Patrick Lawrence: Israel and Its Neighborhood, An Interview with Ambassador Chas Freeman

Why have West Asian nations that long ago pledged their support to the Palestinian cause remained so silent amid Israel’s terrorizing assaults on Gaza, the West Bank, and now Lebanon? Where have the Russians and Chinese been? Is this not the time for a display of solidarity among non–Western nations? Can we not look to them as a counter to the inexcusable support the U.S. and its clients extend to the Zionist regime? What can we expect, looking forward, of the BRICS whose members [there are now 10, with 13 “partner” nations now added] just concluded a summit in Kazan? 

These are my questions a year on from the events of Oct. 7, 2023. On the assumption others may ask them, too, I put these matters to Chas Freeman, the distinguished former diplomat. Who better? Freeman, among much else, is a former assistant secretary of defense, ambassador to Saudi Arabia, and chargé d’affaires ad interim at Bangkok and Beijing. He was the principal American interpreter during President Nixon’s 1972 opening of U.S. relations with China.

Andrew Bacevich, “the dissident colonel,” as I call him, once told me—this was during the 2016 political campaigns—he thought Freeman ought to be the next secretary of state. He is, you will not be surprised to learn, the editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica article on “diplomacy.”

Our extended exchange via email follows. 

—P.L.

PL: A German newspaper recently published an interview with the Egyptian foreign minister, Sameh Shoukry, who expressed his profound frustration with the Americans as Israel continues its assault in Gaza—and now the West Bank and Lebanon. You can’t work with the Americans, he complained in so many words. They say one thing, they rarely mean it, and typically do something else altogether.  

It prompts my first question in the context of the enlarging crisis in West Asia, please comment on the diplomatic positions of America’s allies in the region. What, generally, is going through their minds? Why haven’t they reacted more vigorously to the Israeli assault? Are they simply “bought,” in one or another way? Or is there more to it?

CF: The United States no longer has any “diplomatic allies” in the region. Popular anger at American support for the Israeli effort to rid Palestine of its Arab population and expand into Gaza and Lebanon makes alignment with Washington too politically costly for Arab rulers to risk.  

Israel’s depravity has ended any prospect of normalized relations by Arab states with it. Those that have normalized relations with Israel are now under popular pressure to suspend or reverse it. More importantly, the Gulf Arabs have declared that they will be neutral in any conflict between Iran, Israel, and the United States.  Israel’s genocide in Gaza has created a state of war between it and Yemen and fostered a rapprochement between previously estranged Egypt and Turkey.  

PL: It has been said that neighboring nations had more affinity with the PLO in times past than with Hamas now because the former was a secular organization, the latter not. Is this accurate, and if so, does the distinction matter now?

CF: Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist democratic movement. It came to power in Palestine by winning an election in 2006. Hamas’s leaders take the position that Arab societies should be governed by those with support at the ballot box rather than by princes, generals, dictators, or thugs. Arab rulers who fall into these authoritarian categories naturally find this position threatening.  

Religion is not a major factor in Arab and Muslim states’ relations with Hamas.  Like Arab rulers, Hamas is Sunni Muslim. The differences of Arab rulers with Hamas are far less than they were with the atheist leadership of the PLO. Iran, which is Shi`a, has been the main supporter of Hamas — not on religious grounds but in support of Palestinian self-determination. 

PL: Can you talk about some specific nations in this context? Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince, asserted just recently there can be no question of a Riyadh–Tel Aviv rapprochement until the Palestinians have a state with East Jerusalem as its capital. What is behind this? Where are the Emirates, Qatar in particular, on the Israel–Palestine question?

CF: The Gulf Arab states all affirm that Palestinians are entitled to self-determination and support a two-state division of Palestine. They face mounting criticism from their publics for having done nothing concrete to advance this goal.  The last poll of Saudi opinion on normalization with Israel that I saw showed 94 percent opposed to it. Most now argue that those Arab states that have established diplomatic relations with Israel should now break them.

The status of Jerusalem is an important issue for the world’s two billion Muslims.  The intrusions into the Al–Aqsa Mosque and the calls of fanatic members of the Israeli cabinet for its Judaization are deeply offensive to Arab Muslims and Christians alike.

PL: I was very pleased, I admit even delighted, to see a video of the en masse walkout at the U.N. General Assembly when Netanyahu took the podium at the General Assembly on Sept. 27. I take this to be a moment of some importance, and so I have a few questions for you about it. How did you read that occasion and what was your reaction to it? 

CF: The hateful things Israel is doing have made it the most hated society on the planet. Netanyahu is seen as the moral equivalent of Adolf Hitler and Israel is a pariah everywhere outside the West. No one other than a dwindling band of American politicians now wants to be seen in Israel’s or Netanyahu’s company.  The walkout was a virtual inevitability, only slightly offset by Netanyahu’s importation of Israeli fans of his to applaud his many inversions of truth and falsehood.

PL: I wonder, actually, who was in that group. Was it a broad gathering of non– Western powers that walked out? Almost the entire membership of the new “global majority”—the so-called “Global South”—seems to have walked out, leaving only an isolated contingent from the West behind. 

Also, U.N. ambassadors do not generally act without the authorization of their ministries. Can we assume this was the case with the walkout? It was understood in advance what would be done, perhaps with a measure of coordination? And does this tell us something? 

CF: You are probably correct that there was prior consultation with capitals, but Israel is now so thoroughly despised internationally that this would hardly have been necessary. Anti–Zionism has become good politics almost everywhere outside the West.

PL: Can you talk about West Asian nations that are neither allies nor clients of the Americans? Iran, Iraq, Syria, Turkey: How have they responded to the Gaza crisis — or not — and how do you see them reacting as it expands?

CF: Israel’s actions in Gaza, Syria, Yemen, and now Lebanon, and its efforts to produce a widening regional war in West Asia, have accomplished the previously impossible. They have united Shi`a with Sunni and consolidated the Saudi–Iranian rapprochement. The greater Israeli cruelty to its captive Arab populations and neighbors, the stronger the coalition against it becomes. [The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Islamic Republic reopened ties, after a lengthy breach, following talks sponsored by the Chinese in March 2023.]  

PL: The big question for a lot of people is why there has been so little effective reaction, even diplomatically, to Israel’s barbaric conduct since the events of 7 October. 

The Arab League has issued some strong statements, but these have not come to much. As Israel’s savagery became evident last autumn, a few Latin American nations withdrew their ambassadors or cut relations altogether. The South Africans have gone the legal route, very honorably. But other than this, there’s not much going on. 

Why the silence, the timidity, whatever you are inclined to call it? It seems a case of “the whole world watching” but the whole world not doing anything. Does this come down to the question of American power?

CF: It is proof, I believe, that, as the saying has it, no one wants to get into a pissing contest with a skunk. That is especially the case when the skunk is backed by a country as powerful and prone to coercive actions as the United States. The supporters of Zionism have a well-deserved reputation for the vicious slander of their critics and determination to ostracize them. This intimidates most people and governments.

Tactically, with a few honorable exceptions, countries have opted to wring their hands while sitting on them. But the strategic (i.e., the long-run) implications of Israel’s self-delegitimization will be far-reaching. International law and the global majority may have temporarily been set aside by risk-averse governments, but tolerance of Israel by their publics as a practitioner of evil is clearly wearing ever thinner.  

There is a widening gap between entrenched political elites and outraged mass opinion that is destabilizing politics in democratic and undemocratic societies alike. Demands for the re-democratization of Western societies, as well as punishment of Israel, are becoming ever louder. The “BDS” movement—boycott, disinvest, and sanction—is gaining ground, much as it eventually did against the far milder form of apartheid earlier condoned by the West in South Africa.

PL: Turning to the Europeans, especially the British, French, and Germans: Do we have to conclude these nations are simply vassal states, or is there more complexity to their positions?

CF: Each is different. The Germans are consumed with guilt for their conduct of the antisemitic Holocaust and overcompensate by conferring immunity on Israel, which came into being as a result of that European atrocity. The British and French, like the United States, have politics that are policed by very effective Zionist lobbies and media that self-censor in favor of Israel. Ironically, some European countries with fascist, antisemitic pasts and current affinities for xenophobic authoritarianism see contemporary Israeli political culture as similar in some respects to their own. And Islamophobia is a rising factor in European Christendom.

PL: We come to the big non–Western powers: The Russians, the Chinese, the Indians, if you want to include them the Brazilians. I would have expected more of them by now. The Chinese convened that meeting of various Palestinian factions—this shortly before Ismail Haniyeh’s assassination on 31 July. It struck me as a typical gesture of the nation purporting to live by Zhou Enlai’s Five principles. 

What are your thoughts on how the major non–Western powers have so far responded to the West Asia crisis?   

CF: These countries are engaged in building an alternative to the increasingly impotent United Nations structure and its sidelined regulatory agencies, like the WTO. The BRICS group began as a protest movement against American and G–7 global primacy by major non–Western powers. It is now developing the potential to convene ad hoc assemblies that can make rules outside the U.N. framework, pending the reform and reorganization of the U.N. to restore its effectiveness.  

Chinese efforts at peacemaking in West Asia and Eastern Europe have the backing of its fellow members of BRICS. It is significant that South Africa—the  “S” in BRICS—brought the cases against Israeli genocide in both the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court. We are seeing the gradual growth of willingness on the part of decolonized countries to hold the West to its hypocritically professed ideals.

PL: What do you see out front on the diplomatic side? One is forced to wonder, the Israelis having opened a new front in Lebanon and no sign the Western powers will respond any differently, whether we are looking at what I’ve taken to calling limitless impunity, impunity with no end. What influence, what impact, can other nations have on the West Asia crisis at this point? 

If you would, please consider the non–West in particular. Can we expect anything more of these nations than we’ve so far seen? The question is especially important, it seems to me, because it bears on the larger matter of “a new world order” and just what any such notion may or may not eventually mean.

CF: I do see the world beyond the West becoming more insistent on respect for global norms by the West as it becomes more powerful and prosperous. The “rise of the rest,” as Fareed Zakaria put it, is a reality. The global center of gravity has left the Euro–Atlantic region.

Middle-ranking powers are becoming more independent and assertive in defense of their own interests and less deferential to the club of imperialist powers that makes up the G–7. And, while the politics of formerly colonized countries are often dominated by the tremors of post-colonial hangovers, their demands, like their struggles for independence, have been inspired by ideas they absorbed from the West. 

For the most part, they seek to affirm rather than dispense with the global norms enacted in the period of Western dominance. Thus, they do not seek to overthrow the inherited order but to restore compliance with its ideals. The U.S. perception that they are “revisionist” has a basis, but U.S. antagonism to their demands is founded on a desire to retain a hegemonic role in the global political economy and the ability to use force to override the very norms Americans helped compose and still claim to support.

PL: Just one more question in this line. There is renewed talk now of fundamental reform at the U.N., and, while this is hardly a new topic, the discourse seems more serious now — more promising. You had a plain and simple demonstration of one big problem at the General Assembly this past week: The G.A. can recommend, but all executive authority lies with the five Security Council powers. This, a structural flaw if you like, goes back to the U.N.’s founding. 

Richard Falk and Hans–Christof von Sponeck, two authoritative figures with long experience as senior U.N. officials, just published Liberating the United Nations: Realism with Hope (Stanford). I count this an important book. 

Can you think out loud about the spreading crisis in West Asia and what might be done about it in the context of this new movement for U.N. reform?

CF: A bit of diplomatic imagination is much needed. There is nothing in international law that would prevent the ad hoc gathering of like-minded countries to concert policies and practices without regard to the United Nations. The U.N. is demonstrating a level of political impotence that resembles that of the League of Nations in the face of fascist actions in the 1930s in China, Ethiopia, and Central Europe. We must hope that the reform or replacement of the U.N. will not require a world war, which is what it took to replace the League with a new and — for a time — more effective organization.  

As I suggested, the BRICS seems to be developing into an institution that might give birth to new and more just systems of global governance. But whether it does or not, the need to focus on shared objectives and devise collective measures to pursue them is pressing. Falk and von Sponeck are onto something important.

PL: As it happens, the BRICS just concluded a summit in Kazan, along the Volga in southwestern Russia. I found the timing suggestive, if only vaguely, of a world order to come as it prepares to replace a declining order. The Western press coverage, was, of course, almost farcically resentful, and I always read this kind of thing as a measure of the West’s insecurities. Do you have a read on the summit and its significance? 

The big news that was supposed to come out of the Kazan gathering—so I thought, anyway—was a formal announcement of a strategic partnership, maybe even an alliance, between Russia and the Islamic Republic. This would have huge implications for the West Asia crisis. But I didn’t see anything on the Moscow–Tehran relationship. Do you have a thought on this? 

CF: Those with militarized foreign policies not surprisingly think of the BRICS as a “bloc” like the G–7 or a potential alliance like NATO, but it is neither. It is an alternative to Western domination of international institutions and rulemaking, but it is a forum, like the United Nations, not an anti–Western coalition. Treating it as anti–Western could, however, provoke it to become anti–Western. 

If Russia and Iran wanted to formalize their defense relationship, the BRICS meeting at Kazan would have provided a place to do so, but the timing was not opportune, given the uncertainties created by Israel’s threats to attack Iran to restore escalation dominance and thus achieve the regional hegemony to which it aspires.  Russia does not need a formal alliance to be able to help Iran or others in the region to defend themselves against Israeli aggression.  It will do so to the extent this serves Russian interests, as it has in Syria. Iran will continue to sell drones and transfer technology to Russia in return.

One important difference between the fading world order post–Cold War and the new international system toward which we are transitioning is the diminished role of alliances and the return of classic diplomacy. The emerging system is one dominated by ententes (limited partnerships for limited purposes) based on common interests, some of which may be transient, rather than by alliances embodying shared values as well as interests. 

All five of the original BRICS member states are nonaligned and regard “alliances” as liabilities rather than unalloyed strategic assets. They are prepared to defend their own interests, which they privilege above those of other nations. They will agree to help others defend themselves when contingencies make this expedient but not otherwise.

The reasoning behind this view is straightforward. Commitments to defend other sovereign states subject those who make them to the risk of becoming embroiled in fights that are not their own to advance interests they may not share. George Washington understood this well, which is why he counseled Americans to avoid entangling alliances as well as passionate attachments to other nations. Our current leadership does not understand the wisdom of such a self-interested and flexible approach to foreign affairs. It seems incapable of realizing that the BRICS member states are prioritizing diplomatic dialogue and cooperation over military deterrence. BRICS members seek to safeguard their sovereignty not just by freeing themselves from Western hegemony but by enhancing cooperation among each other based on give and take that serves common interests.