The several articles that have appeared in the Recorder on the subject of Israel and Palestine remind me of how human action is so proportionally tied to the power it represents. Great powers do great things they desire, quite proportional to their powers and desires. (It’s always the boss who hollers, not the mailroom clerk.) In modern-day Israel, supported by the U.S., we see an alliance of the greatest power on earth now and the greatest power in the Middle East (60 percent of U.S. foreign military aid for 2021 is Israel-bound). The results are that things that are done in Palestine are pretty much the consequences of these two great powers. It’s in the very nature of great powers.
The Nation magazine gives this description in its June issue: “(S)mashing their shops, breaking into their homes, dragging them from their cars and beating them savagely in the street.” This is what Jewish Israel did recently to Palestinian Israelis, but it could just as easily be the Nazis doing to the Jews during Kristallnacht, or Whites doing to Blacks in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Even without knowing the facts of who did this to whom, we would not think of Blacks doing that to Whites, Jews doing that to Nazis, or Palestinians doing that to Jewish Israelis. It’s a matter of who has the power to do such things to others, as injustice requires power to do injustice. Ironically, the Jews were victims under the Nazis when the former were powerless; now the Palestinians are victims of a strong U.S.-backed Israel, which is criticized by Amnesty International for employing some of the old Nazi tactics of torture on Palestinian terrorist suspects. Paraphrasing Lord Acton, power tends to do evil and absolute power does absolute evil.
Two recent historical examples, one Nazi and one American, further remind us how the nations of absolute power behave when their power approaches absoluteness. The Nazis at the peak of their power, on the strength of their military victories, devised a most fantastic plan called “The General Plan for the East” in which they would enslave, Germanize, and exterminate millions of people in the East, namely in Poland and Russia. Their power was so great that virtually anything that emerged in the heads of German scientists and bureaucrats in the Nazi Reich on the uses of conquered Slavs and lands was expected to be fully realized.
Between 1939 and 1942, the Nazis’ great power made it possible for them to merge fantasy with reality. All their fantasies for world conquest came to an end when their power started cracking under the strain of the defeat at Stalingrad: As their power faded, so did their ambition, ruthlessness and inhumanity. The Nazis, or Germans, without power, became predictably humble and contrite. (Nothing changes faster than our behavior as a function of our power: We become haughty or humble, as persons or as nations, depending on the level of our power.)
Something quite similar happened to the United States, between 1945 and 1949, when it was the sole owner of the atomic bomb, and therefore the power to rule the world during that brief period. The U.S. relations with its chief antagonist, the Soviet Union, were solely shaped by the possession of such power. In short, the U.S.’s bullying behavior became, at least to the Soviets and the American critics, intolerable as it threatened to “drop it” on Russia every chance they had. The White House told the ambitious Soviets to move their 15 divisions from post-Wolrd War II Iran in 48 hours, or “We’re going to drop it on you!” President Truman boasted, “They were out in 24 hours!”
In mid-September 1945, after a conference with U.S. State Secretary James Byrnes, the irritated Soviet counterpart Molotov (of the “Molotov Cocktail” fame) asked Byrnes if he “was hiding an atomic bomb in his coat pocket.” Byrnes’ response: “We carry our artillery in our pocket. If you don’t cut out all this stalling…, I’m going to pull an atomic bomb out of my hip pocket and let you have it.” Robert J. Oppenheimer said Byrnes was using “the (atomic) bomb as a pistol.”
This type of bullying by the world’s only owner of atomic bombs subsided when, in late 1949, the Soviets exploded the first atomic bomb of their own. Nowadays, digital technology has brought the two nations closer to parity.
Without the trouncing at Stalingrad for the Nazis, and without the Soviet atomic bombs and digital equality, the ambition, ruthlessness, and inhumanity of both Nazis and Americans would have become quite routine, fitting their absolute power, which always equals proportional evil.
Two questions remain: How do we prevent powers, of any kind, from becoming strong enough to do harm to the powerless? What if we, ourselves, became the victims of their great ambitious, ruthless and inhuman powers?
Jon Huer, columnist for the Recorder and professor emeritus of the University of Maryland, is the author of “Call from the Cave: Our Cruel Nature and Quest for Power,” a book about the causes of the Holocaust. He is a Greenfield resident.