Israel, the US and the New Orientalism
What makes this repackaged Orientalism new are its intentions, its proponents, and the enemy it has targeted for destruction. Its intention is to mobilize the United States behind a scheme to balkanize the Middle East into ethnic, sectarian and religious micro states, a new system of client states that would facilitate Israel’s long-term hegemony over the region. Ironically, the scholars who have dominated this repackaging of the old Orientalism are mostly Jewish, a reversal of roles that flows directly from the creation of a Jewish colonial-settler state in the heart of the Middle East. Once they had succeeded in creating Israel, the Zionists knew that its long-term survival depended on fomenting wars between the West and Islam. Zionism has pursued this goal by its own wars against Arabs and, since 1967, a brutal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza; but equally, it has pulled out all the stops to convince the United States to support unconditionally Israel’s depredations against Arabs.
The target of the war that the new Orientalists want to wage are what they variously call Islamists, Islamic fundamentalists, Islamic militants, Islamo-fascists, or Islamic terrorists. Whatever the term, it embraces all Islamicate movements–no matter what their positions on the political uses of violence–that appeal to Islamic symbols to mobilize local, national, and pan-Islamic resistance against the wars that the United States and Israel have jointly waged against the Middle East since 1945. These Islamicate resistance movements, which are both national and transcend national boundaries, have replaced the secular nationalists who, after failing to achieve their objectives, were co-opted by the United States and Israel to destroy the Islamicate resistance.
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