Stop Me Before I Vote Again

One Andrew Pollack, an extremely militant Fourth Internationalist, wrote, recently, on one of my lefty mailing lists:

In a front-page article in today's Times... Obama echoes recent statements by Gen. Petraeus, VP Biden and others about how Israel's intransigence is threatening "our" interests in the war against Arabs and Muslims.

This is another reason to firmly oppose alliances with right-wingers supposedly against war, who love this "America First" approach.

[After] the announcement by Israel, made during Vice President Joe Biden’s visit, that it would build 1600 new homes for Jewish settlers in Al-Quds(*)... U.S. officials feigned outrage—not because they oppose settlement construction, but because they fear the Zionists aren’t properly acting out the diplomatic charade. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that the timing of the announcement was “insulting,” and top aide David Axelrod called it an “affront” that “seemed calculated” to undermine the peace talks.

The U.S. government... needs the Israeli government as an outpost in the Middle East.

Oh, to be sure, Washington would not look with favor on a Palestine in charge of, say, Hamas, which would be a lot like a replay of the Iranian revolution. But there's quite a gap between that and a client state that doesn't know its place; a client state with its own nutty hubristic regional-superpower fantasies; a client state that routinely insults and domineers over the captain and bridge crew of the global hegemon. I mean, really, who needs that?

Comrade Andrew's well-informed but ultimately disappointing treatment of the subject reveals a certain widely-shared schematism in our understanding of empire and, for that matter, of class society. Or so I think. We too often imagine our rulers as a highly organized and self-aware monolith, when in fact they're a loose collection of rival gangs. They share an interest in milking, bilking, and suppressing us, of course, but except for the rather rare periods when that happy state of affairs seems to be in question, they don't all pull in the same direction, always or even most of the time.

Now if that's the case -- what in earth would be wrong in playing one against another, assuming our poor etiolated Left were in any position to do that? Comrade Andrew decries "alliances with right-wingers supposedly against war, who love this 'America First' approach". But if "we" -- the Left, I mean -- were actually able to help stir up or exacerbate any tension between one imperial faction and another, then where's the downside?

I can only think that Comrade Andrew's reason for not wanting to shore up any "right-wingers", of any stripe, is that like many Lefties, he sees the Left's task as primarily one of evangelism and conversion. We Lefties have a certain view of the world, and if only we could persuade enough people to see it our way -- why, then, The Masses would rise up and overthrow The Bosses. Any kind of "alliance" with any "right-wingers" would imply leaving the scales on at least some "right-wing" eyes, and defer the day of general enlightenment.

This view of social transformation and how it works seems awfully idealistic to me. But perhaps I'm just a shameless opportunist. If people want to get mad at the Zionists for threatening "American" interests, that seems not just delightful but even, in some non-trivial sense, perceptive.

Hell, I'm an American, Lefty though I be -- and what am I, chopped liver? The bastards sure aren't doing me any good, or anybody else except themselves, for that matter.

You could turn my argument against me, of course. You could say that if in fact actually-existing and actually-overreaching Zionism is more of a liability to the Empire than an asset, then taking the Zionists down a peg or two would make the Empire more rational, qua empire, and thus better-run and more formidable. So as an anti-imperialist, I ought to be cheering the Zionists on.

The more I think about this argument, the better I like it, and may start to use it myself. Support Israel! Destroy America! Hey, there's a slogan for you!

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(*) In demotic non-militant English, "Jerusalem".