AYOOB, Mohammed

Was Huntington Right? Revisiting the Clash of Civilizations (Insight Turkey, 1 October 2012)

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One of the greatest achievements of the Israel lobby and of Jewish Americans, in general, has been to transform the idea of America based on the Anglo-Saxon variety of a Christian civilization into one based on a common Judeo-Christian civilization. Multiple factors including American guilt about the Holocaust, the high motivation demonstrated by Jewish Americans to assimilate into American society and become “normal” Americans, and the Evangelical obsession with the ingathering of the Jews in Palestine as a pre-requisite for the return of Jesus and the “end of days” helped in this transformation. America’s largely unquestioning support for Israel is a corollary of the broad acceptance on the part of the American public that Christians and Jews, and therefore the United States and Israel, share a strong bond of cultural kinship and that this bond trumped all strategic considerations in American policy toward the Middle East, in general, and the Arab world, in particular.

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Even those American policy makers and publicists who have been mildly critical of Israeli policies that increasingly preclude a two-state solution have done so to save Israel from itself by preventing the Palestinian demographic time bomb from exploding in its face. The Palestinian narrative of dispossession, exile, and occupation and, indeed, of the demographic transformation of Palestine under the British mandate is not only ignored but treated as fictional.

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This would be the case because Arabs and Palestinians are viewed by the majority of the American public as belonging to an alien civilization. The attempt by a hypothetically strong Arab lobby to use its financial and political power to shape America’s Middle East policy would have been seen as foreign interference in the American policy-making process – a label that does not apply to those groups that lobby on behalf of the Israeli government.

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American policy toward the Middle East when analyzed through the prism of the clash of civilizations paradigm yields substantial evidence that corroborates Huntington’s central thesis. While such an exercise may not be able to provide explanations for all American actions in the Middle East, it does demonstrate that one cannot fully comprehend the logic of American policy toward the Middle East, especially as it pertains to issues affecting Israel, unless one factors in the cultural kinship based on a common civilization, to use Huntington’s term, that American policy makers strongly feel toward Israel and that acts as the filter through which they perceive Middle Eastern realities.

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