JONATHAN COOK - ISRAEL AND THE CLASH OF CIVILISATIONS

Jonathan Cook, an independent British journalist living permanently in Nazareth, Israel, is well known for his interrogative and incisive commentary on the Middle East. It is no surprise, therefore, to find these qualities in his new book. Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East is a cogent, wide-ranging and accessible account of the US and Israeli governments’ strategies to exert control over the region. However, it could be argued that Cook does not adequately address the more structural elements of the power relations he outlines, meaning that his book is more influenced by the mainstream mystification of the politics of the Middle East than one might expect.

Cook’s main argument is that the US neoconservative establishment and the Israeli state have joined forces to deliberately incite sectarian and ethnic disintegration and the dissolution and/or partition of rival Arab and Muslim states and other non-state players. He argues that the hardliners within the Israeli military establishment have persuaded the US administration that if Israel’s position as the most powerful player in the Middle East is secured, in particular as the only state with access to nuclear weapons, US control of the region’s oil would be secure from other challengers. In a post-9-11 context, the ideologies of the ‘war on terror’ and the ‘clash of civilisations’ have ensured that consent for such destruction has been more easily achieved. This has given the Israeli establishment the opportunity to pursue its long-held strategy of breaking up the Middle East to weaken and even eliminate Arab, particularly Palestinian, nationalism, as required by the Zionist imperative to ethnically cleanse Palestine. Indeed, as Cook illustrates, this sophisticated form of divide-and-rule, which was applied against the Palestinians even before the creation of the state of Israel, is now being extended into the wider region. What appears most refreshing about Cook’s account is that, unlike many liberal commentators, he understands the chaos, violence and disorder in the region as a means to an end, rather than unintended, unforeseen and therefore excusable consequences.

This argument places Israel and the US in a messy and symbiotic relationship. In so doing, Cook provides a valuable addition to the ongoing debate about whether it is Israel or the US that decides strategic foreign policy. For Cook, “it is not that the dog was wagging the tail or the tail wagging the dog: the dog and tail were wagging each other.” Given the perennial intimacy of US and Israeli states, perhaps it is not surprising to find them hard to separate into neat formulae of who is to blame or who is in the position of leader.

While providing valuable historical antecedents for this strategy, and charting its development within the Israeli military establishment, Cook nonetheless argues that its current implementation marks a historical break. He contends that whereas previously the Israeli and US governments used a selected proxy, a controllable leader, to protect their interests from challengers, they have now decisively oriented their policy towards a strategy of disintegration in the hope that it will sufficiently weaken those challengers. He writes, “Tribal and sectarian groups could be turned once again into rivals, competing for limited resources and too busy fighting each other to mount effective challenges to Israeli or US power.” According to Cook, this strategy played a considerable role in the decision to go to war on Iraq, in order to gain control over oil resources, remove a powerful support for Palestinian and Arab nationalist causes, and to create the chaos necessary to effectively divide and rule. This strategy, for Cook, also helps account for the current campaigns against Iran and Syria, the two most important state challengers to Israeli hegemony in the region. Cook also argues that the 2006 war on Lebanon was an attempt to eliminate Hezbollah, to avoid having to fight on multiple fronts in the event of an attack on Iran or Syria. That this attempt failed, and Hezbollah successfully resisted the Israeli military and increased its own popular support, exposes a certain hubris in the formulation of US and Israeli policy. Furthermore, Cook argues that their current failure to act in accordance with their bellicose anti-Iranian rhetoric evidences “the US and Israel’s inability to manage the civil wars and insurrections, as well as opinion back home, as successfully as they had imagined.”

If the book has any shortcomings, it is perhaps in the limited theoretical scope of the analysis. Solely focusing on international relations and foreign policy, Cook seems to avoid addressing some of the more fundamental structures and mechanisms through which such overwhelming and destructive power is exercised. Missing from Cook’s account is analysis of how oppositional challenges to Israeli and US domination are undermined and attacked because they also threaten the terms of modern-day capitalism: US empire and neoliberalism. In seeking domination, these capitalist imperialist powers are seeking control over resources and power, the most talked-about being oil and nuclear weapons, in order to be able to enforce and police neoliberal capitalist practices globally.

Part of this strategy is maintained by practising and promoting ‘democracy’. These incursions into the region are about more than destabilising and partitioning. Inciting the necessary degree of sectarian infighting is part of a strategy to hinder resistance to the underlying structures of capitalist rule, structures which are imposed in the name of ‘democracy’. These include the basic state, corporate and social structures which perpetuate and uphold the systems of domination required for capitalist relations to continue and expand.

This omission has meant that Cook does not complement his trenchant and biting account of the brutality of US and Israeli imperialism with a trenchant and biting account of how such brutality is part of maintaining the current world order. Consequently, Cook’s account lacks a perspective which understands those in power as threatened, behaving reactively and defensively and therefore also being defeatable. The defenders of today’s world order are pushed to lengths which are increasingly impossible to justify through their own vaunted claims of defending ‘democracy’ in order to protect themselves from those who might challenge them. This perspective, which understands power as vulnerable, is precisely what is needed to better aid, inform and give hope to both local and global struggles against capitalism and imperialism.