"Israel: Between Colonialism and Imperialism," Antioch Review, Vol. 42, No. 1 (1984), pp. 60-76

On the one hand, there is metaphysical discourse to be contended with, discourse which privileges Israel and obscures clarity and understanding. This discourse has two genres: one is eschatological, whereby 20th Century Israel is represented as fulfilling Old Testament prophecy. The other is metahistorical, whereby Israel is represented as transcending the historicity of "normal" nation-states, a "unique" [60/61] entity above the world of historical nations. Israel is represented as a product of a unique Holocaust visited upon the Jewish people, am sequela, a people itself "outside" of history.

On the other hand, there is a frankly technocratic discourse which differently privileges Israel, trivializing clarity and understanding. This discourse is the apologetic genre of the military-industrial complex which celebrates in incredibly fetishized detail the military exploits of the F-4 Phantom jet, the Uzi submachine gun, and so forth as the pinnacle of civilization. But one Book of Joshua is probably one too many.

It is the intention of this essay to sketch in broad outlines the social and historical processes of the "longer term," as the French historian Fernand Braudel has put it, whereby the place of Israel in modern history will be clarified and can be understood. The historicity of these processes of longer duration involves terms which contradict those of metaphysical discourse and which allow shorter term processes (e.g. the Deir Yassin massacre of 1948, the Tel-Zataar massacre of 1976, the Shatila and Sabra massacres of 1982) to be analysed fully without the discussion degenerating into the fetishized discourse of technocracy. Let us now establish some of those terms.

Capitalism is widely understood as having developed through several stages -- three, to be precise: first, merchant capitalism, then competitive or industrial capitalism, and finally, finance capitalism. The historical and processual nature of the development of capitalism must be stressed, with all the transitions, all the intermediate forms, which constitute such a process. The first and last of these stages are the occasions of the founding of modern empires. Merchant capitalism gave rise, most importantly, to settler colonies in South Africa and the Americas: the Cape Colony, the United States, the Viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata, etc. The imperialism of finance capitalism repartitioned the colonial world among the capitalist "great powers" toward the close of the nineteenth century. For example, the U.S. appropriated the Spanish colonies of Cuba and Puerto Rico. Moreover, imperialism partitioned the hitherto uncolonized remainder of the globe into imperialist possessions. For instance, the Congo was assigned to King Leopold of Belgium at the 1884 Berlin Conference.[61/62]

The scientific conception of imperialism emerged during the First World War, and has been associated with the names of John Hobson and V. I. Lenin. In terms of historical periods, imperialism is the predominant form of geographical expansion of late nineteenth and twentieth century capitalism, and must be distinguished from colonialism. Colonialism was the predominant form of global expansion of seventeenth and eighteenth century merchant capitalism. This was an early stage in the development of capitalism, characterized by mercantile rather than entrepreneurial domination over enterprise. Furthermore, the small scale of production corresponded to a weak and variable control over labor, necessitating non-wage forms of labor-force control such as settler colonialism, indenture, and slavery. Hence metropolitans, the "settlers," characteristically emigrated to the colonies to extract (or grow) and to ship "staple products" back to the metropole under conditions of trade favorable to mercantile interests. Examples of staples from North America included furs, lumber, and later wheat from the northernmost colonies and tobacco, sugar, indigo, and rice, and later cotton from the southern colonies.

Two crucial conditions of colonialism were plentiful, cheap land (the "colony" itself, with its indigenous peoples either evacuated, exterminated, or enslaved) and agricultural or extractive labor power (the "settlers," complemented by their indentured servants and enslaved "natives" as well as imported slaves). As a final characteristic, colonialism was the globally expansive force of contending "mother countries" which warred perennially. Thus wars were waged not only against the indigenous peoples during settlement, but between one metropole and its colonies and another and its colonies as well.

Imperialism, by contrast, is widely understood to be the final stage in the development of capitalism. It is a stage characterized by financial institutions' domination of industrial enterprise. It is characterized by a substantial capital flow from the metropole to the imperialist possession in search of a higher rate of profit than that available at home, for instance today's "runaway shops." Imperialism is characterized by military adventures on the part of the metropolitan nations, the capitalist great powers. This adventurism acts itself out in the subjugation and continued domination of the imperialist possessions," dirty little wars" such as the United States has just launched against Grenada. It also acts itself out in the metropole as the "world wars" between the great powers.

It is frequently argued that the origin and subsequent development [62/63] of Israel can be understood in terms of the scientific conception of imperialism. On the one hand Zionist apologists hold that Palestine was an imperialist possession of Great Britain, and that Jewish resistance to British domination eventually took the form of a "war of national liberation" whereby Palestine was partitioned and Israel emerged. This understanding links Israel with the preeminent global political process of the last half of this century, the anti-imperialist struggle of "Third World" nations.

On the other hand, the question is being raised in progressive political circles whether Israel has become in its own right a developed capitalist country and even an imperialist power. This inquiry finds evidence in the obvious superiority of Israel's military technology and performance over that of its Arab neighbors and in its widely proclaimed aspirations to supplant the West as the political power in the Middle East. This position finds further evidence in Israel's de facto and de jure seizure of Syrian and Lebanese territory, and in its "classic colonialist" administration of the West Bank, Golan Heights, Gaza Strip, and now southern Lebanon. We will suggest that neither of these positions can be sustained. Under the League of Nations Mandate, Palestine was indeed a British imperialist possession. Yet the emergence of Israel cannot thereby be understood as anti-imperialist, no more than the "Rhodesia" of Ian Smith and his short-lived "Unilateral Declaration of Independence." Zionist apologists do indeed fantasize about a Greater Israel stretching from the Suez Canal to the Fertile Crescent. Yet Israel, the de facto protectorate of the United States, cannot be understood as any sort of imperialist power, no more than the British protectorate, Portugal under Salazar, with its own possessions in Mozambique, Angola, and elsewhere.

But these two understandings, Israel as self-emancipated former imperialist possession and Israel as self-standing imperialist power, do not exhaust the scientific conception of imperialism. Both of these are limited understandings which demand in their one-sidedness a more scientific comprehension. Such a comprehension is available.

In Chapter 6 of his book entitled Imperialism, Lenin observes that imperialism, like other matters of nature and social life, is characterized by a series of "transitional forms." Between the autarky of the imperialist power on the one hand and the subjugated imperialist possession on the other are a number of what he calls "semi-colonial states," entities which are nominally sovereign but militarily, econom[63/64]ically, and politically dependent upon a genuine imperialist power. Examples? Lenin mentions Portugal and Argentina, both clients of Great Britain. For instance, in our contemporary world an imperialist power such as West Germany (FGR) can be juxtaposed to imperialist possessions (or, following Kwame Nkrumah, what we should more properly speak of as "neo-colonial concessions") such as Barbados, Honduras or Guatemala. Between these extremes lie today's "semi-colonies."

It is perhaps instructive to inquire why these are "transitional" forms. Transitional from what to what? Logically, or perhaps better, typologically, these are intermediate between the dependent and the independent, political entities characterized by formal political independence but actual dependency. Historically, these are transitional forms in the global development of capitalism. These "semi-colonial states" are residuals of merchant capital's settler colonialism in the era of finance capitalism. Their own economic development has been impeded because of geographical location, limited population, etc. Hence on the one hand they have not grown into developed capitalist countries or imperialist powers. On the other hand, they retain vestiges of their own colonial heritage and metropolitan culture and have not been reduced to imperialist possessions, nor, what is more frequent today, to neo-colonial concessions such as Jamaica, Kenya and Zaire. Straightforward examples today of such "transitional forms" are South Africa and Brazil. It will become clear that Israel is such a "transitional form" as well.

The remainder of this essay will develop two themes. First, the League of Nations Mandate in Palestine was the product of twentieth century British imperialism, just as Lebanon was the product of French imperialism. But Israel was quite another case. It is the product -- a profoundly anachronistic product -- of European settler colonialism deriving from merchant capitalism. Present space considerations permit only a severely abbreviated account of the historical documentation which this theme requires. Second, Israel has always been a dependency of the imperialist powers and currently has become de facto a protectorate of the United States. Jointly, these two themes are sufficient to conclude that Israel is precisely one of the "transitional forms" of imperialism in both the typological and the historical sense.

The end of the French and Indian War was affirmed by the Treaty of Paris in 1763. It had two momentous al[64/65]though distant consequences for the future of Palestine. The defeat of France and its war debt contributed to the outbreak of the French Revolution and Napoleon's invasion of Egypt. The British victory relieved the American colonists of the 'French menace', which allowed the colonists to raise a war of national liberation within a few years. The termination of the First British Empire focussed British imperial attention toward the Orient, toward India. Thus the First British Empire gave way almost immediately to the Second British Empire; both were colonial forms deriving from early-modern merchant capitalism, far antedating the imperialism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Thereby the middle of the British Empire, "where the extremes meet," came to be raised to the level of world-historical significance that the Middle East retains today, long surviving even the Empire.

The Revolution threatened the British Empire throughout - at its middle and at both ends. In the British Isles, the war with Revolutionary France generated revolutionary unrest in the Corresponding Societies, modelled on the French Jacobin Clubs, as well as naval mutinies at Spithead in April and on the Nore in May of 1797. By 1795, the middle of Britain's Indian route had been reinforced when the Cape of Good Hope was captured from the Dutch. Finally, Napoleon Bonaparte's Egyptian expedition in 1798 was incorrectly but widely taken by the English to be a thrust at India. In countering Bonaparte, Malta was taken by British forces in 1800 while Bonaparte's Egyptian campaign failed. Interestingly enough, Bonaparte proposed a canal at Suez in his invasion plans. In the end, however, the Second British Empire remained secure, its great enemy exiled on St. Helena, a station in the middle of the trade route to India. Established as early as 1651, St. Helena had been strategically downgraded by the nineteenth century in favor of the Cape Colony.

While assimilation was progressing in Western Europe and even more in North America, historical forces were about to usher in a new stage of capitalism which would change the world and Judaism.

The Suez Canal was completed in 1869 at the height of the Second Empire of Louis Bonaparte, nephew of Napoleon I. With Gibraltar, Malta, and the Aden Protectorate, Britain controlled the major sea approaches to the Canal. Yet the fear of new French expansionism made the British uneasy; Sedan and the sack of Paris after the Commune of 1871 relieved these fears. When Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli's government purchased the Egyptian Khedive's shares of the Suez Canal in 1875, Gladstone's only observation was that the canal might prove fiscally unsound. Quite the contrary, of course, a vast volume of shipping came to be diverted from the Cape route through the Mediterranean and Red Sea route. Thus the Cape could be strategically downgraded in favor of the Suez Canal. Just as St. Helena was retained as an active coaling station long after its strategic primacy was lost, so the Cape was retained to secure a secondary route to India.

By the late 1870's, George Eliot proposed in her "Essays" that the Jewish people were "not, before the dispersion, unique in essential qualities," that is, they could constitute a nation-state in the modern sense. She pondered whether there were not "in the political relations of the world, the conditions present or approaching for the restoration of a Jewish State planted on the old ground..." The emergence of such ideas in late nineteenth century British thought, only slightly influenced by Jewish nationalists like Emmanuel Deutsch, Moses Hess, and Hirsch Kalischer, can be straightforwardly explained in terms of the exigences of empire and especially those of the Suez Canal.

Imperial control of populous Egypt has always proved as difficult from within as the control of its neighbors without. Palestine was the obvious alternative for the strategic control of the Suez Canal. And this provides the explanation of these British ruling-class apologetics. As early as his hackneyed 1847 novel, Tancred, Benjamin Disraeli had recognized of the Second British Empire that les extremes se touchent, and the middle of the Empire was Palestine. There are two curious aspects to his observations. First, only the middle of the Empire is fixed and the end-points are indifferent: Disraeli's character [66/67] proposes that Queen Victoria shift the capital from London to Delhi! Second, Disraeli's character proposes that Palestine be conquered, on behalf of Britain, by the Maronites. This proposal reflected the impossibility of the Jewish colonization of Palestine at mid-century due to the small number of Jews in England. The subtitle of Disraeli's novel is telling: "The New Crusade" would employ the ever ready Maronite allies of the imperialists.

By the close of the century, however, Disraeli's Tory heirs would find a few Jewish colonists to establish instead "The New Colony." The difficulty of convivial interaction let alone assimilation of Ashkenazim and Palestinians made Jewish colonization desirable for the British as "a rampart of Europe against Asia," as the Zionist Theodore Herzl put it in his programmatic Der Judenstaat of 1896.

After the passing of the social democratic interlude of Weimar, Adolf Hitler showed little if any interest in the former German colonies in Africa. Instead, the focus of Nazi imperialist designs was on the Slavic regions and especially the Ukraine. Indeed, Hitler was abetted in these designs by the British imperialists on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. It was an incredibly smug Montreal Star, for instance, which editorialized on September 21, 1938, after Munich, that Hitler "will never attack either France or Britain," because he was too "wise" [67/68] for that; instead, he would soon "seek the opportunity to show the Russians, as he has boasted, how to exploit the wheatfields of the Ukraine." The Nazi programme for Eastern Europe differed little from that which obtained in the actual German colonies there and had a distinct cultural continuity with the earlier militarism of the feudal Teutonic Order. The "Ostraum" was to constitute the "Greater Germany" whose colonists would have no convivial interaction with the subjugated Slavs.

While adjudged "racially inferior" by the Nazis, the Slavs were at least "racially pure." All "racially impure" peoples, for instance Jews and Gypsies, were to be exterminated. This settler colonial and racist programme of the Nazis was honored in the breach in several important respects. One was the Nazi promotion of the proto-fascist General Andrei Vlasov's "Russian Liberation Army" (ROA) which fantasized about the existence of anti-Bolshevik hostility among the Soviet populace. Another was the Nazi use of Jewish labor in the war effort. As already noted, the Nazi labor programme for Eastern Europe postulated a "hierarchy of races." The Nazi doctrine considered the Germans to be superior humans, the Slavs to be inferior humans, and the Jews, Gypsies, etc. to be subhuman. But the war effort placed demands upon the Nazi regime that obliged it to utilize otherwise "undesirables." The resolution of this dilemma was, as the historian Jurgen Kuczynski has pointed out, to lower the "standard of living" of the Jews in the labor force to the point where they would soon die out. Hitler expected that the war would be short; hence the racial policies of extermination and the settler colonial policies of land acquisition in the East would coincide in the collapse of the Soviet Union at the hands of the Third Reich.

The Jews in the Slavic regions were thus subjugated under the colonial policy of the most vicious of modern capitalist regimes, that of Nazi Germany. Prior to the Holocaust, the Jews had experienced other capitalist regimes which systematically took "exception" to the rule of law and are thereby called exceptional regimes. Such exceptional regimes included Marshal Pilsudski's Poland, Admiral Horthy's Hungary, and Rumania. These experiences with the "levity of law" seem to have been sufficient to inculcate the terrorist mentality in the likes of Vladimir Jabotinsky and Menachim Begin; consider how much more profoundly the actual experience of the Nazi regime would contribute to what the famous Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin called "Jewish fascism." This was particularly to be expected [68/69] in light of the opposition in Europe between progressive politics and Zionism. Thus Zionist survivors of the Holocaust were prepared to acquiesce if not actively contribute to the development of an "exceptional" regime in Palestine. The interview of Golda Meir in the Sunday Times of London on June 15, 1969 was symptomatic of the consequences for Zionist perceptions of the Holocaust. Of the Palestinians, she said, "they did not exist." The Nazi denial of the "existence" of a subjugated people is thus reproduced in that same people's denial of the "existence" of another subjugated people.

An "exceptional" regime was necessary for the expropriation of Palestinian lands. The expropriation of Arab peasant land and then its "acquisition" by the Zionists was substantially realized within a decade of partition. Thus one crucial condition of settler colonialism, cheap and plentiful land, was being fulfilled. Moreover, an "exceptional" regime was more than adequate for the Ashkenazim immigrants who flooded into Palestine just after World War II. These immigrants were more or less prepared to act as settler colonists in Palestine, more or less indifferent to their merchant capitalist role. Thus another crucial condition of settler colonialism, displaced metropolitans, was being fulfilled. And the Sephardim all around the Arab world were manipulated by the Zionists in tacit league with Arab reaction -- the same monarchies which today are labelled "moderate Arab regimes" -- to "flesh out," as it were, the ranks of the immigrants.

Lloyd George had partitioned Ireland in December, 1921. With the end of World War II and the exhaustion of Great Britain, the "jewel" of the Second British Empire was fast slipping away. The partition of the subcontinent of India was very hurriedly completed by Viceroy Mountbatten on August 15, 1947. Thus the notion of "partition" of colonies was not unprecedented in British ruling class circles. And such a policy was clearly compatible with the doctrine of divide et impera. With the loss of India, the Oriental end-point of the Second British Empire was immediately reestablished on the Persian Gulf. Now the staple product was petroleum. As President Dwight D. Eisenhower characterized the situation in his address to the U.S. Congress on January 5, 1957, the Gulf region (and Arabia) "normally supplies the petroleum needs of many nations of Europe, Asia, and Africa. Now the nations of Europe are peculiarly dependent upon this supply and this dependency relates to transportation as well as production." Thus the new end-point of empire is the Gulf. And notice Eisenhower's reference to "transportation." The middle is still the [69/70] Suez Canal. Were it lost, Eisenhower goes on in the most apocalyptic of terms, "Western Europe would be endangered just as though there had been no Marshall Plan, no North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The free nations of Asia and Africa, too, would be placed in serious jeopardy."

Thus when Gamal Abdul Nasser had nationalized the Suez Canal in July 1956, terminating what he called "a state within a state" and providing for the financing of the High Dam at Aswan, the British (and their French allies) attempted to reestablish hegemony through their colonial creature, the Zionist settler state. The Israelis pretended that they were threatened with being "swamped from three sides with a new wave of Fedayeen violence." The Syrian and the Jordanian "sides," however, were disingenuously discounted by the Israelis who invaded only Egypt on October 29, 1956. Given this pretext, the British and French themselves attacked Egypt for the avowed purposes of protecting their vital interests in the Canal on the one hand and, on the other, preventing an armed clash between the Zionist regime and Egypt! Even Zionist historians such as Salomon Grayzel admit that the Israelis "probably knew beforehand that France and England intended to act." As we know now, however, by 1956 the middle of the colonialist Second British Empire had been irretrievably lost. Dominion was lost in Cyprus in 1961, in Malta in 1964, and in Yemen a day before schedule in November 1967.

Thus the Second British Empire ended by the late sixties, if not before. But some of the creatures of that almost two centuries of colonialism lived on. For instance, the Mandate in Palestine, the product of twentieth-century imperialism, has been terminated and imperialism seems to be on the retreat around the globe. Meanwhile Israel, the product of the much earlier merchant colonialism, survives as a "transitional form" within the system of imperialism. It even acts on behalf of that imperialism, destabilizing and Balkanizing the Middle East and reacting against national liberation movements around the world.

So much for the genesis of Israel as a belated colony of merchant capitalism. This raises the other theme of this essay. What can be said about its contemporary dependency status ?

It is important initially to distinguish between the concepts of [70/71] "dependence" and "interdependence," especially in a discussion of the modern interdependent world. Both concepts involve an interrelationship between several entities, in this case, political entities. There are two dimensions of this interrelationship: salience and uniqueness. Where several entities find each other to be particularly important to their existence or welfare (that is mutually 'salient'), they are interdependent. In this sense it can be said that the modern world is interdependent; developed capitalist countries are interdependent. Where one entity finds another entity to be salient, and where there are no alternatives to the second entity (that is, it is 'unique'), then the first entity is dependent upon the second. Recall Eisenhower's reference to the petroleum needs of Europe and that these nations are "peculiarly dependent" upon the petroleum supply from the Gulf region. In the following, we will show that Israel is categorically dependent upon the United States in just these terms of salience and uniqueness.

But the relationship between imperialist power and its possession, too, is one of domination and dependency, one of inherently unequal relations. Much has been made of this in the theory of "Unequal Exchange" promoted by Arghiri Emmanuel during the late sixties. Whatever the merits of this theory, quite another aspect of imperial inequality should be noted in the present context: the relationship between imperial power and its possession invariably implicates a thoroughgoing racism. Unequal relations between political entities under the regime of imperialism corresponds to unequal relations between the ethnic groups of the metropole and those which populate the possession.

The relationship between merchant capital "mother country" and its colonies, by contrast, never presented its inequality in racist guise insofar as metropolitans and settlers were concerned. This privileging of the settler becomes part of the colonial heritage and culture, and is reflected throughout the relationship between the "transitional forms" and their imperialist protectors. The relation of metropolitans today --"on vacation" in the semi-colony, say -- toward "natives" may be as racist as that of the settlers, while that is not the case between metropolitans and settlers. The settler colonists are, after all, derived from the same ethnic groups as the metropolitans; many of the colonists hold metropolitan passports and so forth. They are simply metropolitans "overseas," and are perceived as such both by themselves and by others.[71/72]

Where the settlers arrived at the colony as a cohort, such as the Protestants at Ulster, this is straightforward. Circumstances become somewhat more complex where they arrive in several cohorts or waves, such as Boers and "Uitlanders" (English) in the Cape Colony. Then a "vertical mosaic" emerges, where the racial distinction between settlers and indigenous peoples still predominates, as does the unity of the settler groups with their metropole. This analysis bears directly on the Zionist colonization.

Until the close of the l9th Century, the minuscule Jewish population in Palestine was economically utterly dependent: it existed only through the charity of Diaspora Jews, called the Halukkah, estimated to have amounted to £ 100,000 Sterling during the 1880's. Then the first aliyah entered Palestine; its settler colonies, too, were utterly dependent -- they existed only through the largesse of Baron Edmond de Rothschild. Much has been written -- and much of that writing has been Zionist -- criticizing the dependency of these late nineteenth and early twentieth century experiments in Jewish colonialism. It must be one of the great ironies of modern history -- the utter dependency of present-day Zionist Israel upon the Halukkah of "Uncle Sam."

During the Mandate, the Jewish population became dependent upon the British authorities, especially for defense against the increasingly aggrieved and hostile Palestinian people. Meanwhile the mass aliyah from Western Europe and North America which had been predicted by the Zionists never occurred. Instead Diaspora Jews remained in the metropolitan countries and continued to support the Jewish Agency in Palestine, and generously so.

Economic dependency might have been expected to continue for some time after partition. Indeed, Alex Rubner has estimated the sum of Israel's Gross National Product for its first decade to have been just under ten billion dollars, while the sum of "charitable and political aid" for the decade was about one- quarter as large. As Asad Abdul-Rahman and others have documented, a considerable amount of this vast flow of funds to the Zionists took the form of gifts from Diaspora Jews or loans. Of course there was some U.S. aid from the beginning. President Harry Truman announced the first U.S. loan to Israel in November 1948, a few months after partition. By the time of the 1956 war, the U.S. had given Israel an estimated half-billion dollars in the form of officially announced loans and grants. Another important portion consisted of West Germany's reparations to Israel in addition to [72/73] its restitutions to the survivors of the Holocaust. The government of the FGR began negotiations in March 1952 with Israel and representatives of Diaspora Jewish organizations regarding reparation payments. An agreement was concluded in September of that year and was ratified in March 1953. Since that time the FGR has contributed the equivalent of many billions of dollars to Israel. Little wonder that a UNESCO report published in 1958 conservatively estimated that between 1953 and 1957, Israel had received more economic aid per capita than any other country in the world; it received almost twice as much as the next-ranked country.

After the 1956 war much of this flow began to take the form of direct military aid and was increasingly augmented by official U.S. "foreign aid." By 1962 the Zionist lobby in the U.S. had spent over five million dollars to facilitate this change; it was completed at about the time of the war of June 1967. In September 1962, the United States announced that it was supplying Hawk surface-to-air missiles to Israel. During the following years, the U.S. also began supplying Israel with Patton tanks. Finally, in May 1966, the United States announced it would supply Israel with A-4 Skyhawk fighter-bombers. The U.S. supply of weapons systems to Israel thus progressed from defensive to offensive during this period. Moreover, the U.S. Foreign Military Sales (FMS) to Israel began to grow exponentially after the June l967 war. Hearings during 1977 by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee indicated that FMS deliveries to Israel were $14 million in FY 1967, over $28 million in 1968, over $72 million the next year, $126 million in l970, and $315 million in l971. During 1972 and 1973 the FMS deliveries to Israel were only about $190 million per annum. Then the FMS deliveries jumped again in FY 1974; they amounted to almost a billion dollars of arms. Indeed, this military aid can be viewed as a major precipitant of the October 1973 war.

According to a 1983 U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) draft report on assistance to Israel, the U.S. has provided Israel with a total of $15.5 billion in FMS loans between 1950 and 1983. As already noted, the greatest part of that total was incurred since 1967, during last half of Israel's existence. The very magnitude of this aid is strong evidence for Israel's military dependence on the United States; its increase suggests the growth of this dependence.

The United States provides credit to Israel for military purchases, usually in the form of loans. This is characteristic of U.S. arms trade around the world. But for Israel, much of the principal of the loans [73/74] has been immediately forgiven, making the "loan" into a grant. Nonetheless, the Israeli debt service for the remaining principal of the total FMS loans amounted to $810 million in 1982. The problem of servicing such a debt in an economy as fragile as that of Israel can scarcely be overstated. Moreover, the remaining principal has been unpaid through grace periods of ten years. Those grace periods are ending for the earlier FMS loans; the principal is coming due. And those circumstances focus our attention on the second major component of official U.S. assistance to Israel, that channelled through the Economic Support Fund (ESF) program, administered by the Agency for International Development (AID).

According to the GAO draft report, the United States has provided Israel with $6.6 billion in ESF assistance between FY 1972 and FY 1983. The greatest portion of this assistance (and since FY 1981, all the annual amounts) has taken the form of outright grants and is utilized to cover the debt service on the FMS loans. This is unlike U.S. foreign aid elsewhere in the world, which is linked to other countries' specific economic development projects. The GAO report further anticipates that

the gap between ESF grants and the debt service and FMS loan repayments will continue to increase, reaching almost a billion dollars difference by FY 1993, as more and more of the grace periods end. Whether the U.S. government forgives an even greater part of the loans, thereby adding to budgetary deficits at home, or extends the grace periods for the principal, thereby merely postponing the day of fiscal reckoning, is a choice to be made by U.S. elected and appointed officials, with -- or more likely without -- full public discussion. In any case, the magnitude of this ESF assistance provides good evidence for Israel's economic dependence on the United States. On the one hand, such dependence does not entail that Israel is an imperialist possession. It will be recalled that capital is exported from the metropole to the imperialist possession in search of higher rates of profit than that available at home. Israel is not an imperialist possession, if for no other reason than the moribund state of its economy. Capital is not exported there because of higher rates of profit; indeed some of the foreign investment in Israel, for instance from U.S. pension plans, is made in contravention of "prudent investor" clauses of trust funds. On the other hand, there is no indication that this dependence will do anything but increase in the foreseeable future. And this discussion hasn't even commented on the enormous import surpluses of the Israeli economy, another measure of economic depend[74/75]ence. These surpluses have never been less than $238 million per annum since 1950, and have tended to increase over the years.

Hence, Israel is both militarily and economically dependent upon the United States. The economist Thomas Stauffer has expressed it well in the very title to his 1983 publication: "U.S. Aid to Israel [is] the Vital Link." If, in addition, "Arik" Sharon had to get the green light from U.S. Secretary of State Alexander Haig to attack Lebanon in 1982, as Sharon avers, then even Israel's loudly and widely proclaimed political independence from the United States can be questioned. Nominal political independence has always provided a convenient cloak to mask true dependency.

Let us conclude by briefly summarizing our argument and noting some implications. In terms of the scientific conception of imperialism, Israel is not the product of anti-imperialist struggle, neither is it an imperialist power, nor possession. It is instead a creature of the earlier settler colonialism of merchant capitalism, existing as a "transitional form" within the modern system of imperialism. Its status is indeed one of military, economic, and perhaps even political dependency upon the United States, but this is the dependency of a "semi- colonial state."

Such a conclusion has several implications, all of which highlight the importance for Israelis of breaking this dependency cycle. First, Israelis themselves must move toward full recognition of the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinians, the PLO, and further, begin the movement to withdraw to the pre-1967 borders of Israel. This is necessary if Israel is ever to break its military dependency upon the United States. While such political motion within Israel is not absolutely inconceivable, it will surely require a radical turn from the present political leadership as well as from what currently passes for the "loyal opposition." Next, economic independence of Israel can only be established through a profound rupture with the system of imperialism. This follows from the linkage between Israel's militarism, aided and abetted by imperialism, and its resulting and categorical economic dependency. Such a break by the world's foremost debtor nation may be traumatic. The resulting decline in standards of living may be quite severe in the short term. Finally, this analysis suggests that reconciling ethnic antagonisms within Israel can only proceed through the elimination of all vestiges of racism. Setting aside [75/76] the issue of "non-Jews" for just an instant, the racism which permeates the relationship between European and Arab would still prevent nation-building.

This should not be taken as the counsel of despair. A thoroughgoing break with militarism and imperialism will unleash popular forces within Israeli society itself. Such popular forces must undertake these and even greater transformations. No, it is the policies of the status quo that proven to be the counsel of despair.[76/]