say, somewhere between $2.1 [billion] and $2.3 billion. That proportion was set up following the 1979 Arab—Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, and it’s remained fixed since then. Those are gifts. Israel gets the money every quarter, in advance, not tied to any project. Some proportion of that money can be spent on—inside Israel, some of it for Israeli equipment, some of it for equipment that Israel manufactures for itself and for the United States military. Most of it is spent in the United States. In the case of Egypt, every penny is spent in the United States for equipment supplied by American arms manufacturers.
Hillary’s relationship with Mubarak exemplifies her hawkish status quo approach, not only to the Middle East, but yesterday you were talking about Honduras. She had a similar view there. The entire population of Egypt was rising up against Mubarak, and she says that she believes the Mubarak regime is stable. She’s tone deaf when it comes to the democratic aspirations not only of the Egyptian people, but certainly also to the Palestinian people.
Hillary Clinton said in 2009, “I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family.” I’m sure they were. Probably not anymore. Yeah, why not? The president of Egypt, yeah, would be friends with the family of a secretary of state and former president. The American government has done a great deal to keep the Mubarak family in power for 31 years, so they would be friends.
the basic story is that the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank had been for decades trying to impose neoliberal economic structural reforms to reshape the economies of the Middle East. And what happened there is a version of what happened here: The rich got richer, and the poor get poorer, even when, in some cases, the economies did grow. Poverty increased; it didn’t decrease as the World Bank claimed it would. People, in some cases, literally couldn’t afford bread. I was present in Egypt when huge crowds of people were chanting about the price of bread there. In Tunisia, one of the slogans of the uprising was “Bread, water and no Ben Ali,” the former president of Tunisia. So, basic human needs were not being met, despite the proud claims of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank of economic success. Two French presidents called Tunisia an economic miracle. Well, it was miraculous for the family of the president’s wife, who owned perhaps 30 percent of the national economy, but not so miraculous for people who started the uprising.
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Joel Beinin
professor of Middle East history at Stanford University. He is the former director of Middle East Studies at the American University in Cairo, author of several books, most recently, Workers and Thieves: Labor Movements and Popular Uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt.
— source democracynow.org