As we follow news of a so-called “Washington deal”, hoping for a resolution of the Israeli invasion of Gaza and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, we realise that this could be but one more episode of buying time to cover up Israel’s crimes and beautify the face of the US in front of its people and the peoples of its European allies. These peoples are protesting in rage against the dire plight of the Palestinians. What goes unsaid however, is that the US President and his administration are fixed on the looming presidential elections scheduled for the upcoming November, and thus cannot afford to anger Israel or the Zionist Jewish lobby in the US and accordingly risk losing a substantial vote.
While we wait for developments to unfold on the fateful Gaza front during the coming days or weeks, I keep on following on talk shows or podcasts opinions expressed by international political analysts and strategy experts. Prominent among them is American political scientist and international relations scholar John Joseph Mearsheimer whose views I have introduced to my readers in previous Watani editorials. Mr Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago; he belongs to the realist school of thought. I strongly value his wisdom, poise and willingness to surf against the tide.
Today, I print excerpts of Mr Mearsheimer’s recent interview with Paul Salvatori on “Palestine Talks” in the Turkish channel TRT World. Mr Mearsheimer focused on the crimes committed by the Israeli administration against Gaza and the Palestinians.
Dr Salvatori started by asking Mr Mearsheimer on his view of offensive realism and how that might be manifested in Israel’s assault on Gaza.
“I’m not sure that Israel’s assault on Gaza has much to do with realism,” Mr Mearsheimer replied, “but I’ll give you my take on what realism is…
“Realism is a theory of international politics that privileges power,” Mr Mearsheimer told Dr Salvatori. “It says power is the currency of international relations; States are mainly concerned about the balance of power, and they want to maximise the amount of power they have. The best situation is to be a hegemon in the system. Why is that the case? The argument that I make is that if a State operates in a world where there’s no higher authority that can rescue it if it gets in trouble, and one can never know what the intentions of another State are today, and certainly cannot know what their intentions will be in the future, and that rival State may be very powerful, in that world you want to make sure you are much more powerful than all of your rivals… Now the reason this doesn’t apply to the Israeli-Palestinian case is we’re not talking about rival States, we’re talking about one State which is greater Israel and we’re talking about the fact that inside of greater Israel, the Palestinians in Gaza are revolting against the Israelis, this is basically a prison break. What happened was that the Israelis in effect locked the Palestinians in Gaza up in a giant open-air prison, and they treated them horribly. And what happened on October 7th is you had a prison break, and the Israelis reacted to that by invading Gaza, but this is not competition between two States… What you have here is basically a rebellion by those prisoners who are locked up in Gaza.”
Dr Salvatori: “Israel is trying to defeat Hamas but they will never be able to do so, how in that sense is it in Israel’s interest to keep waging this war?”
Mr Mearsheimer: “I believe that the Israelis should have long ago given the Palestinians a State of their own, that was the smart thing to do. But they’ve decided not to do that, now there’s no question that the Israelis went into Gaza and they argued that what they wanted to do was defeat Hamas… It is virtually impossible to defeat Hamas in combat… Their ultimate goal, I believe, from the beginning was to ethnically cleanse Gaza, to drive the Palestinians out of Gaza… The fact is that greater Israel is today an apartheid State… So what the Israelis would like to do is to ethnically cleanse Gaza and ethnically cleanse the West Bank, so that you have a greater Israel that’s filled mainly with Israeli Jews and almost all of the Palestinians are gone.”
Do you think that Israel’s seeming lack of concern of the international community trying to stop what they’re doing is irrational?
For the Israelis what really matters is what the United States does, but not only the United States, countries like Canada and countries in Europe… We see this even with the Germans today, who you would think given their experience with genocide would be opposing what the Israelis are doing in Gaza, but the Germans are standing by the Israelis as are the Americans and pretty much everybody else in the west, so the Israelis think they have a free hand here… I do not think this is in the American national interest and I don’t think it’s in Israel’s interest as well… What a lobby likes to do is make the argument that Americans support Israel down the line because it’s in our interest… Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, it shares our values, this is the argument that it’s morally and strategically correct to support Israel… Very important to understand that the coming of social media has changed the game in very important ways, it was much easier to work in the background and it was much easier to sort of cover up what Israel was doing before the coming of social media… With social media now there’re just all sorts of video on the internet of what the Israelis are doing in Gaza… all sorts of videos that portray the Israelis acting towards the Palestinians in barbaric ways, and when young people see these, they obviously become remarkably sympathetic to the Palestinians and they think badly of the Israelis.
You’ve talked about the end goal that Israel has to create greater Israel, and I am wondering whether you see this as ultimately destructive or self-defeating for Israel.
Israelis ethnically cleansed the Palestinians in 1948, and then they did it again in 1967 in the West Bank when they captured the West Bank from Jordan… So they’ve done massive ethnic cleansing on two occasions, and they got away with it, and it played a key role in creating the State of Israel… So when the opportunity comes, they will be able to ethnically cleanse Gaza and the West Bank, greatly reduce the number of Palestinians… and the end result is they will be much better off, they will have gotten away with it… Remember we’re talking about a world here where the United States and the Europeans, especially the Germans will basically support Israel no matter what it does, so one could argue it’s not such a foolish policy, is it a morally bankrupt policy… it may ultimately turn out to be a reckless policy, yes. But that remains to be seen.
Watani International
21 June 2024