Wayne O'Leary

The Looming Vietnam Analogy

As the Israel-Hamas war enters its fourth month with no clear ending in sight, an uncomfortable comparison has begun to make itself felt. Memories of my generation’s tragic forever war, Vietnam, which had receded into the background, are suddenly fresh in mind once more.

There are obvious differences, of course, between then and now. History doesn’t exactly repeat itself, as Mark Twain is supposed to have said, but it does rhyme. Much as we might like to ignore them, the rhymes are increasingly impinging on us.

Start with the position of the United States. Since the end of World War II, this country’s self-imposed mission has been to involve itself in all the world’s problems and try to solve them; it’s what America does. This leads inevitably to being militarily overextended and budgetarily stressed. From the 1950s through the 1970s, the height of the Cold War, the American agenda included resisting the spread of Communism by involvement in the wars and revolutions of Chinese and Soviet Third World client states.

The issues and stakes in these wars were seldom black and white; nationalism and post-colonial aspirations usually intruded. In Vietnam, the US foolishly took the side of one participant in an internal civil war. We’re doing something similar in Israel — not brokering a fair two-party peace agreement, but taking sides in an open-ended conflict.

If America’s direct, armed intrusion in Vietnam was aimed at shaping Southeast Asia, its arms-length presence in Israel is geared to shaping the Middle East; the outcome won’t just affect Israelis and Palestinians, but Iranians, Syrians, Egyptians, Jordanians and Lebanese, as well. The world’s leading superpower wants to dictate the balance of power among the regional Arab nation-states and simultaneously support its primary client state in the region, Israel.

Unfortunately, we have at present a flawed client. Since the 1970s, the conservative Likud Party (the GOP of Israel), which supplanted left-leaning Labour, has with only brief interruptions run the Jewish state. And since the 1990s, Benjamin Netanyahu, as leader of that party, has usually been head of government, working his way toward reactionary and corrupt one-man rule under the guise of an increasingly undemocratic democracy. The romantic days of kibbutz-centered collectivism implanted by the early Zionist socialists are long gone.

The transition is a major reason why extremist Republicans in the US identify so strongly with present-day Israel; its governance, like that of Orbán’s Hungary, is an expression of their right-wing ideology. Old-line Democrats, for their part, cleave to Israel out of reflexive habit, preferring to believe in the Israel they remember, or think they remember, rather than the Israel that currently exists.

Self-proclaimed Zionist Joe Biden, the most uncritical pro-Israel president other than Trump — OpenSecrets lists him as the single biggest US recipient of political donations from the Israeli lobby ($4.3 million since 1989) — is one of those nostalgic Democrats. His policy regarding the Jewish state is to be in lockstep with its leadership at all times, much more so than such Democratic predecessors as Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter.

The Biden embrace of Netanyahu’s government extends to standing in isolation with it in opposing a UN-sponsored Gaza ceasefire supported by, literally, the entire world. The same applies to an administration acceptance of any and all Israeli intelligence claims regarding military operations, including a Biden denial of civilian fatality statistics produced by the Gaza health ministry (20,000-plus killed by air strikes) and endorsed as largely accurate by UN health officials.

Playing fast and loose with casualty figures is in keeping with the Vietnam analogy. From 1963 to 1975, Pentagon estimates of dead and wounded couldn’t be trusted; Vietnamese civilian deaths were minimized, and enemy body counts were vastly exaggerated. Israeli and American statisticians are apparently now playing the same game. To Netanyahu, it doesn’t matter. His expressed desire is for “a mighty vengeance.” Civilian deaths are just so much collateral damage made morally acceptable, he says, by precedents set by the US itself in its own prior wars.

The Israeli position is that Gaza’s agony is trivial compared, for instance, to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where 200,000 Japanese were exterminated in 1945. Netanyahu’s blood lust is such that if dozens of Gazans have to die to eliminate one Hamas fighter, it’s a small price to pay in his eyes. Besides, extremist elements in his “unity” government want to impose a collective punishment on all Gazan Palestinians, who, after all, voted for Hamas in 2007, when it was perceived as the most viable governing alternative available. Left unsaid, of course, is that Israelis collectively voted for Netanyahu’s neofascists several times in the intervening years — six of one, half-dozen of the other.

In the long run, the Biden standpat position condemning Palestinians to either indefinite apartheid within their own homeland, or to a form of ethnic cleansing that would banish them involuntarily to a neighboring Arab state (Egypt has been suggested by Israelis) is practically and morally untenable. Ultimately, there has to be a two-state solution, something both Hamas and the Netanyahu government presently oppose, but that the West Bank Palestinian Authority (PA) supports in theory.

The man best equipped to negotiate a workable two-state settlement on behalf of Arabs is Palestinian leader in absentia Marwan Barghouti, the Alexei Navalny or Nelson Mandela of his people, who is presently languishing in an Israeli prison on trumped up charges of terrorism. Barghouti, no fanatical Islamist, is a secular nationalist, a former participant in the first and second intifadas (1987 and 2000) who’s renounced violence and attacks on civilians in favor of peaceful reconciliation. Despite this and despite widespread international support, including among liberal Jewish voices like Peter Beinart, Israel refuses to release him — due, no doubt, to his potential political effectiveness.

Barghouti is the most popular living West Bank Palestinian leader, far more admired than ineffectual PA President Mahmoud Abbas, widely viewed as corrupt and compromised. Hamas fears Barghouti’s appeal; so does Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud. Each of them seeks an all-out victory and total regional hegemony. Barghouti could split the difference and end the Middle Eastern forever war.

For that reason alone, the Biden administration should end its destructive complicity with the Netanyahu hard-liners and demand his release, using Israel’s outrageous blank check on American aid as leverage. Otherwise, it’s likely to fulfill the encroaching Vietnam analogy.

Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy. He holds a doctorate in American history and is the author of two prizewinning books.

From The Progressive Populist, February 1, 2024

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