Santa Clara University

A Dialog of Faith

Question III : America’s Role in the Middle East

Since the peace conference ending World War I and Woodrow Wilson’s call for national self determination, the United States has been increasingly involved in the Middle East. Today, Americans are pursuing "nation building" in Iraq," a failed effort to end Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a war on terrorism through out the region.

What religious principles might inform policy makers and concerned citizens about the United States’ role in the Middle East? Who or what should that country support? Who or what should it oppose?

Muslim participants are divided in their response to this question. Zeehsan Hasan expresses cynicism about the political motives of all great powers: "Any religious or moral principles would do," he writes. "Unfortunately, the foreign policy of great powers is generally not based on any principles at all. They tend to be based rather on [national] self-interest, as defined by a small elite group that happens to be in power.

"In the case of the British Empire, this meant systematically under-developing colonies and using them as captive markets for the industrialization of Britain. In the case of the U.S., it generally means supporting any Middle Eastern government that guarantees U.S. access to cheap oil."

Felix Pomeranz expresses some faith in the "road map," a plan for negotiations sponsored by the United States, Russia, the European Union, and the United Nations. He also suggests that the United States "could and should underwrite the cost of corrective action."

Mustapha Hogga writes that the United States should have a major role in establishing "a just peace between Israel and the Palestinians, the settlement of the conflict with Syria and Lebanon, and the restoration of Iraqi sovereignty in a democratic system…. They should however act in the United Nations framework."

Asher Meir notes the importance of honoring agreements, pointing to Maimonides' monumental and authoritative Code of Jewish law that has an entire section devoted to the rules of war. The very first law is that "war can never be waged with anyone until they have been offered terms of peace." Another law states, "It is forbidden to lie to or deceive them after they have capitulated." An extreme example of this is "Joshua who was deceived by the elders of Givon (Gibeon) through a fraudulent pact. When he discovered that he had been deceived, Joshua was very angry, but he did not withdraw his agreement. In fact, he [maintained the peace] and even came to the defense of the Givonites against their enemies."

"This insistence on honoring commitments has not been evident in U.S. intervention. The original detailed Oslo agreement was signed amid great fanfare in the United States, … but Arafat never fulfilled his obligations. Indeed, in a May 1994 public speech, he frankly announced that he had no intention of adhering to Oslo. The reaction of the U.S. should have been to insist on strict adherence to the agreement, which had been attained with so much effort and sacrifice of well-meaning individuals on both sides of the conflict as well as from the U.S.

"Instead, each violation leads to a new plan: the Wye agreement, Tenet plan, Mitchell plan, Zinni plan, and road map…. If an agreement falls apart because circumstances show that it’s not ‘win-win,’ then there is some reason to try to alter the conditions somewhat, just like in any contract. But if one side openly and frankly reneges on its commitment to fulfilling the most basic elements of the agreement, then what good will another agreement do? Perhaps if the U.S. had shown less ‘flexibility’ on these issues, Oslo could have been a success instead of the terrible disaster it became."

Rev. Karen Thomas Smith, a Baptist Christian and a chaplain at Al Akhawayn University in Morocco, expresses her commitment to principles of freedom of conscience and dissent as well as the individual and community’s right to shape the practice of religion with complete autonomy from the state. She writes, "I am therefore always leery of the state co-opting religious language to justify political actions. The strong relationship between the religious right and the political right is disconcerting to me, forging an alliance that blurs the distinction between actions taken in the name of the state and actions taken for the sake of faith. My experience in Morocco is that many Moroccan Muslims see the actions taken by the U.S. government as "Christian": Christians invading a Muslim country (Iraq), Christians siding with Jews (Israel) against Muslims (Palestinians). This is obviously a drastic oversimplification, but when President Bush uses a word like ‘crusade’ to describe U.S. action in Iraq, his own language plays into this perception. Whereas Americans tend to think in secular terms, many of my Moroccan neighbors don’t.

"I do believe, however, that people of faith should participate in political debate. And perhaps the religious principle that I would most want to be in the fore of discussion is freedom, non-coercion, and its corollary, trust. I believe that in the Middle East, America has tended far too long to attempt to control outcomes of discussions, to manipulate players in the political arena in order to ensure that U.S. interests are served. However, the outcomes of such manipulated and coerced arenas of political decision making have not served the best interests of America, much less the nations of the Middle East. The U.S. government needs to impose its agenda less. Rather, the U.S. needs to use its influence… to allow parties to choose their own solutions.

"This is a central Christian virtue, seeking not to control, but letting go of our desire to manipulate in order to be open to what the Spirit of God can do that is beyond our imagining."

Finally, Raymond Helmich’s response to this issue presents an overview that both critiques U.S. policy in the region and presents alternatives to the past errors. The following is a summary of his ideas.

A basic justice question [underlies] the relation of Israelis and Palestinians. The land has been the home of the Palestinians for many centuries, under a variety of foreign dominations. Jews have also a claim that deserves respect, a people related to the diaspora of very ancient times, much persecuted and without a land of their own.

What happened since 1948 has to be described, at least in part, as the pursuit of a morally untenable design, however. Instead of sharing the land, conditions set forth by the Balfour Declaration and the League Mandate, some elements pursued a revisionist scheme, to which much of the Israeli Right has since subscribed: "getting rid of the indigenous population … whether phrased in terms of ‘transfer,’ of ethnic cleansing or even of prospective genocide. The Israeli state will live under an indelible moral cloud if it implements that design."

It is defensible only in terms of a real fear of the extermination of the Jewish population, which had some color of credibility for that time. It is quite intelligible to me why the Arab states rejected the partition proposal at that stage (they, rather than the Palestinian population, being the ones who actually made decisions then), since this was a land that undeniably belonged to its Arab inhabitants and had been given by outsiders to someone else without their consent.

But now the Jews are there, and by 1948 they had already been there. They had come for good reason, even if some (not all) had the intention of destroying the people who were already there. To uproot them, in 1948 or at any time since, would be another injustice, matching what was being done to the Palestinians. My belief is that the United States and American opinion have been right to sustain and protect the Jewish state of Israel, but that this cannot be justified without equal concern for the good, the rights, and the freedom of Palestinians.

So where should the United States Government be in this? Both peoples are deserving of protection that the American superpower can give, and it should be firmly in favor of the peace, not the superior advantage to either side. The peoples are, by right, equal, regardless of their enormous disparity of power. Such disparity of power is in every case reason for conflict. It is obvious enough that the United States itself has power ambitions in the whole Middle Eastern region, and needs to be on guard against acting with fundamental injustice. Anyone in the Middle East knows that when the United States, as in its invasion of Iraq, talks of establishing democracy in the Middle East, what it really means is subservient government.

With all our faults, Americans have been used to living in a world where most people look up to this country as a beacon of justice and freedom. To our general bewilderment, we now live in a world in which people don't believe that. Our current government's response, in strategy and practice, has been to require that the United States maintain its military superiority to all comers for all time, and assert the right to act preemptively in defense of that superiority at any time of its choosing. The preemption doctrine can have no moral justification, and since everyone else knows that, all the other nations have to concentrate on containing this American behemoth. Sooner or later, on this basis, we will lose and go into the famous dustbin of history. The only chance for the United States to survive is to develop policies that promote justice and to work together with others to that end.

By those criteria, we have gotten ourselves into a dangerous trap by a misguided invasion of Iraq. We can't morally walk away and leave Iraqi society to rot, since it is we who have wrecked it. Resentment of American occupation there is bound to grow exponentially. Sooner or later we will we will be forced to hand over power there to someone with proper moral credentials. Meantime, we can only strive to foster a capacity for decent governance in Iraq, working at a great disadvantage since everyone who cooperates with us is thereby morally tarnished in the eyes of other Iraqis.

What recourse do we have? This will not come out well, but the best we can do is to establish our credit as promoters of genuine justice in the one place that will count most: the conflict between Israel and Palestine.

In our proper concern for the safety of the Israelis, we have nurtured a condition in which the obligations of international law are simply ignored. Since their 1967 conquest of all the rest of Palestine, we have accepted the proposition that everything there is in the gift of the Israelis. The only basis for that is the superiority of their military force, backed of course by ourselves.

Two of Israel's prime ministers, Rabin and Barak, have drawn the conclusion that they must have peace with the Palestinians for the good of Israel. The supposition that everything is in the Israelis' gift has meant that any negotiation over the peace is between Israelis and other Israelis: those who want to give something, those who want to give more, and those who want to give nothing at all. That means that Palestinians are never actually parties to the negotiation, but are expected to accept what the Israelis offer. Even President Clinton, very friendly to the Palestinians (without neglecting the needs of Israel), who wanted more for the Palestinians rather than less, still subscribed to that thesis that everything was in the gift of the Israelis. That was the reason his mediation failed.

In fact, I see little prospect of improvement so long as we have the governments we have in the United States and in Israel. American policies are all dictated by a twisted ideology, and the Sharon policy appears truly fixed on the outright destruction of the Palestinians. We need to be in support of reconciliation between the Israelis and Palestinians and a just protection for the rights of both. That can be accomplished if the standard is the rule of international law, which would protect both parties equally. But the first need, for us and for the Israelis, is to vote in a better government.