Hasbara: Blame it on the Wasps.
A Review of Stephen Zunes ‘The Israel
Lobby: How Powerful is it Really?’
Published May 18, 2006
Updated June 4, 2006
America’s Ruling Establishment.
Over the last four decades a succession of
America administrations have sent the Jews-only state in
Palestine (Jos) a vast treasure chest to implement its racist
policies in Palestine and consolidate its military supremacism
in the Middle East. “Total direct U.S. aid to Israel amounts to
well over $140 billion in 2003 dollars.
(John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt ‘The
Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy’ rwp_06_011_walt.pdf March
2006 p.2). According to Stephen Zunes in his essay, ‘<a href=“http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/3270”>The
Israel Lobby: How Powerful is it Really?</a>’ America’s ruling
elite sees the Jos as its colony or client state. It lavishly
funds the Jos to pursue its strategic interests in the Middle
East.
Zunes implies this ruling elite consists of
Wasps, “these influential and (mostly) wealthy, white,
Anglo-Saxon, Protestant lawmakers ...” (Stephen Zunes ‘The
Israel Lobby: How Powerful is it Really?’
http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/3270
May 16, 2006). According to Zunes, Wasps have created the
world’s sole military hyper power and run what is increasingly
looking like an American empire. American Jews are mere
supplicants to the court of the Wasp emperors and the Jos is an
American colony more or less wholly dependent on America for its
survival. If the Jos doesn’t obey Wasps’ orders, it won’t be
rewarded, and it won’t survive. In other words, the Jos is no
different from any other American colony such as Honduras. Zunes
argues that neither the Jos nor the Jews-only lobby in America (Jol)[i]
is powerful enough to extract such monies if it wasn’t in the
interests of America’s ruling Wasp elite.
There is little doubt that, up to the second
world war, America’s ruling elite consisted primarily of Wasps.
But, thereafter, American Jews have become increasingly wealthy
and politically powerful. Whilst there are still many Wasps
amongst America’s ruling establishment, it is currently
dominated by American Jews. They own or manage a significant
part of America’s economy. They own, manage, and run, most of
America’s media. They finance, and predominate in, some of
America’s most prestigious universities. Although American
Jewish billionaires are only a minority amongst America’s
wealthiest people, they are by far and away the most politically
active. They fund a variety of organizations in order to convert
their wealth into political power to achieve their political
objectives. They have established more think tanks and lobbying
organizations than any other lobby group in America - a
remarkable achievement given that American Jews compose only
2-3% of America’s population. They fund American political
parties not merely the Republican and Democratic parties but
even the country’s smaller parties. American Jews also
predominate in all of these parties. A major component of
America’s ruling establishment is what is commonly referred to
as the military industrial complex. Zunes implies firstly, that
this complex is run entirely by Wasps even though he presents no
evidence it is. And, secondly, that the political power of the
complex derives from being America’s biggest industry. This may
have been the case in the past but no longer. America’s biggest
industry is the media and entertainment industry which is
dominated by American Jews.
Since the second world war, America’s Jewish
elite has succeeded in persuading/pressuring/bribing a
succession of American administrations into supporting the Jos
on a number of critical occasions. Over time, these victories
have become increasingly frequent and increasingly beneficial to
the Jos until, after the Pentagon and New York bombings, the
dominance of America’s Jewish elite slid almost imperceptibly
into position as America’s ruling elite. America is now ruled by
a Jewish elite consisting of Jewish billionaires, Jewish media
owners, Jewish dominated academic institutions, Jewish run think
tanks, Jewish dominated political parties, Jewish dominated
state legislatures, Jewish owned Congress, and the huge
proportion of American Jews in the Bush administration.[ii]
The increasing domination of American Jews
over America’s economy and political system explains a number of
critical political developments. Firstly, that America’s defence
and foreign policies have all been imported, primarily by
American Jews, from the Jos. Secondly, the extraordinary
transformation of the Jos’s enemies into America’s enemies even
though they pose no threat to America nor even to American
interests in the Middle East. "With the assault on Iraq," wrote
the distinguished historian, David Hirst, "the U.S. was not
merely adopting Israel's long-established methods - of
initiative, offense and pre-emption - ; it was also adopting
Israel's adversaries as its own...” (quoted in Jeffrey Blankfort
‘A War for Israel’
http://www.leftcurve.org/LC28WebPages/WarForIsrael.html
April 2004).[iii]
Finally, the vast donations that American
Jews have been able to extract from successive American
administrations. Today these donations have become tribute
payments that the Jos, with the aid of America’s ruling Jewish
elite, extracts from its American colony. These tribute payments
ensure the Jos’s military supremacism not only in the Middle
East but around much of the rest of the world.
Over the last sixty years, the growth in the
economic, social, political, and cultural, power of American
Jews has been phenomenal. This has fostered the equally
phenomenal rise in the military and political power of the Jos.
The Jos did not exist in early 1948 but is now commonly regarded
as the fourth most powerful military in the world.
“Israel has become a military
superpower in its own right. Its army and air force rival those
of the major European countries, and it has become the world's
fourth largest nuclear power, despite never signing the Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty.” (Jeff Halper ‘Israel as an
Extension of American Empire’ http://www.counterpunch.org/halper11072005.html
November 7th 2005). American Jews’ control over the
American political system gives them dominance, but not yet
total dominance, over America’s military hyper power. The Jos,
America’s ruling Jewish elite, and the Jewish elite in many
western countries including Russia, compose a global Jewish
elite which runs a Jewish empire for the benefit of this elite
and its headquarters in the Jos.
Zunes’s Ideological Stance.
Here then are two opposing models of the
composition of America’s ruling elite and thus the relationship
between America and the Jos. It might be expected that political
scientists would collect evidence, develop explanations for
historical and political events, and perhaps even make
predictions about the future course of events in order to
determine which of these models is correct. However, as far as
Zunes is concerned, this is not the case. He ignores vast tracts
of evidence. He says nothing about America’s Jewish elite, the
scale of its political power, nor its rise within the American
elite over the last sixty years. He says nothing about the
proportion of Jewish owned businesses in the American economy
nor the inhibiting effect this has on the political views of
millions of people employed by these businesses. He says nothing
about the Jewish domination of America’s biggest industry and
the colossal impact this has on shaping the views of ordinary
Americans. He says nothing about what Jeff Blankfort terms the
military-industrial-Israeli complex.[iv]
It should be added that Mearsheimer and Walt do not address such
issues either although this is not relevant in this review.
When Zunes’s dismisses the proposition that
American Jews were responsible for pushing America into the
invasion of Iraq he makes a critical generalization. “There are
a number of plausible explanations, ranging from control of the
country's oil resources to strategic interests to ideological
motivations. One explanation that should not be taken seriously,
however, is the assertion that the right-wing government of
Israel and its American supporters played a major role in
leading the US to invade Iraq.” (Stephen Zunes Israel not to
blame for Iraq mess’ http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HA11Ak01.html
Jan 11, 2006).[v]
Zunes is not merely dismissing a particular hypothesis. In
effect, he is saying that he refuses to discuss any aspect of
Jewish power. Zunes not only ignores any facts concerning Jewish
economic and media interests, he dismisses any discussion of
Jewish power whether in America or around the world. He refuses
to even countenance the theory that stands in stark contrast to
his own.
Ignoring his academic duty as a political
scientist to examine all sides of the argument Zunes dismisses
the accusation that American Jews pushed America into a proxy
zionist war on the grounds that. “Because this particular theory
parallels dangerous anti-Semitic stereotypes that exaggerate
Jewish power and influence, however, it is a particularly
grievous misinterpretation, not just because it reinforces
long-standing oppressive attitudes against a minority group, but
because it diverts attention away from those who really are
responsible for the unfolding tragedy in Iraq.” (Stephen Zunes
‘Israel not to blame for Iraq mess’ http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HA11Ak01.html
Jan 11, 2006). But until questions about how much “power and
influence” American Jews actually possess are determined then
how is possible to be certain who is exaggerating their power or
“who really [was] responsible” for the war in Iraq?
Zunes resorts to a historical analogy to
explain his view of the current relationship between Wasps and
American Jews. “Throughout Europe in past centuries, the ruling
class of a given country would, in return for granting limited
religious and cultural autonomy, set up certain individuals in
the Jewish community to become the visible agents of the
oppressive social order, such as tax collectors and money
lenders. When the population would threaten to rise up against
the ruling class, the rulers could then blame the Jews, sending
the wrath of an exploited people against convenient scapegoats,
resulting in the pogroms and other notorious waves of repression
that have taken place throughout the Jewish Diaspora over the
centuries.” (Stephen Zunes ‘Israel not to blame for Iraq mess’
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HA11Ak01.html Jan 11,
2006). So, those devious medieval rulers set up Jews as tax
collectors and money lenders solely to protect themselves from
the revolting peasants! This questionable medieval reality is
supposed to illuminate modern global politics, “Using Israel as
an excuse for unpopular US policies in the Middle East is
nothing new, either. In short, American officials are using
classic anti-Semitic scapegoating by blaming an alleged cabal of
rich Jews behind the scenes for being responsible for a widely
perceived injustice as a means of deflecting attention away from
those who actually are responsible.” (Stephen Zunes ‘Israel not
to blame for Iraq mess’ http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HA11Ak01.html
Jan 11, 2006). It could be quipped that Zunes’s refusal to
discuss Jewish interests and Jewish power because of this
fantastic medieval analogy, is a very convenient scapegoat for
condoning, and thus protecting, Jewish power.
When trying to assess the power relationships
between American Wasps and American Jews and thereby the
existence of either an American, or a Jewish, empire Zunes rules
out of consideration not merely the notion of a Jewish empire
but of any Jewish power - indeed any Jewish interests. This
doesn’t exactly leave too many alternatives as to who the real
power holders might be! Zunes’s position is thus transparently
ideological. He starts from the premise that Wasps control the
American empire and then deduces everything from it ignoring all
evidence to the contrary.
Is the Jos America’s Strategic Asset in
the Persian Gulf?
According to Zunes, America’s Wasp
establishment manages a global empire which forces the Jos into
protecting Wasps’ strategic interests in the region, “It has
long been in Washington's interest to maintain a militarily
powerful and belligerent Israel dependent on the United States.”
The Jos is a strategic asset which obeys orders from its
American rulers. It is important to point out that Zunes’s view
of America’s relationship with the Jos is not a hypothesis whose
validity has been assessed in terms of empirical evidence. It’s
an ideology. He starts from the premise of Wasp global
domination and then logically deduces the Jos’s servile role.
Similar views are held by other left wingers such as Noam
Chomsky, Joseph Massad, Jeff Halper,[vi]
and Norman Finkelstein.[vii]
Zunes’s ideology is virtually divorced from reality for a number
of reasons.
Firstly, he argues the Jos “projects”
America’s military power in the Middle East. “Washington wants a
Middle East where Israel can serve a proxy role in projecting
U.S. military and economic interests.” Michael Neumann retorts,
“Furthermore, what does 'projecting US
power' mean? What exactly is this projection system supposed to
be? If the US sends troops to the region, it does not do so via
Israel. If it sends ships, it does not use Israeli ports. If it
sends aircraft, it does not use Israeli airfields. It may use
Israeli intelligence a bit, but it also uses Jordanian, Saudi
and Egyptian intelligence, and its own monitoring systems do not
depend on Israeli satellites. Israel does not supply the US with
oil or other vital resources for its military operations.
Israeli banks do not wire secret US funds to Middle Eastern
capitals.” (Michael Neumann ‘The Stability and Value of
Israel’
http://www.counterpunch.org/neumann05132006.html
May 13/14, 2006). Left wingers would have us believe that the
Jos protects America’s oil supplies but how exactly could it be
of military assistance? “Israel would
have to shove through Syria or Lebanon or Jordan to get near any
oil. That would cause a major conflagration and - guess what -
destroy enormous amounts of oil-producing capacity.” (Michael
Neumann ‘The Israel Lobby and Beyond’
http://www.counterpunch.org/neumann04042006.html April 4,
2006).
Secondly, if the Jos is America’s colonial
asset it seems bizarre the Jos has never fought any wars for
America nor has it lost a single soldier in a battle to protect
America or American interests. Even worse is that occasionally a
Jos politician will let slip that the Jos wouldn’t go to war for
America or sacrifice its soldiers for America. Whilst the Jos
has never gone to war for its supposed colonial master, America
has intervened to support the Jos during one of its invasions of
neighbouring countries, and fought a couple of proxy zionist
wars, resulting in the loss of thousands of American lives. From
the perspective of Zunes’s ideology, even more incongruous is
that in 1967 the Jos killed nearly three dozen American
servicemen when it attacked the USS Liberty. Neumann concludes,
“The view that Israel is an
indispensable ally is a contagious disease of the Zionist
imagination. We are taught to regard Israel as standing shoulder
to shoulder with the US government in some nebulous battle. What
battle is that? The US fights all its battles without Israel,
and always has.” (Michael Neumann ‘The Stability and
Value of Israel’
http://www.counterpunch.org/neumann05132006.html
May 13/14, 2006). So, which is the empire and which is the
colony?
Thirdly, the baseline reality that needs to
be considered when assessing America’s strategic interests in
the Middle East is that the Jos has no oil whereas Arab/Islamic
countries have a super-abundance of oil. Transparently,
objectively, and overwhelmingly, America’s strategic interests
lay with the Arab/Islamic world not with the Jos. This is a
no-brainer. This stark reality had to be confronted by American
administrators and politicians after the second world war when
the founding of the Jos was being discussed and planned. Many
opposed the idea. “Following World War II, foreign policy
professionals wrote scores of position papers that warned an
independent Jewish state would trigger a 'reject phenomenon'
throughout the Middle East. Most of President Truman’s cabinet
was against it. The most formidable naysayer was then Secretary
of State Gen. George Marshall.” (Arnaud
De Borchgrave ‘Touching the third rail’
http://news.monstersandcritics.com/northamerica/article_1157963.php/Touching_the_third_rail
Apr 24, 2006).
President Harry Truman eventually supported
the establishment of the Jos. Firstly, because he needed the
votes of American Jews in key states in the 1948 presidential
election campaign. “Harry Truman knew
as well as any Republican that the Democrats did not have a
prayer to win New York state unless they could pile up a huge
majority in heavily Jewish New York City.” That Date in
November’
http://www.time.com/time/archive/preview/0,10987,934016,00.html
Oct. 14, 1946). Secondly, because rich American Jews were
financing the Democratic party’s electoral campaigns. According
to Truman’s daughter, "More than once,
the Palestine question was put to Dad in terms of American
politics. At a cabinet luncheon on October 6, 1947, Bob Hannegan
almost made a speech, pointing out how many Jews were major
contributors to the Democratic Party's campaign fund and were
expecting the United States to support the Zionists' position on
Palestine." (Lenni Brenner ‘The Lobby and the Great
Protestant Crusader’
http://www.counterpunch.org/brenner05172006.html May 17,
2006). Thirdly, as the Christisons have pointed out, most of
Truman’s inner circle of advisors were Jews who were fervent
supporters of a Jewish state, “Truman would probably not have
been as supportive of establishing a Jewish state without the
heavy influence of his very pro-Zionist advisers.” (Kathleen and
Bill Christison ‘The Rise of the Israel Lobby: A Measure of Its
Power – CounterPunch May 16-31, 2006). Fourthly, Truman faced
popular demonstrations by American Jews for the establishment of
Jos. “A quarter of a million people marched in Manhattan. One
hundred thousand squeezed into Madison Square Garden, many of
them in uniform. Over 100,000 telegrams deluged the White House.
All demanded the immediate recognition of the about-to-be-born
new state of Israel.” (Arnaud De
Borchgrave ‘Touching the third rail’
http://news.monstersandcritics.com/northamerica/article_1157963.php/Touching_the_third_rail
Apr 24, 2006).[viii]
Finally, although initially parts of the Jewish owned media in
America opposed the establishment of the Jos, the zionists
browbeat them into support. “In 1946,
Arthur Hays Sulzberger gave a synagogue speech denouncing
Zionist attacks on calls for liberalizing America's immigration
laws, passed in 1924 to keep down the number of Catholic and
Jewish immigrants. These Zionists wanted Jews in Displaced
Persons camps in Germany to have no choice but to go to
Palestine. They retaliated by getting the city's Jewish
department stores to pull ads from the paper.” (Lenni
Brenner ‘The Lobby and the Great Protestant Crusader’
http://www.counterpunch.org/brenner05172006.html May 17,
2006). These same tactics were later adopted by the Jol and
continue to be used today.
Any one of these factors might have been
enough to persuade Truman to support the establishment of the
Jos but to be faced by all five made the decision almost a
foregone conclusion. This was an over-caused event. Domestic,
party political considerations trumped America’s strategic
interests. Truman sacrificed his country’s geopolitical
interests, primarily the oil industry, to support the foundation
of the Jos. This sacrifice was not an anomaly - thereafter it
became a constant and ever louder refrain. America has suffered
increasingly for its support for the establishment of the Jos.
It’s also interesting that when Truman made his decision,
members of America’s Wasp ruling elite, especially those in the
oil industry, couldn’t be bothered to fund the Democratic party
despite the dangers to their interests of allowing American Jews
to fund the party and thus influence the country’s foreign
policies when there was a democratic presidency. The interests
of any multi-national corporation are important to society but
unless corporations translate their economic power into
political power to defend and promote their interests they will
be overwhelmed by other political forces – and this is what has
happened to America’s Wasp elite. What is so remarkable about
America is not merely the rise to power of the Jewish elite but
Wasp billionaires’ lack of concern about translating their
economic wealth into political power.
Fourthly, Zunes promotes the traditional,
left wing proposition that the foreign policies of America’s
Wasp elite are preoccupied by oil. “Indeed, oil companies and
the arms industry exert far more economic and ideological
influence over Washington's policy in the Persian Gulf region
than does the Israel lobby.” He doesn’t bother to explain why
America is preoccupied with oil only in the Middle East rather
than in South America or Africa or Russia. Perhaps the most
blatant example of oil’s secondary importance is that in 1995,
under pressure from the Jos/Jol, president Clinton banned
America’s gigantic multinational oil companies from making any
substantial investment in Iran. These oil companies could have
made vast profits from the exploitation of Iran’s vast fossil
fuels reserves – such profits would also have boosted the
American economy. Oil company leaders were none too pleased
about the ban. No less a figure than Dick Cheney objected to it
on behalf of what was then a minor oil company, “Go back to
March 1996. Cheney was CEO of Halliburton, which was eagerly
seeking to win energy business in Iran. The Clinton
Administration had imposed sanctions on Iran a year earlier. “I
think,” said Cheney, “we Americans sometimes make mistakes.
There seems to be an assumption that somehow we know what's best
for everybody else and that we are going to . . . get everybody
else to live the way we would like.” Two years later, in a
speech at the Cato Institute, Cheney was even more scathing
toward American sanctions on Iran. He said that in 1997
America's partners in the Middle East had refused to allow U.S.
military forces to be based on their territory in anticipation
of taking “military action against Iraq in order to get [it] to
honor the U.N. resolutions.” And why were our friends being so
recalcitrant? In part, Cheney explained, because the United
States “had been trying to force the governments in the region
to adhere to an anti-Iranian policy, and our views raised
questions in their mind about the wisdom of U.S. leadership.
They cited it as an example of something they thought was unwise
and that they should not do . . . The nation that's isolated in
terms of our sanctions policy in that part of the globe is not
Iran. It is the United States. And the fact that we have tried
to pressure governments in the region to adopt a sanctions
policy that they clearly are not interested in pursuing has
raised doubts in the minds of many of our friends about the
overall wisdom and judgment of U.S. policy in the area.”” (Ken
Silverstein ‘Dick Cheney, Dove’ http://harpers.org/sb-cheney-3020932092.html
May 17, 2006). What must have been even more galling to leaders
of America’s oil corporations was that the ban was introduced
not on the grounds of any immediate or long term threat to
America’s national security let alone its national interests but
because of Iran’s support for Hezbollah freedom fighters trying
to end the Jos’s illegal occupation of southern Lebanon. At this
period in time the idea of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons
belonged to the realm of political fantasy. That America’s
Jewish elite was able to overpower America’s gigantic
multi-national, oil companies was one thing but to sacrifice the
country’s oil giants, and the American economy, for the sake of
the pathetically miniscule threat that Hezbollah posed to the
Jos reveals a much more frightening degree of Jewish power in
America’s political system.
This was not the only grossly
disproportionate sacrifice that America has made for its Jewish
masters. One of the reasons Zunes gives for dismissing the
proposition that America invaded Iraq in order protect the Jos
is that he believes Saddam posed no threat to the Jos. .. “in
the years leading up to the March 2003 invasion, Iraq was no
longer a strategic threat to Israel nor was it actively involved
in anti-Israeli terrorism. In short, Israelis had little to
worry about Iraq during Saddam Hussein's final years in power.”
(Stephen Zunes Israel not to blame for Iraq mess’ http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HA11Ak01.html
Jan 11, 2006). Zunes is correct about the threat posed by
Saddam. Given Saddam’s precarious position, the only policy he
could risk in order to express his opposition to the Jos was
providing compensation for the families of Palestinian freedom
fighters whose homes had been demolished by the terrorist Jos
state. “It is also true that Iraq supported a tiny pro-Iraqi
Palestinian group known as the Arab Liberation Front, which was
known to pass on much of these funds to families of Palestinians
who died in the struggle against Israel. In any case,
given that Israeli occupation forces routinely destroyed the
homes of families of suicide bombers and the Iraqi money fell
far short of making up for their losses, it was hardly an
incentive for someone to commit an act of terrorism, which tends
to be driven by the anger, hopelessness and desperation from
living under an oppressive military occupation, not from
financial incentives.” (Stephen Zunes Israel not to blame for
Iraq mess’ http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HA11Ak01.html
Jan 11, 2006). But, contrary to Zunes’s conclusion, as far as
the Jos/Jol were concerned the miniscule financial and
ideological contribution Saddam was making to the Palestinians
was more than enough to warrant an invasion. If American Jews
could get America to ban its oil companies in Iran because of
Hezbollah’s pin pricks, then why shouldn’t they try to get
America to invade Iraq because of Saddam’s diminutive financial
contributions to Palestinian freedom fighters? After all, such
an invasion wasn’t going to cost any Jewish lives or resources.
Finally, it has to be wondered how the Jos
can be an American colony when it determines America’s enemies
even though they pose no threat to America. Saddam was never an
enemy of America. He posed no threat to America or even to
American interests. On the contrary, he went to war against Iran
in order to show what a staunch ally he could be to America.
Throughout most of the 1980s he was feted by the Reagan
administrations which recognized his strategic value.[ix]
Saddam believed his reward for
fighting the terrible war against Iran which killed millions and
nearly bankrupted both countries, was that he could annexe
Kuwait, an artificial construct created by the British empire,
to help rejuvenate his economy and military power. His army sat
on the Kuwaiti border for three weeks until the Bush senior
administration acquiesced in the invasion. And yet
shortly after the invasion, the Jol/Jos succeeded in pushing the
Bush senior administration into betraying Saddam and, with the
help of the Jewish dominated American media, almost instantly
transformed him into America’s greatest enemy. One of Zunes’s
defences for his beloved Jos is that, “In contrast, Washington's
Arab allies - still suspicious of U.S. intentions and lacking
the Israeli advantages of well-trained armed forces, political
stability, technological sophistication, and the ability to
mobilize human and material resources - could never substitute
for America's alliance with Israel.” In the 1980s Iraq had as
many advantages as the Jos, if not more – which, indeed, is why
the Jos was so intent on decimating the country.
Iran hasn’t regarded America as an enemy
since the death of Ayatollah Khomeini. Despite being labeled as
part of the axis of evil, Iran attempted to seek a compromise
with America in 2003. It poses no threat to America or its
interests in the Middle East. And yet America’s ruling Jewish
elite has succeeded in hyping up the view that it is now
America’s greatest enemy – in the belligerent, paranoid view of
the Jewish neocons, Ahmadinejad has been turned into the latest
in a long line of Adolf Hitler’s! But, according to Juan Cole,
Iran is no more of an urgent global strategic problem to America
than Burma or Zimbabwe. “While it is difficult to see why the
United States should be more exercised about Iran than about
Burma or Zimbabwe, it is no secret what the Israeli government
thinks about the matter.” (Juan Cole ‘More
on Autonomous Regions’
http://www.juancole.com/2006_05_01_juancole_archive.html
May 02, 2006). Raimondo
concurs, “Iran represents a threat to nothing and no one but
Israel, and everybody knows it.” (Justin Raimondo ‘Steppingstone
to War’ http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=8914
April 28, 2006).
The Jos is an Ever Increasing Catastrophe
for America.
The Jos has never lived up to its propaganda
image as America’s strategic asset in the Middle East. It has
been a nightmarish liability for America ever since its
establishment. It has continually undermined, distorted, and
even wrecked America’s interests in the region – only rarely
supporting America when it was in its interests to do so.
* The Jos’s violent, terroristic foundation,
its continual slaughter of Palestinians, its continual
expropriation of Palestinian property, and its increasingly
hideous humiliation of the innocent Palestinian people, has
alienated the Arab/Islamic world for the last sixty years
despite the desperate desire of many Arab/Islamic leaders for a
mutually beneficial relationship with America. During the cold
war period, the establishment of the Jos constantly pushed the
Arab/Islamic world towards the Soviet empire despite its
reluctance to move in this direction.
* In 1956 Britain, France, and the Jos,
invaded Egypt. The Jos was clearly acting against the strategic
interests of its alleged colonial master. When Eisenhower
discovered what was happening he forced the withdrawal of the
invading armies.
* Thereafter, the Jos carried out a series of
black propaganda operations to sabotage America’s relationship
with Egypt even though Nasser wanted an alliance with America.[x]
Such an alliance would have been in America’s interests.
* From the late 1950s onwards the Jos
deliberately misled successive American administrations about
its construction of a nuclear power reactor, its acquisition of
nuclear fuel, and its development of nuclear weapons. This was a
fundamental deception about which virtually nothing is said in
America as if it was of no significance to America’s
geostrategic interests.
* In 1967 the Jos pre-emptively attacked, and
comprehensively defeated, four Arab armies. The Arab world’s
lack of preparedness for war shows clearly their disinterest in
warmongering. The Jos also attacked an American naval vessel.
“The special U.S.-Israel relationship encountered another major
hiccup during the 1967 Six-Day War ... Israeli warplanes
repeatedly attacked the USS Liberty, a ship intercepting
tactical and strategic communications from both sides, flying
the U.S. flag on a clear day, 15 miles off the Sinai coast,
killing 34 sailors, wounding 171.” (Arnaud
De Borchgrave ‘Touching the third rail’
http://news.monstersandcritics.com/northamerica/article_1157963.php/Touching_the_third_rail
Apr 24, 2006). This was just a hiccup? Wait a minute, didn’t
America fabricate a north Vietnamese attack on an American
patrol boat in the Gulf of Tonkin in order to declare war on
north Vietnam? How is it that America declared war on Vietnam
for an incident which never happened but refused to declare war
against the Jos despite a very real, and bloody, attack? The
Christisons have concluded. “In other words, Israel was beyond
question the senior partner in this particular policy
initiative; Israel made the decision to go to war, would have
gone to war with or without the U.S. green light, and used its
lobbyists in the U.S. to steer Johnson administration policy in
a pro-Israeli direction. Israel’s attack on the U.S. naval
vessel, the USS Liberty, in the midst of the war – an attack
conducted in broad daylight that killed 34 American sailors –
was not the act of a junior partner. Nor was the U.S. cover-up
of this atrocity the act of a government that dictated the moves
in this relationship.” (Kathleen and Bill Christison ‘The Rise
of the Israel Lobby: A Measure of Its Power – CounterPunch May
16-31, 2006).
* The Jos’s pre-emptive war in 1967 also
pushed America toward an economic calamity. Arab countries
retaliated against Jewish aggression by launching an oil boycott
against America – unfortunately without success.
“In 1967, after Israel trounced its
Arab neighbors in the Six-Day War, five oil-producing Arab
countries used what they called the "oil weapon" and cut off
supplies to the United States and its European allies. But the
weapon turned out to be a dud. The United States increased its
production by a million barrels a day, and more modest boosts by
three other oil-producing nations defused the crisis.” (Steven
Mufson ‘The Weapon Iran May Not Want to Use’
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/18/AR2006051802089_pf.html
May 19, 2006). Despite these two near calamitous setbacks to its
strategic interests, after the war America started developing a
closer political relationship with the Jos. What this shows,
once again, is that America’s strategic concern for its oil
supplies was secondary to its support for the Jos.
Paradoxically, it was at this point that America’s Jewish elite
significantly increased its propaganda about the Jos being a
strategic asset to America.
* Despite the outpouring of propaganda about
the Jos being an American asset it wasn’t long before the Jos
was jeopardizing America’s oil interests yet again. This time
there was no escape. A mere five years later, in October 1973,
the Jos once again resorted to a pre-emptive war without the
slightest concern for the impact this would have on American
interests. The Jos used nuclear blackmail to force the Nixon
administration to send military supplies to prevent a Jos
defeat. The Arab world once again imposed an oil embargo. This
time it was all too effective. It plunged America, and the rest
of the world, into an economic recession that lasted for over a
decade. Does it not seem strange that even though alarm bells
had rung five years earlier about the vulnerability of its oil
supplies, America was still willing to risk supporting the Jos?
The whole point of the Jos being a strategic ally was that it
was supposed to ensure America’s oil supplies weren’t disrupted
and yet here was the Jos stirring up two wars with the Arab
world, in order to promote its own interests, that inevitably
resulted in just such a disruption.
* As if this wasn’t
enough, in 1973 both the Jos/Jol combined to undermine Nixon’s
policy of détente
with Russia which could well have
brought about a huge peace bonanza. Détente could have
stimulated massive economic growth in both countries as Russia
traded its vast natural resources for American consumer goods.
But American Jews sacrificed good relations between the
superpowers simply to provide Russian Jews with the ‘human
right’ to emigrate from Russia. (When huge numbers of Russian
Jews were given the right they went to America so the Jol forced
Congress to block their entry into America in order to force
them to move to the Jos). To undermine the strategic interests
of the world’s two gigantic superpowers and resurrect the cold
war was an astounding achievement for such a seemingly
insignificant country as the Jos. But, what is so shocking is
not so much that the Jol/Jos could deter America from pursuing
its strategic interests – cooperation with Russia - but that
such vast economic and political interests were once again being
sabotaged for such miniscule gains to the Jos. The grossly
disproportionate sacrifices that America was making for
microscopic benefits to the Jos are striking.
* In the early 1980s the war mongering Jos
invaded Lebanon. Reagan demanded the Jos’s withdrawal and was
humiliated when it refused. “Although Massad refers to the U.S.
as Israel’s master, in this instance as in many others including
1967, Israel has clearly been its own master. Chomsky argues in
support of his case that Reagan ordered Israel to call off the
invasion in August, two months after it was launched. This is
true, but in fact Israel did not pay any attention; the invasion
continued, and the U.S. got farther and farther embroiled.”
(Kathleen and Bill Christison ‘The Rise of the Israel Lobby: A
Measure of Its Power – CounterPunch May 16-31, 2006). But even
worse was to come for Reagan. It might have been thought that
Reagan would have been so resentful about his humiliation he
would have refused to respond to the Jos’s request for help when
its forces found themselves overstretched in the Lebanon. And
yet Reagan responded by sending in American marines who were
then hit by a truck bomb killing 241 servicemen.[xi]
Soon after, Reagan pulled American forces out of the mess
created by the Jos. America had been dragged into the Lebanon to
support the Jos’s illegal invasion and suffered a massive
retaliatory attack. Yet again, Americans were laying down their
lives for yet another illegal Jewish war.
* The military relationship between America
and the Jos was eventually formalized heavily in favour of the
Jos. “In 1987, the U.S. designated Israel a “major non-NATO
ally,” thus giving it access to military technology not
available otherwise. The notion of demanding concessions from
Israel in return for this favored status – such as, for
instance, some restraint in its settlement-construction in the
West Bank – was specifically rejected. The U.S. simply very
deliberately and abjectly retreated into policy inaction,
leaving Israel with a free hand to proceed as it wished wherever
it wished in the Middle East and particularly in the occupied
Palestinian territories.” (Kathleen and Bill Christison ‘The
Rise of the Israel Lobby: A Measure of Its Power – CounterPunch
May 16-31, 2006).
* The collapse of
the Soviet empire opened the floodgates for the Jos/Jol to
pursue their interests in the Middle East even though this meant
accelerating the scale of the strategic liabilities the Jos
inflicted on America. The claim is often made that after
the 1967 war, America saw the Jos as an outpost to counter
Soviet influence in the Middle East. It was deemed to have
played this strategic role until the demise of the Soviet
empire. But this interpretation makes little sense. Nixon and
Kissinger sought détente with Soviet Russia in the early 1970s
which could have produced a monumental peace bonanza – one of
even more staggering proportions if China had also been brought
into the peace. If the policy had succeeded the Jos’s strategic
value would have disappeared leaving it exposed to the dreadful
desiccating winds of peace. The Jewish neocons must have
appreciated this implication so they must have concluded it was
imperative to resurrect the cold war in order to re-establish
the Jos’s supposed vital role as a bastion against the spread of
communism.
* In 1990,
America’s Jewish elite and the Jos pushed the Bush senior
administration into its first proxy zionist war in order to oust
Saddam from Kuwait even though the administration had given
Saddam the green light for the invasion.
* After the Pentagon and New York bombings,
Sharon succeeded in positioning himself as the leader of the
western world in the fight against so called Islamic terrorism.[xii]
The power of America’s Jewish elite had grown significantly
after the collapse of the Soviet empire but after the Pentagon
and New York bombings its growth has been even more dramatic.
This was the first time the Jos and America’s Jewish elite could
be seen directing America’s foreign policies. In effect,
America’s Jewish elite became America’s ruling elite. This
Jewish usurpation of power would soon have a calamitous impact
on America’s foreign policies. It was in America’s interests to
locate and dismember al Quaeda but instead of pursuing this goal
Sharon, with the aid of America’s ruling Jewish elite,
manipulated America into a proxy zionist invasion of Iraq for
the sake of boosting the regional supremacy of the Jos. As a
consequence, America has still not captured bin Laden nor
dismantled al Quaeda but now finds itself militarily and
politically bogged down in Iraq for the sake of the Jos thereby
creating even more widespread popular support for bin Laden and
al Quaeda. Al Quaeda has now regrouped and, in conjunction with
the Taliban, is currently launching a spring offensive in
Afghanistan against American and Nato forces. If American Wasps
had pursued their own interests they would have dealt with al
Quaeda and continued to contain Saddam – they would not have
allowed Sharon to dictate America’s foreign policies in the
region by pushing America into an irrelevant invasion of Iraq.
Zunes’s view of this issue is merely that the Pentagon and New
York bombings reinforced the Jos’s strategic relationship with
America. “Since the Sept. 2001 terrorist attacks, the perception
of Israel as a natural ally in President George W. Bush's “war
on terror” has cemented the strategic partnership still further,
as the Pentagon pre-positions equipment in Israel to enhance
military readiness for intervention elsewhere in the Middle
East.” What Zunes celebrates as the cementation of a “strategic
relationship” was in reality the Jos pushing America into the
abyss of ignominy and defeat in Iraq and, quite possibly,
opening the way for what Jewish neocons have been advocating, a
third world war against the moslem world. As an aside it’s
interesting that Zunes suddenly elevates the Jos from being a
mere colonial asset with no natural resources to the dizzy
heights of a strategic partnership.
To any outside observer, Bush’s capitulation
to Sharon over the Jos’s illegal invasion of Jenin was one of
the most revealing political events of his presidency exposing
the underlying balance of power between the two countries. Who
could possibly forget Sharon calling Bush a Chamberlain and
further humiliating the leader of the so-called American empire
by publicly refusing to withdraw from Jenin not once, not twice,
but three times? Zunes regurgitates his usual defence of this
event by arguing that Bush didn’t cave in to Sharon at all but
to America’s Christian zionists, “However, most accounts of
President Bush's backtracking attribute it not primarily to
pressure from AIPAC and other Jewish groups but rather to the
more than 100,000 emails received by the White House from
Christian conservatives defending the Israeli offensive.” Of
course when two million British people did far more than tap out
a few emails in their spare time but spent huge amounts of time
and money demonstrating against the proposed invasion of Iraq
they were just ignored. Bush wasn’t pushed onto the defensive by
this email democracy, it provided him with a fig-leaf to cover
up his humiliation before his master Ariel Sharon. The fact that
America’s Christian zionists sided with Sharon rather than their
own president shows the degree to which these gullible victims
of zionist ideology have even lost their sense of patriotism.
Zunes portrays the current power of the Christian zionists as an
independent force from that of America’s Jewish elite but fails
to acknowledge that this group would never have escaped its
lunatic fringe existence if it hadn’t been for the Jol.[xiii]
In 1975 the Jol started cultivating, financing, and publicizing
a tiny, crackpot Christian sect until today it is supported by
tens of millions of Americans. .. “in
fact, the rise of a religious right in the West owes much of its
impetus to Zionism and Israel ..” (Jeff Halper ‘Israel as
an Extension of American Empire’
http://www.counterpunch.org/halper11072005.html November
7th 2005).
* In 2003, America’s
ruling Jewish elite pushed the country into its second proxy
zionist war – the invasion of Iraq. No sooner was the invasion
pronounced as being over than the Jos/Jol were howling for a
proxy zionist attack on Iran.
Zunes criticizes Mearsheimer and Walt’s
allegation that the Jos/Jol was responsible for initiating the
war against Iraq, “Perhaps the most twisted argument in their
article is the authors' claim that the 2003 invasion of Iraq
“was motivated in good part by a desire to make Israel more
secure.”” There were certainly a number of commentators who,
even before the invasion took place, suggested the Jos/Jol were
pushing America into a proxy zionist invasion of Iraq. But,
since the invasion, a lot of evidence has emerged about the Bush
administration’s preparations for the invasion and, as a
consequence, even more commentators have reached the same
conclusion.[xiv]
American Jews were the most prevalent, and the most vociferous,
group in support of the invasion and their prominence was
heightened by the virtual absence of support for this policy
from America’s oil industry and even the American military. The
main reason Zunes gives for believing this argument to be
twisted is that, “Israel is far less secure as a result of the
rise of Islamist extremism, terrorist groups, and Iranian
influence in post-invasion Iraq than it was during the final
years of Saddam Hussein's rule, when Iraq was no longer a
strategic threat to Israel or actively involved in anti-Israeli
terrorism.” This view is twisted. Just because the invasion did
not turn out to be the “cakewalk” American Jewish commentators
predicted it would be, doesn’t negate the proposition that they
were responsible for pushing America into the war. America’s
ruling Jewish elite, and the Jos, strategized the Jos would be
better off as a result of deposing Saddam. It was a gamble they
were willing to take. If they are losing, it is their own fault.
The lead up to the attack on Iran is following a similar pattern
to the preparations for the invasion of Iraq. The most blatant
protagonists of a war against Iran are America’s ruling Jewish
elite and the Jos whereas America’s oil companies and the
American military are even more wary of such a war after
America’s terrible humiliations and tribulations in Iraq. There
are now many commentators who suggest not only that American
Jews are the main group promoting the war against Iran but that
they are the only group doing so. If American Jews push America
into an attack on Iran, it is to be hoped the Jos unequivocally
loses this gamble.
Zunes’s argument that the Jos is worse off
now than prior to the invasion of Iraq is Jewish propaganda
solely designed to protect the Jos from accusations that it
initiated the invasion. When the Jos/Jol pushed America into the
invasion of Iraq they intended to install Ahmed Chalabi in place
of Saddam.[xv]
When this didn’t work out they established the Coalition
Provisional Authority which was basically a Jewish
administration running Iraq which, after a decade of sanctions,
had learnt to hate and despise the Jos.[xvi]
When this didn’t work out they still had a third option – the
break up of Iraq. Zunes himself has admitted that Jewish neocons
desired this eventuality. “Top
analysts in the CIA and State Department, as well as large
numbers of Middle East experts, warned that a U.S. invasion of
Iraq could result in a violent ethnic and sectarian conflict.
Even some of the war's intellectual architects acknowledged as
much: In a 1997 paper, prior to becoming major figures in the
Bush foreign policy team, David Wurmser, Richard Perle, and
Douglas Feith predicted that a post-Saddam Iraq would likely be
"ripped apart" by sectarianism and other cleavages but called on
the United States to "expedite" such a collapse anyway.”
(Stephen Zunes ‘The US Role in Iraq's Sectarian Violence’
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/zunes.php?articleid=8668
March 7, 2006). The break up of
Iraq is currently a distinct possibility and this would boost
the Jos’s strategic interests. Zunes denies the Jos is
benefiting from the invasion because he wishes to defend the
Jol/Jos from accusations they pushed America into the war.
Given this recitation of the major incidents
between America and the Jos, it is difficult to conclude the Jos
has been a strategic asset to America.
The foundation of the Jos was a strategic liability for America.
Since then it has become an increasingly disastrous liability
for America. It pressured America into a war to oust Saddam from
Kuwait and then pushed America into an invasion of Iraq that has
become little less than catastrophic. It is now on the verge of
pushing America into an even greater catastrophe – a war against
iran - that could lead to its moral, political, military, and
economic, bankruptcy. If anyone should want to understand
the power of propaganda not merely to distort reality but to
substitute for it, they could find no more brazen example than
the Jewish propaganda that the Jos is America’s strategic asset.
The idea of the Jos as an American ally was
coined after the foundation of the Jos. “Seymour
Reich of the Israel Policy Forum insisted that Washington is
only pro-Zionist because, "beginning with President Harry S.
Truman's, every American administration has viewed Israel as an
important strategic ally."” (Lenni Brenner ‘The Lobby and
the Great Protestant Crusader’ http://www.counterpunch.org/brenner05172006.html
May 17, 2006). However, the Jol didn’t start popularizing it
until after the 1967 war. The Jewish media hyped up this
propaganda primarily to cover up for the Jos’s continual
undermining of American interests in the Middle East. The more
the Jos has undermined America’s interests, the more the
increasingly Jewish dominated media in America has had to pump
out the ‘Jos is an ally’ message. This propaganda has been hyped
to such an extent it has become a cliché. The one saving grace
concerning this propaganda is that the greater the military
power of the Jos, the more opportunities it has had to fabricate
sops to the idea of being America’s asset in the Middle East.
But equally, the more commonplace this propaganda has become,
the greater the opportunity it has created for the Jos to
undermine America’s strategic interests in the region even more
fundamentally. This propaganda has also deterred Americans from
questioning their relationship to the Jos let alone demanding
retaliation for the Jos’s misdeeds.
The great contradiction at the heart of
America’s foreign policies in the Middle East is that America
regards the Jos/Jol as a strategic asset even though it
devastates America’s interests in the region. This contradiction
has become so stark it has reached the point now where America’s
proxy zionist invasion of Iraq has dramatically reduced the
country’s oil exports, dramatically increased oil prices, and
thrown the global oil markets into a state of nervousness where
the slightest hint of further trouble sends the price of oil
even higher. Such a contradiction will become even more blatant
if America’s ruling Jewish elite succeeds in pushing the country
into a proxy zionist attack on Iran. It is difficult to imagine
how such an attack could avoid a catastrophic impact on the
world’s oil supplies. This contradiction can be explained solely
by the rise of America’s ruling Jewish elite i.e. the Jewish
dominated media, Jewish think tanks, the Jewish owned congress,
and the Jewish dominated Bush administrations.
The reasons American Wasp politicians refuse
to face up to this contradiction are firstly, the massive hype
being pumped out by America’s Jewish elite through the Jewish
dominated media, Jewish think tanks, and academia. Secondly, the
economic and political power of American Jews to bribe Wasp
politicians into accepting such hype. And, thirdly because the
Jos has gone out of its way to find ways of being useful to
America in order to give some substance to the hype. Zunes has
provided a long list of examples where the Jos has helped
American foreign policy in the Middle East and beyond - even
though such examples are of little significance. What he does
not provide is any sort of list of the ways in which the Jos has
undermined American interests let alone outline the history of
the Jos as an increasingly catastrophic liability to America.
The Dominance of the Jol over the Oil
Lobby.
In his response to
Mearsheimer and Walt’s publication, Chomsky
refers to evidence provided by Stephen Zunes concerning the
Jol’s financial contributions to members of Congress and
political parties. “As Middle East scholar Stephen Zunes has
rightly pointed out, "there are far more powerful interests that
have a stake in what happens in the Persian Gulf region than
does AIPAC [or the Lobby generally], such as the oil companies,
the arms industry and other special interests whose lobbying
influence and campaign contributions far surpass that of the
much-vaunted Zionist lobby and its allied donors to
congressional races."” (Noam Chomsky ‘The Israel Lobby?’
http://www.zmag.org/content/print_article.cfm?itemID=9999§ionID=11
March 28, 2006. Quote taken from Stephen Zunes ‘Israel not to
blame for Iraq mess’ http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HA11Ak01.html
Jan 11, 2006).
Jeff Blankfort responded,
“This claim cannot be substantiated simply because it isn't
true. In 2002, for example, Haim Saban, the Israel-American who
funds the Saban Center at the Brooking Institute and is a big
contributor to AIPAC, gave $12.3 million to the Democratic
Party, almost as much as the $14 plus million the arms
manufacturing PACs gave to both parties. In 2001, Mother Jones
listed on its web site, the 400 leading contributors to the 2000
national elections. Seven of the first 10 were Jewish, as were
12 of the top 20 and 125 of the top 250. I didn't go any
further. Were all these Jews supporters of Israel? To some
degree it is quite likely but, as a number of observers over the
years have said, in the eyes of Congress, there is only one key
issue for American Jews and that is Israel. Now, if "ME Scholar
Stephen Zunes," who Chomsky quotes, or Chomsky himself, has
evidence that contradicts this, let them present it. I have sent
copies of this email to both of them.” (Jeffrey Blankfort
Chomsky on the Israel Lobby’
jblankfort@earthlink.net March 28 2006).
Zunes must have accidentally deleted
Blankfort’s email before reading it. “The arms industry
contributes more than $7 million each election cycle to
Congressional campaigns, twice that of pro-Israel groups. In
terms of lobbying budgets, the difference is even more profound:
Northrop Grumman alone spends seven times as much money in its
lobbying efforts annually than does AIPAC and Lockheed Martin
outspends AIPAC by a factor of four. Similarly, the lobbying
budget of AIPAC is dwarfed by those of General Electric,
Raytheon, and Boeing and other corporations with substantial
military contracts.”
Michael Massing offers the following figures.
“The Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan group that
analyzes political contributions, lists a total of thirty-six
pro-Israel PACs, which together contributed $3.14 million to
candidates in the 2004 election cycle. Pro-Israel donors give
many millions more. Over the last five years, for instance,
Robert Asher, together with his various relatives (a common
device used to maximize contributions), has donated $148,000,
mostly in sums of $1,000 or $2,000 to individual candidates.”
(Michael Massing ‘The Storm over the Israel Lobby’
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19062 May 11th 2006).
This is not the place to try and reconcile
these contradictory figures. Instead, let’s take the worst case
scenario and assume that both the oil industry and America’s
arms manufacturers donate more bribes to members of Congress and
the country’s two main political parties than the Jol. So what?
Firstly, this is not a competition to become the biggest spender
of lobby money. It is about spending money to achieve
objectives. If the Jol can achieve its political objectives by
spending x million dollars why should it throw away 2x or 10x
millions just to become the most extravagant lobbyist? The
evidence that the Jol/Jos is achieving more of its objectives
than either America’s oil industry or the American military
derives from an interpretation of events not an inspection of
lobbying league tables. The Jol/Jos’s success in preventing
American oil companies from trading with Iran for the last
decade is one very powerful piece of evidence indicating their
superior power. This was reinforced by a revelation resulting
from the Katrina hurricane disaster in New Orleans. Katrina was
a global burning disaster causing significant amounts of damage
not only to residential properties but to America’s oil
industry. That America’s oil companies couldn’t get the
government to spend money on environmental defences to protect
their billion dollar investments in the city (primarily because
the government was spending so much money on the proxy zionist
invasion of Iraq) reveals where real power lays in American
politics – especially given the oil connections of George.Bush,
Dick Cheney, and Condoleeza Rice.
Secondly, developing the theme of only paying
what is needed to achieve an objective, Michael Massing provides
an example of the critical impact a small donation can make to a
political campaign. “One congressional staff member told me of
the case of a Democratic candidate from a mountain state who,
eager to tap into pro-Israel money, got in touch with AIPAC,
which assigned him to a Manhattan software executive eager to
move up in AIPAC's organization. The executive held a
fund-raising reception in his apartment on the Upper West Side,
and the candidate left with $15,000. In his state's small market
for press and televised ads, that sum proved an important factor
in a race he narrowly won. The congressman thus became one of
hundreds of members who could be relied upon to vote AIPAC's
way. (The staffer told me the name of the congressman but asked
that I withhold it in order to spare him embarrassment).”
(Michael Massing ‘The Storm over the Israel Lobby’ http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19062
May 11th 2006).
Finally, it would not be surprising if arms’
manufacturers spend more on lobbying than the Jol/Jos because
whilst the latter is concerned about bribing American
politicians to protect one country, the former has the much more
substantial task of boosting arms’ sales to a large number of
countries.
The Power of the Military-Industrial
Complex or the Military-Industrial-Jewish Complex?
As regards the tribute payments that America
makes to the Jos, Zunes claims. “Matti Peled, the late Israeli
major general and Knesset member, reported that as far as he
could tell, the $2.2 billion figure of annual U.S. military
support of Israel at that time was conjured up “out of thin
air.” (Thereby) reinforcing his impression that “aid to Israel”
is little more than a U.S. government subsidy for American
munitions manufacturers.” Politicians in America might well have
invented this ruse to boost military sales but what Zunes
ignores is the issue of who owns the American
military-industrial complex. In other words, who really benefits
from the political ruse? Zunes deduces it must be Wasps but,
given the reality of the military-industrial-Israeli complex, it
could also be American Jewish arms manufacturers. The ruse is
not the issue: the issue is who benefits from it.
Zunes supports his fantasy that America’s
ruling Wasps treat the Jos as a strategic asset, not with
evidence but with a speculation. “Similarly, if there ever came
a time when those in power in Washington decided that a major
shift in policy toward Israel was necessary, they could likely
effect such a shift, however the Israel lobby might react.” In
1956, president Eisenhower forced the Jos to withdraw from the
Sinai. But the days when an American president would dare to
demand the Jos withdraws from land it has occupied or illegally
annexed are long since gone. American presidents would no longer
risk insisting on the Jos’s withdrawal from Lebanon, Syria, or
the West Bank, because to do so might trigger another American
civil war. Certainly America has the military and economic power
to force the Jos out of lands it is illegally occupying but it
no longer has the political power to do so because America’s
ruling Jewish establishment would never permit such a policy. It
is laughable to believe America will order the Jos to do
anything when members of Congress are too frightened to even
criticize the Jos.[xvii]
The Jol: Powerful or Powerless?
Chomsky dismisses the
political influence of the Jol. He argues that even if the Jol
didn’t exist America’s pax americana policies towards the Jos,
the Middle East, and the rest of the world would be exactly the
same. Zunes sees the logic of Chomsky’s argument.
“Indeed, U.S. policy in the Middle East over
the past several decades .. is remarkably similar to U.S. policy
toward Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia. If the United
States can pursue such policies elsewhere in the world without
pressure from the Israel lobby, why is its presence necessary to
explain U.S. policies in the Middle East?”
It is true American imperialism is no less
disgustingly barbaric in Iraq than it was in South East Asia in
the 1960s-1970s and in Central America in the 1980s.[xviii]
What is fundamentally different, however, is that in the past
America defined its own enemies whereas today the Jol determines
America’s enemies. America ignores it own enemies to devote
itself to confronting the Jos’s enemies. If American Wasps were
currently pursuing their own strategic interests they would be
focussing not on the Middle East but on South America, China,
and Russia. They would not have allowed themselves to become so
politically and militarily bogged down in the Middle East that
they could do little about developments in these other regions.
The power of America’s ruling Jewish elite can be seen in its
ability to focus America’s foreign policies on the Middle East,
fighting the Jos’s enemies in order to promote Jewish
supremacism, thereby preventing America from confronting adverse
political developments in South America and China.
In South America the rise of left wing
governments is posing a growing threat to America’s oil
supplies. There is no strategic sense for America to focus on
the Middle East where it gets relatively little oil whilst
ignoring South America from where it gets more of its oil. This
anomaly can be explained only by America’s ruling Jewish elite
determining America’s foreign policies.
America’s focus on the
Jos and the Middle East is undermining its own national defence
strategy to combat the rise of any future rival.
America’s ruling Jewish elite are deceiving
Americans into focussing on the Middle
East whilst the country is losing global dominance to
China. Juan Cole laughs at the absurdity of America’s current
foreign policy posture. “At what point would Iran be a greater
military threat to the United States than Communist China? It
certainly is not now. It is just a poor, small, ramshackle,
mulla-ridden society with no unconventional weapons at all.”
(Juan Cole ‘More on Autonomous
Regions’
http://www.juancole.com/2006_05_01_juancole_archive.html
May 02, 2006). America and the
Jos have divergent interests as regards China. To America, China
is an increasing global rival. To the Jos, and even some Jewish
neocons, it is a trading partner. That America has put China on
the backburner for the sake of the Middle East, once again
indicates the power of America’s ruling Jewish elite.
The divergence of
strategic interests between America and the Jos can also be seen
over the Kurds. Zunes provides an
example of where the Jos is acting as a strategic asset for
America, “Israelis have helped arm and train pro - American
Kurdish militias.” It is true that Kurdish militias are pro-american
(and pro-Jos) but this doesn’t mean that America supports an
independent Kurdish state in Iraq, and a greater Kurdistan
covering territory annexed from Iraq, Iran, Syria, and possibly
even Turkey. It is in the strategic interests of the Jos to
support such developments - even though it has an alliance with
Turkey. Neither are in America’s interests. Firstly, because it
would undermine support from Turkey but, secondly, because it
would critically undermine support from the Arab world. It
doesn’t matter to the Jos if it further alienates the Arab world
but if America did so the adverse consequences could be
significant – Saudi Arabia would think seriously about its
relationship to America if the Arab world was faced with the
prospect of a greater Kurdistan. The Kurdish issue is an example
of the Jos pursuing an independent foreign policy which runs
counter to America’s global interests. Yet again the Jos is
undermining America’s strategic interests in the Middle East
whilst maintaining the fiction that it is acting on America’s
behalf.
America’s Divide and Rule Tactic.
Zunes postulates that Wasps’ pax americana
has turned the Jos into a strategic asset. However, Wasps do not
merely bribe the Jos with a vast treasure chest to do its
bidding. Zunes believes that Wasps have inflicted a terrible
political price on the Jos. They employ the well known
imperialist tactic of ‘divide and rule’ to keep Jews and
Palestinians in conflict with each other. The benefit of this
tactic is that both sides will be more willing to obey American
orders in order to win favours from their global emperors. For
Zunes, the implications of this tactic are wide ranging.
Firstly, Zunes believes America is
responsible for forcing the Jos to institute racist laws and
policies towards Palestinians. American Wasps have deliberately
set out to produce conflict between Jews and Palestinians who
otherwise would be living happily together because of their
shared religious and historical heritage. “U.S. policy has
resulted in dividing Israelis from Arabs, although both are
Semitic peoples who worship the same God, love the same land,
and share a history of subjugation and oppression.” According to
Zunes, the Jews in the Jos are not responsible for the racist
policies they have implemented against the Palestinians because
they are being forced to implement such policies by America.
Secondly, Zunes proposes that America’s Wasp
imperialists were responsible for forcing the Jos into wars
against the Arab world in 1967, 1973, and in 1982. It was not
Jos belligerence that brought about these wars but Wasp
imperialists. Zunes’s view is not uncommon amongst America’s
Jewish left, “Similarly, the U.S.
doesn't want an Israel truly at peace with the Arabs, for such
an Israel could loosen its bonds of dependence on the U.S.,
making it a less reliable proxy.” (Norman Finkelstein ‘It's
Not Either/Or
http://www.counterpunch.org/finkelstein05012006.html May 1,
2006). The Christisons have pointed out two examples of left
wingers blaming America for pushing the Jos into wars. “The
critics generally believe, for instance, that Israel’s political
destruction of Egypt’s Nasser in 1967 was done for the U.S. Most
if not all believe that Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon was
undertaken at U.S. behest, to destroy the PLO.” (Kathleen and
Bill Christison ‘The Rise of the Israel Lobby: A Measure of Its
Power – CounterPunch May 16-31, 2006).
Thirdly, Zunes holds that Wasp imperialists
are responsible for preventing peace agreements from being
reached between Jews and Palestinians.
Fourthly, Zunes suggests the vast majority of
Jews in the Jos support peace and want to live happily with
their Palestinian neighbours.
Finally, similarly Zunes suggests the
majority of American Jews also support peace in the Middle East.
Zunes’s analysis borders on fantasy. The
imperialist tactic of divide and rule has been used throughout
history. The idea is to alternately reward (or punish) each side
so they compete for rewards from their imperial master. The aim
is to provoke both sides into violence against each other so
they keep each other weak thereby enhancing imperialist power.
If the two sides collaborated they could seriously challenge the
imperial power so the latter has to ensure the conflict between
them keeps them both powerless.
This model does not apply to Palestine.
Whilst it is quite true that both sides use violence against
each other, the overwhelming majority of the violence comes from
the Jews. America has not sought to weaken both sides. On the
contrary, it has helped boost the military power of the Jos over
the Palestinians until it is virtually total. It constantly
rewards the Jews whilst constantly punishing the Palestinians.
Each of Zunes’s points can be criticized.
Firstly, America was not responsible for
forcing the Jos to enact racist laws. Since its inception,
zionist ideology was an explicit form of Jewish racism. Jewish
racism was the backbone of the zionist movement for fifty years
before American politicians were bribed into supporting the
establishment of the Jos. Despite American support for the
foundation of the Jos, the Jos treated America with contempt up
until 1967 so there was no chance for American imperialism to
impose itself on the development of the Jos.
Secondly, it was the Jos, not American Wasps,
who initiated wars against its Arab neighbours. These wars were
solely the responsibility of the Jos not Americans. “The
evidence is equally clear that Israel was the prime mover in the
1982 invasion of Lebanon and led the U.S. into that morass,
rather than the other way around. Although Massad refers to the
U.S. as Israel’s master, in this instance as in many others
including 1967, Israel has clearly been its own master.”
(Kathleen and Bill Christison ‘The Rise of the Israel Lobby: A
Measure of Its Power – CounterPunch May 16-31, 2006).
Thirdly, America has not sought to prevent
peace agreements from being developed between Jews and
Palestinians. On the contrary, it is America who has initiated
all the peace negotiations and it is the Jews who have done
their best to wreck these negotiations. Only one Jewish leader
made any serious effort to promote peace rather than war – and
he was assassinated by a Jewish extremist.
Fourthly, it is not the case that the vast
majority of Jews in the Jos support peace. Most want a Jews-only
state with as few non-Jews as possible. Most are racists and
treat Arabs with contempt. They regard all Palestinians as
terrorists and do not want to negotiate with them in order to
live peacefully together.
Finally, the majority of American Jews
support the stance taken by the Jos and the Jewish people. The
number of American Jews who support peace is minimal.
In conclusion, Zunes’s proposal that America
is employing a divide and rule tactic against those living in
Palestine is yet another Jewish lie - this time one perpetrated
by left wing American Jews rather than, as is usually the case,
by right wing American Jews. America has never had the power
over the Jos to use the divide and rule tactic. The Jos has
never acted as America’s asset despite Jewish claims that it is
an American asset. On the contrary it has forced America into
becoming a Jewish asset. If America had the imperial power to
use such a tactic to force the Jews to do its bidding, why would
it need to bribe the Jos with such vast sums of money? America
has given the Jos more than enough weapons for it to defeat
deter its enemies so why does America keep providing it with
even more military assistance? Implicit in Zunes’s ideology is
the assumption that America’s imperial takeover of the Jos was
achieved a lot more easily than America’s takeover of Iraq.
Whilst the Jews have seemingly submitted themselves in silence
to American domination, the Iraqis have heroically resisted
American occupation and exploitation. It is absurd to believe
that Jewish extremists like Golda Meir, Menachem Begin, and
Ariel Sharon, would ever accept servility so easily.
American Jews’ Need to see the Jos as
America’s Strategic Asset in the Persian Gulf.
Zunes’s basic premise, that America’s Wasps
use the Jos as their pet bulldog to threaten their enemies in
the Middle East, is Jewish propaganda. But, it does have a
psychological benefit of enormous significance to many American
Jews.
To summarize: Zunes believes firstly, that in
the medieval period, Jews were used as scapegoats by European
rulers to escape the wroth of their subjects when things went
wrong. Secondly, that since the the foundation of the Jos,
American Wasps have deliberately set out to produce conflict
between Jews and Palestinians. Thus the Jews in the Jos are not
responsible for implementing racist policies against the
Palestinians because they have been forced to do so by America.
They are as innocent and as blameless as the Palestinians.
Thirdly, that American Wasp imperialists have been responsible
for pushing the Jos into wars against the Arab world. It was not
the Jos’s belligerence or its strategic interests that brought
about these wars. Fourthly, that in the run up to America’s
invasion of Iraq in 2003, American Wasps needlessly blamed Jews
for initiating the war as a means for deflecting popular
criticism away from themselves. Fifthly, that the Jol is as
powerless and ineffectual as the Jos. The conclusion should be
clear. Zunes is transparently whitewashing the Jews of any
responsibility for everything. He is peddling the modern version
of the Jew as an eternal victim.
Blankfort explains the belief in Jewish
innocence, powerlessness, and victimhood, in terms of social
conditioning. “That most of those from
the Left who have criticized the Mearsheimer-Walt paper happen
to be Jewish is not an accident. They have been conditioned from
childhood to automatically resist anything that appears to be
"blaming the Jews" even when the accusation applies to only a
certain segment of the Jewish population. That their influence
in the Palestine support movement has been pervasive is one of
the major reasons for its utter failure to date.” (Jeff
Blankfort ‘The “Israel lobby”
controversy’
jblankfort@earthlink.net May 17 2006).
Jewish belief in their blamelessness may be
transmitted through social conditioning but its roots lay in
Jewish religion, Jewish traditions, and Jewish folk-lore. There
is no doubt that some Jews have been persecuted terribly in many
places and at many times throughout their history – especially
of course during the age of totalitarianism. But they have not
always, and everywhere, been victims. The British have a far
more substantial claim to victimhood than the Jews given that
the country was invaded by the Celts, Saxons, Romans, Vikings,
Normans and came close to being invaded in Elizabethan times by
the Spanish armada, in Napoleanic times by the French, and of
course, during world war two by the Germans. Doubtlessly many
other European countries could also make such claims.
Zunes’s ideology is that Jews are always
powerless, they are always the victims of manipulation by
greater powers. No matter how much power and wealth Jews might
actually have they are always manipulated by non-Jews with more
power and more wealth. Even today when the Jos possesses nuclear
weapons and is the fourth most powerful military power in the
world Zunes still believes it is a pawn in Wasps’ pax americana.
Conversely, the Jews have never been responsible for anything
they have done throughout their history. No matter how
barbarically they have acted, they are eternally innocent. Ariel
Sharon was a terrorist who physically murdered Palestinians but
he too was an innocent victim pushed into such acts of barbarism
by American imperialism. For Zunes, anti-semitism is blaming
Jews for doing things they did not do or, if they did, were not
responsible for doing because they were forced into doing it by
greater powers. “Indeed, that has largely been the functional
purpose of anti-Semitism throughout Western history: to
misdirect popular opposition to economic injustice, disastrous
military campaigns, or other failures by political and economic
elites on to a convenient and expendable target.” (Stephen Zunes
‘Israel not to blame for Iraq mess’
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HA11Ak01.html Jan 11,
2006). Given such a blatant ideology, it has to be concluded
that these days Jewish accusations of anti-semitism are simply a
cover for the continuing accumulation of Jewish power.
In some respects Zunes appears to be a
modern, progressive, left wing, rational thinker. But, in other
respects, he seems to be modernizing the lament of many
religious figures throughout Jewish history – “Why is it always
us?”; “Why do they always pick on us?”; “Why do they always hate
us?”; “Why are we always the victims?”; “Why are we always too
powerless to defend ourselves?” Underneath Zunes’s sophisticated
left wing thinking is a devout rabbinical scholar who wails
against the injustices that powerful, evil, non-jews have
perpetrated against powerless, eternally innocent, divinely
sanctioned, Jews.
It was suggested that Zunes starts with the
basic premise that American Wasps are all powerful and then
logically deduces everything else from it. To be more precise,
his fundamental premise is that ‘all Jews are victims’. This is
the premise from which he makes the logical deduction that
American Wasps must be more politically powerful than American
Jews. Zunes has borrowed this ‘Jews are Blameless’ ideology from
Chomsky, the chief rabbi of the left.
Zunes’s Vested Interests.
Zunes’s pro-semitic bigotry permeates his
article in such expressions as “Israel's democratic
institutions”. The Jos is a racist state and is no more
democratic than was apartheid South Africa. Only Jewish racists
proclaim the Jos is a democracy. Zunes also proclaims, “Israel
is the world's only Jewish state” - as if its racist nature is
something to be proud of. It is quite true that Britain is a
British state (although whilst it is becoming increasingly
multi-cultural, the Jos continues to ethnically cleanse
Palestine.) It has been this way for nearly a millenium.
However, if it colonized another country let’s say Peru at the
same time and in the same way that Jews colonized Palestine,
would Zunes proudly proclaim, ‘Peru is only the world’s second
British state.” Thirdly, Zunes refers to Palestinians’ efforts
to rid themselves of their racist oppressors as “armed factions
of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) .. launching
terrorist attacks inside Israel” They’re freedom fighters as
he’d admit if he wasn’t a Jewish racist. The Palestinians have
an international legal right to resist occupation especially
when confronted by a terrorist state which continually steals
their land and resources, deliberately wrecks Palestinian civil
society, whilst refusing any negotiations.
Zunes, like most other commentators who
believe American Jews must remain invisible, also uses the
vacuous phrase “the corporate-owned media in America” (Stephen
Zunes ‘Israel not to blame for Iraq mess’
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HA11Ak01.html Jan 11,
2006). This formulation is not incorrect, but it is inadequate
and deceptive. A more accurate phrase is “the American Jewish
dominated media” indicating that American Jews own substantial
parts of the media; that a high proportion of those employed in
the industry are American Jews; and that many non-Jewish owned
media outlets are fanatically devoted to boosting the interests
of the Jos.[xix]
Finally, Zunes’s phraseology, “my opposition
to U.S. support for the Israeli government's policies of
occupation, colonization, and repression” is another way of
saying that if America’s ruling Wasp imperialists weren’t
forcing the Jews in Palestine to occupy, colonize, repress, and
humiliate, Palestinians then they would be living in harmony
with Palestinians.[xx]
Zunes’s view of the world is ideologically warped.
Many reviewers of Mearsheimer and Walt’s
publication have concluded that the reaction to their paper from
many American Jews has proved one of the authors’ main
conclusions - that anti-semitism is being used as a weapon to
silence critics. Quite amazingly for a left winger, Zunes tries
to belittle this conclusion by claiming that such a reaction
can’t have anything to do with Jewish racism since he’s also
been subjected to exactly the same sort of treatment as
Mearsheimer and Walt. “I have often been on the receiving end of
such attacks. As a result of my opposition to U.S. support for
the Israeli government's policies of occupation, colonization,
and repression, I have been deliberately misquoted, subjected to
slander and libel, and been falsely accused of being
“anti-Semitic” and “supporting terrorism;” my children have been
harassed and my university's administration has been bombarded
with calls for my dismissal. I have also had media appearances
and speaking engagements cancelled, even by groups generally
supportive of the right to dissent.” What he’s implying is that
the attacks on Mearsheimer and Walt are not evidence of racist
abuse by American Jews but just an experience suffered by any
controversial writer criticizing American policies. Isn’t this
similar to saying that a racist attack has nothing to do with
racism because violence is endemic in society?
The Political Bankruptcy of the Left.
There is a strong case for proposing that one
of Zunes’s criticisms of Mearsheimer and Walt should also be
applied to his own views. “What progressive supporters of
Mearsheimer and Walt's analysis seem to ignore is that both men
have a vested interest in absolving from responsibility the
foreign policy establishment that they have served so loyally
all these years.” According to Blankfort, Zunes has his own
vested interests when discussing the racist Jos. “In this
article, Prof. Stephen Zunes, a self-declared Zionist ("I will
be a Zionist as long as there is anti-semitism"), who has
publicly said on more than one occasion that he "supports Israel
as Jewish state" and that the establishment of Israel "was an
example of global affirmative action" indulges in the most
vicious attack yet on the Israel Lobby paper by Mearsheimer and
Walt. He also has written that the US has been using Israel as
the feudal lords used Jews as middlemen and that Israel is
therefore the victim of anti-semitism on the part of the US
government. That anyone uttering and writing such poppycock
could be taken seriously, let alone considered an authority on
the Middle East and on the Israel-Palestine should make us shake
our heads, but his book Tinderbox which includes this
formulation has been praised by the likes of Noam Chomsky, Rabbi
Michael Lerner, As'ad AbuKhalil, Naseer Aruri, Richard Falk,
Joel Beinin, Howard Zinn, and Saul Landau. Whether or not any of
them actually read the book before endorsing it is questionable
but it illustrates the intellectual poverty from which "the
Left," such as it is, not to mention the domestic Palestinian
movement, has approached this issue.” (Jeff Blankfort ‘Stephen
Zunes: The Israel Lobby: How Powerful is it Really?’
jblankfort@earthlink.net May 16 2006).
According to Zunes’s fundamental tenet,
borrowed from the basic tenets of Jewish religion, tradition,
and folk-lore, Jews have been, and always will be, victims. By
definition anything they do cannot be blamed on them because
there is always some mysterious, omniscient, conspiratorial
power lurking around in the shadows directing Jews like puppets.
The mirror image of his ideology is the wacky anti-semitic
conspiracy theory that, throughout history, Jews have been all
powerful and have ruled the world from the shadows. Zunes
believes, “There is something quite convenient and
discomfortingly familiar about the tendency to blame an
allegedly powerful and wealthy group of Jews for the overall
direction of an increasingly controversial U.S. policy.” But it
is easy to reverse this fantasy and apply it to Zunes. “There is
something quite convenient and discomfortingly familiar about
the tendency to blame an allegedly powerful and wealthy group of
Wasps for the overall direction of an increasingly controversial
U.S. policy.” It has to be suspected that as far as Zunes is
concerned, even if the Jewish army goose-stepped into the Oval
office he’d still insist they were being forced to do it by some
hidden power. Until Zunes dispenses with his Jewish ideology and
explores who owns America’s industries, its media, and the
military-industrial-Jewish complex then he is never going to
expose the truth or help bring justice to the world.
Zunes and other American Jewish commentators
are inflicting crippling political damage on the left through
their ‘Jews are always victims’ ideology. Whatever its purpose,
its effect is to condone whatever the Jews are doing in
Palestine, America, and other countries in the western world.
They blame American imperialism for forcing Jews to act like
racists towards the Palestinians and for forcing Jews into wars
against the Arab/Islamic world. Their assumption is that once
American imperialism is overthrown then Jews and Palestinians
will live happily together or, at the very least, side by side.
This implies the best way to bring peace to the Middle East is
not through boycotts of the Jos but the overthrow of American
imperialism.
There are three main criticisms of the ‘Jews
are always victims’ ideology. Firstly, it seems a tad too
convenient since it is being promoted overwhelmingly by Jewish
commentators who have explicitly stated their support for
zionism and a Jews-only state. Secondly, that it is an ideology
not a theory with hypotheses which can be tested or refined.
This ideology blinds its adherents to masses of evidence
contrary to their ideology. It might be understandable that
Zunes refuses to expose, let alone challenge, the theory of
global Jewish power because ideologically he cannot countenance
its existence. But is this so reasonable when he also refuses to
discuss any manifestation of Jewish power whether in politics,
the economy or the media, in any country around the world?
Thirdly, this ideology pushes Zunes, and other leftists, into an
acceptance of racism. Condoning Jewish racists by blaming their
racism on American imperialism is still condoning racism. If a
person points a gun at someone’s head and says ‘Do this’ then
the victim has no choice. If a person says ‘I’ll give you some
money if you do this’ then there is no victim – the person being
offered the money has a choice of whether to accept or not.
American imperialists have not put a gun to the head of the Jos
and said ‘Act like racists’. It is fallacious to believe the Jos
has been forced into supporting racism.
Traditionally, those on the left of the
political spectrum have overwhelmingly been anti-racists. What
Zunes, Chomsky, and other left wing American Jews, have done in
supporting a racist Jewish state and in promoting the ‘Jews are
always victims’ ideology is to make racism an essential
component of left wing politics. Whilst they claim to support
the Palestinians, their support for a Jewish state and Jewish
ideology undermines their alleged support for the Palestinians.
Michael Neumann has pushed this idea further by suggesting that
those who support the Jos’s strategic role in defending American
interests sabotage the Palestinian cause.
“But the idea that Israel is an
indispensable US ally is more than false; it is deadly to the
Palestinians.” (Michael Neumann ‘The Stability and
Value of Israel’
http://www.counterpunch.org/neumann05132006.html
May 13/14, 2006). Zunes is not objectively describing the facts
about the relationship between American imperialists and its
strategic asset, the Jos, because the facts point in the
opposite direction – that the Jos is an increasingly
catastrophic liability to America. The pretence to be reporting
only the facts about American imperialism forcing the Jos to act
like racists is just a ruse for supporting Jewish racism and
covering up the reality that America has become the Jos’s
strategic asset. Anyone who argues the Jos is America’s
strategic asset in the Middle East is in effect saying they
believe the Arab/Islamic world needs to be controlled by America
and the Jos, and thus that they support the Jewish racist war
against the Arab/Islamic world.
The role of left wing American Jews, more
accurately described like their Jewish neo-conservative and
neo-liberal counterparts as neo-lefties, is no longer to protect
and promote the interests of the working classes or the poor and
dispossessed. It is to protect America’s Jewish ruling elite and
the Jos. Indeed, the more they can earn political credit amongst
the left for protecting and promoting the interests of the poor
and oppressed, the more credibility they are given for being
objective observers of American imperialism when really all they
are doing is protecting Jewish interests, Jewish power, and the
global Jewish empire.
Hasbara.
The Jos’s nuclear weapons are the pinnacle of
the Jos’s now awesome military power. But they also symbolize
the nature of Jewish political power. The world knows the Jos
has got them but Jewish political leaders have never admitted
they do. They play the game of deception because it provides
them with additional military advantages. When a nation admits
its possession of nuclear weapons this weakens their military
effectiveness because adversaries insist on knowing the
conditions under which those weapons might be used. The Jos’s
deception over its possession of nuclear weapons means it
doesn’t have to publish a nuclear weapons’ policy which thus
gives it the freedom to use them pre-emptively whenever it
wishes to do so. If anyone should believe that Jews’ refusal to
admit their possession of nuclear weapons is politically
inconsequential there is one person who faces a life time of
imprisonment for exposing the truth. One day, there could well
be hundreds of thousands of other victims.
Similarly, the Jewish refusal to admit to, or
allow any public discussion of, Jewish political power, allows
powerful Jews to continue accumulating power without drawing
public or political attention to what they are doing. Even more
advantageously, their refusal to admit the possession of
political power enables Jews to condemn those who accuse them of
wielding power. This minimizes the build up of opposition to
their political power. It even sows seeds of doubt in those who
see the terrible consequences of Jewish power so they start
asking themselves, ‘Do Jews really have so much power?’ Thus,
the Jos’s deception over its nuclear weapons provides it with
additional military power not available to those nations which
have admitted their possession of nuclear weapons. And Jews’
deception over their political power provides them with
additional political power because its makes challenging this
power so difficult. Jews have a word for this deception,
‘hasbara’[xxi].
Those who wield great political power are dangerous but they are
doubly so when they believe paradoxically that they are always
powerless victims who have no responsibility for what they do.
Political power can be oppressive but political power without
responsibility invariably leads to terror.
According to Jeff Halper,
“A strong Israel, then, represents a
strong America.” (Jeff Halper ‘Israel as an Extension of
American Empire’
http://www.counterpunch.org/halper11072005.html November
7th 2005). This is not true. Historically, the
greater the power of America’s Jewish elite, the greater the
disasters they have inflicted on America as a result of pursuing
Jewish inspired, warmongering, foreign policies. The reason
America is facing increasing political, moral, and military,
catastrophes is because it is being manipulated by the global
Jewish empire into protecting Jewish interests and fighting
proxy zionist wars.
Any independent, objective observer who looks
at America and the Jos in 1948 and then reexamines these
countries today will notice that America’s defence policies
(unilateralism, pre-emption, supremacism); its foreign policies
(focussing solely on the Middle East); its principles (illegal
detention of innocent people, torture, rendition, collective
punishment); its values (resistance is absolutely wrong even
against illegal occupation); its beliefs (racism against
moslems)[xxii];
and even its choice of enemies, have all been imported from the
Jos. This indicates the balance of power between America and the
Jos. The Jol/Jos has also been primarily responsible for setting
the global political agenda since the early 1970s – from human
rights (but only for Russian Jews), the resurrection of the cold
war against Russia, the formulation of a new global enemy facing
the West, the ousting of Saddam from Kuwait, sanctions against
Iraq, to the invasion of Iraq and the pending invasion of Iran.
In other words, the Jol/Jos has succeeded in turning America
into a rogue hyper-power rather than the beacon of democracy
transforming the Jos into a multi-cultural nation which plays a
civilized role in the Arab/Moslem world and the rest of the
international community. Zunes’s proposition that the Jos is
just a powerless American colony, like Honduras, is far more
divorced from reality than the belief in a global Jewish empire.
America is a Jewish colony being run by a global Jewish elite
which, if not curbed, will bring about increasingly catastrophic
disasters over vast swathes of an increasingly disintegrating
world.
[i] Mearsheimer and
Walt’s definition of the Jewish lobby consists of a
“core” and a “periphery”. Many commentators have
correctly criticized their definition for being too
wide. This work confines the definition of the lobby to
its core, “The core of
the Lobby is comprised of American Jews who make a
significant effort in their daily lives to bend U.S.
foreign policy so that it advances Israel’s interests.”
(John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt ‘The Israel
Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy’ rwp_06_011_walt.pdf March
2006 p.12). Hence the phrase ‘Jews-only Lobby’ or Jol
used in this work.
[ii] “The scope of
the lobby’s infiltration of government policymaking
councils has been unprecedented during the current Bush
administration.” (Kathleen and Bill Christison ‘The Rise
of the Israel Lobby: A Measure of Its Power –
CounterPunch May 16-31, 2006).
[iii] See also,
“The administration has promulgated the new strategic
doctrine that the United States will arrogate the right
to pre-emptively attack any state which, in its view,
might threaten its security at some indeterminate time
in the indefinite future, which also happens to be a
long standing Israeli military doctrine. That's what the
Iraq war is about.” (William James Martin ‘The Dogma of
Richard Perle Zionism and
Legal Skepticism’ Counterpunch
http://www.counterpunch.org/martin07012004.html July 1,
2004).
[iv] The Jos’s arms
industry has become one of the biggest in the world.
“The relatively few very powerful and wealthy families
that dominate the Israeli arms industry are just as
interested in pressing for aggressively militaristic
U.S. and Israeli foreign policies as are the CEOs of
U.S. arms corporations and, as globalization has
progressed, so have the ties of joint ownership and
close financial and technological cooperation among the
arms corporations of the two nations grown ever closer.”
(Kathleen and Bill Christison ‘The Rise of the Israel
Lobby: A Measure of Its Power – CounterPunch May 16-31,
2006). It is not surprising that Jewish arms
manufacturers do a great deal of business with America
and would take every opportunity to own and control
American arms manufacturing companies.
“Israeli defense companies
have become a significant provider of military equipment
to the US Armed Forces. Israel represents one of the top
five suppliers of high-tech military hardware to the
United States, and is first on a per capita basis. An
average of 300 US Department of Defense and military
personnel travel to Israel every month, more per capita
than any other US ally.” (Jeff Halper ‘Israel as
an Extension of American Empire’
http://www.counterpunch.org/halper11072005.html
November 7th 2005).
[v] See, ‘The
Commentators supporting the proposition that Jewish
Zionists Initiated America’s Invasion of Iraq for the
Benefit of the Jews-only State in Palestine’
http://www.geocities.com/carbonomics/MCtfirm/10tf26/10tf26k.html
[vi]
“By collaborating with Israel,
the US has a reliable, democratic and
technologically-advanced partner in securing American
strategic interests. This partnership includes:
bilateral strategic agreements on military planning,
ballistic missile defense and counter-terrorism; joint
development of weapons and technologies; intelligence
sharing; and combined military exercises. By working
closely with the Israeli Defense Forces, and by
pre-positioning equipment in Israel, the United States
military enhances the readiness of its own forces
responding to future crises in the Middle East.” (Jeff
Halper ‘Israel as an Extension of American Empire’
http://www.counterpunch.org/halper11072005.html
November 7th 2005).
[vii]
Combined with its overwhelming
military power, this makes Israel a unique and
irreplaceable American asset in the Middle East.”
(Norman Finkelstein ‘It's Not Either/Or’
http://www.counterpunch.org/finkelstein05012006.html
May 1, 2006).
[viii]
Borchgrave says nothing about
party financing, “The Holocaust of six million
Jews, the telegrams and the marchers in New York
clinched it for Truman.” (Arnaud
De Borchgrave ‘Touching the third rail’
http://news.monstersandcritics.com/northamerica/article_1157963.php/Touching_the_third_rail
Apr 24, 2006).
[ix] American
support for Saddam in the 1980s indicates that America’s
Wasp elite was still in control at this time. Neither
the Jos nor the Jol had the power to reverse this
policy. Zunes seizes on this argument to draw the
erroneous conclusion that the power of the Jos/Jol has
not changed since that time. “More fundamental, if the
United States was really concerned with Israel's safety
from Iraqi attack, why did the US government provide
Iraq with key elements of its WMD capability during the
1980s -including the seed stock for its anthrax and many
of the components for its chemical-weapons program -
back when Iraq clearly did have the capability of
striking Israel? How could the "pro-Israel lobby" –
which was no more influential in 2002 than it was 15
years earlier - have the power to push the United States
to invade Iraq when Saddam was no longer a threat to
Israel, whereas the lobby had been unable to stop US
technology transfers to Iraq when those really could
have potentially harmed Israel?” (Stephen Zunes Israel
not to blame for Iraq mess’
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HA11Ak01.html
Jan 11, 2006). The collapse of the Soviet empire
provided the Jos/Jol with enormous political
opportunities. These opportunities had not existed prior
to this collapse.
[x] See for
example, “In July 1952, the
revolution of the Free Officers took place in Egypt. The
appearance of Abd-al-Nasser frightened Ben-Gurion,
because here was a new type of Arab: a young officer,
energetic, charismatic, striving to unite the Arab
world. From his ascent to power until his death, 18
years later, the Egyptian leader sent out feelers again
and again to find out if a settlement with Israel was
feasible. Ben-Gurion rejected all these efforts and
systematically prepared for the war of 1956, in which
Israel tried, in collusion with France and Great
Britain, then two predatory colonial powers, to
overthrow Abd-al-Nasser. Thus he fixed for generations
the image of Israel as a foreign implant in the region,
a bridgehead of the hostile West.” (Uri Avnery ‘Missed
Opportunities (Partial List)’
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/avnery.php?articleid=9069
May 31, 2006).
[xi] “Hezbollah was
responsible for the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks
in Beirut that killed 241 people and the 1996 bombing of
the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 U.S.
solders, but it has not targeted Americans
subsequently.” (Charles V. Peña ‘Iran: Gulf War III?’
http://www.amconmag.com/2006/2006_06_05/feature.html
June 5, 2006).
[xii] It is
indicative of the power of the Jewish dominated media in
America and of the left’s refusal to expose the role of
the Jol/Jos in American politics, that the absurdity of
this situation was never mentioned in public. Here was a
terrorist, mass murderer, war criminal, and at that time
a state terrorist, who put himself at the forefront of
the western world’s political campaign against terrorism
and was applauded as ‘a man of peace’. The most recent
manifestation of this ongoing absurdity is that the Jos,
a country which refuses to admit its possession of
nuclear weapons; refuses to join the Non-Proliferation
Treaty; and is in breech of a United Nations’ Resolution
over its nuclear facilities, is currently at the
forefront of the western world demanding a Security
Council ban on Iran, a member of the NPT, from acquiring
nuclear power it is entitled to under this treaty.
“Since 1981, Israel has stood
in violation of UN Security Council resolution 487,
which calls upon that government to place its nuclear
facilities under the trusteeship of the International
Atomic Energy Agency.” (Stephen Zunes ‘President
Bush's UN Speech: Idealistic Rhetoric Disguises Sinister
Policies’
http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2004/0409sinister.html
September 22, 2004).
[xiii] Although
Zunes has made the point that Christian zionism was
deliberately cultivated for political purposes he
believes the main instigator was the Republicans not
American Jews. “In recent years a politicized and
right-wing Protestant fundamentalist movement has
emerged as a major factor in U.S. support for the
policies of the rightist Likud government in Israel. To
understand this influence, it is important to recognize
that the rise of the religious right as a political
force in the United States is a relatively recent
phenomenon that emerged as part of a calculated strategy
by leading right-wingers in the Republican Party who -
while not fundamentalist Christians themselves -
recognized the need to enlist the support of this key
segment of the American population in order to achieve
political power.” (Stephen
Zunes ‘The Influence of the Christian Right on
U.S. Middle East Policy’ Foreign Policy In Focus
June 2004). “Though
Christian fundamentalist support for Israel dates back
many years, only recently has it become one of the
movement’s major issues.” (Stephen
Zunes ‘The Influence of the Christian Right on
U.S. Middle East Policy’ Foreign Policy In Focus
www.fpif.org
June 2004).
[xiv]
Aluf Benn confirms the
increasing popularity of this conclusion, “The growing
contention that the "Israeli lobby" entangled the
administration in the Iraq mess, and is now inciting the
administration to take similar action against Iran, has
the Jewish community very worried.” (Aluf Benn ‘Olmert's
independence day’
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/objects/pages/PrintArticleEn.jhtml?itemNo=717559
May 19th 2006).
[xv] “First he
(Bush) was going to send Jay Garner. Then he suddenly
switched off and sent Paul Bremer. I have it from
insiders that in April, 2003, Jay Garner let it slip to
some of his staff that his charge was to turn Iraq over
to Ahmad Chalabi within six months. The staffers were
shocked and some contacted the State Department to see
if this was known there. It was not. So they blew the
whistle on Bush with Colin Powell. I was told that
Powell then made a coalition with Tony Blair and that
the two of them went to Bush and got him to change his
mind. The plan to put Chalabi in charge of Iraq was
frankly idiotic. Chalabi had no grass roots. He was the
one who had the bright idea to throw thousands of
ex-Baathists into unemployment (which encouraged them to
join the guerrilla resistance). This was why, as Kerry
noted on Thursday night, Bush had done no real planning
for the period after the war. He thought he had
everything sewn up because Chalabi would handle it.”
(Juan Cole ‘Debate and Chalabi’
http://www.juancole.com/ October 01, 2004).
[xvi] The
establishment of a Jewish administration in Iraq was
highly inflammatory and was a major factor in triggering
the Iraqi rebellion against the occupation. “Prior to
the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration
placed its Arab-language propaganda efforts under the
operational control of fanatical Zionist Norman J.
Pattiz. As chairman of the Middle East Committee of the
U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors, Pattiz oversees
television and print media in Iraq. Al-Hurra, Radio
Sawa, Baghdad Television, Radio Free Iraq, Al-Iraqiya,
and the rest of the Pattiz empire, is supposed to make
Iraqis feel good about the Bush administration's blind
support of Israel and its installation of an
Israel-friendly regime. However, so-called insurgents
have targeted Pattiz media, killing more than 70 "news"
people since U.S. forces toppled President Saddam
Hussein three years ago.” (Tim Donahue ‘Iraq: Insurgents
Target Media’
http://www.nationalvanguard.org/story.php?id=8271
March 14th 2006).
The Iraqis used to call the American
troops in Iraq the ‘Joos’. “I
was speaking the other day with Scott Pelley of CBS
News's "60 Minutes" about the mood in Iraq. He had just
returned from filming a piece there and he told me
something disturbing. Scott had gone around and asked
Iraqis on the streets what they called American troops -
wondering if they had nicknames for us in the way we
used to call the Nazis "Krauts" or the Vietcong
"Charlie." And what did he find? "Many Iraqis have so
much distrust for U.S. forces we found they've come up
with a nickname for our troops," Scott said. "They call
American soldiers 'The Jews,' as in, 'Don't go down that
street, the Jews set up a roadblock.' Now you find a
steadily rising perception across the Arab-Muslim world
that the great enemy of Islam is JIA - "Jews, Israel and
America," all lumped together in a single threat. This
trend has been helped by the Bush team's failed approach
to the Arab-Israel problem, which is to tell the truth
only to Yasir Arafat, while embracing Ariel Sharon so
tightly that it's impossible to know anymore where U.S.
policy stops and Mr. Sharon's begins." (Thomas L.
Friedman ‘Jews, Israel and America’
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/24/opinion/24friedman.html?oref=login&n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2dEd%2fOp%2dEd%2fColumnists
October 24, 2004). It is difficult to imagine anything
more likely to provoke hostility amongst Iraqis than
putting Jews in charge of their country given the damage
the Jos had inflicted on Iraq in the past.
[xvii] Michael
Massing is the latest commentator to highlight the
absence of any criticism of the Jos in Congress, “All
the measures pouring out of Congress convey a very clear
message. As one congressman put it: “We're so
predictable, so supportive, so unquestioning, of
Israel's actions that in the long run we've alienated
much of the Arab world. We've passed any number of
resolutions making it clear that we didn't want Clinton
or Bush to put pressure on Israel with regard to
settlements, or negotiations. If we passed a resolution
that fully embraced the road map, it would make an
enormous difference in the Arab world, and it would help
undermine terrorists. But you would never get a measure
like that through the international relations or
appropriations committees. Congress would never pass a
resolution that was in any way critical of anything
Israel has done.” (Michael Massing ‘The Storm over the
Israel Lobby’ http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19062 May
11th 2006).
[xviii] Indeed,
many of those involved in the depravities of America’s
secret war in Central America are now pursuing the same
policies in the Middle East. “Dusty (Kyle "Dusty"
Foggo), of course, is not the only veteran of Reagan's
Central American policy who has resurfaced to help fight
George W. Bush's "Global War on Terror." The list
includes John Negroponte, Elliot Abrams, Otto Reich,
John Poindexter, John Bolton, Oliver North, Robert
Kagan, and Michael Ledeen. They can also be found in the
highest levels of the White House: Dick Cheney cut his
political teeth in Congress in the 1980s plumping for
Reagan's Nicaragua policy, thundering that any attempt
to prohibit Contra aid was a legislative "abuse of
power." And on the frontlines, James Steele, who led the
Special Forces mission in El Salvador and worked with
North to run weapons and supplies to the Contras, was
sent to Iraq to help train a ruthless counterinsurgency
force made up of ex-Ba'athist thugs. (Steele is batting
two for two: As in El Salvador, such training has
produced not security but widespread death-squad
atrocities.)” (See Greg Grandin ‘The Swift-Boating of
America’
http://www.antiwar.com/engelhardt/?articleid=9079 June
2, 2006).
[xix]
“Today, Jerry Falwell, who
calls America's "Bible Belt" Israel's "safety belt,"
estimates that there are 70 million Christian Zionists
80,000 fundamentalist pastors, their views disseminated
by 1,000 Christian radio stations as well as 100
Christian TV stations.” (Jeff Halper ‘Israel as
an Extension of American Empire’
http://www.counterpunch.org/halper11072005.html
November 7th 2005).
[xx] Neumann is
right to suggest that even if America did not provide
the Jos with arms and ammunition, Jewish savagery
against the Palestinians would be just as atrocious.
[xxi] “Israelis
have a word for it: "hasbara". It is often misleadingly
translated as "advocacy for Israel". But what the word
signifies more deeply for Israel's supporters is the
duty, when the truth would be damaging, to dissemble or
to disseminate misinformation to protect the interests
of Israel as a Jewish state - that is, a state with an
unassailable Jewish majority.” (Jonathan Cook
‘Bold Ideas and Ugly Intentions’ http://www.counterpunch.org/cook06012006.html
June 1, 2006).
[xxii]
“Newspapers in Israel, of
course, have long used the word to describe Israel's
Muslim enemies. Recently, for example, the Jerusalem
Post ran an article in which al-Qaeda is described as
"yet another Nazi knockoff." This sort of language is
the stuff of Israeli journalism, and not of much concern
to Americans. But now the word "Nazi" is being gradually
fed to Americans as a scientific definition of our
Islamist enemies. Headlines such as "Hamas Uber Alles,"
"Hitler's Heirs in Damascus," and "The Nazi Correction
to Islamic Terror" are increasingly common in U.S. media
publications found in the news files Googled daily by
Americans.” (Mike Scheuer ‘Does Israel Conduct
Covert Action in America?’
http://www.antiwar.com/scheuer/?articleid=8827
April 8, 2006).
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