Divide and Rule

By Israel Shamir

I

The Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, a member for Georgia, was derailed by the Jewish Lobby, as she did not want to pledge blind support to the Jewish state. The blind support of Israel is a modern fealty oath, a promise given by a politician to obey the instructions of the Jewish Lobby, not only about marginal [for Americans] question of Palestine, but about the central question of power in the US. This power could not be sustained without some Black support.

A top Jewish official, Stephen Steinlight, Director of National Affairs at the American Jewish Committee^[1], frankly called the Jews to maintain “our present privilege, success and political power” by undermining the meagre influence of Blacks, Latinos and other non-whites, as “they harbour no feelings of guilt and see the Jews only as the most privileged and powerful of white Americans”. He proposed to use “the Jewish power disproportionally concentrated in Hollywood, TV and news industry” in order to “divide and conquer” various communities of Americans.

II

This drive of “divide and conquer” was the motive of the long “special relationship” between the Blacks and the Jews. It began in 1950s and 60s, when the American Jews were the most important and powerful friends of the Blacks. Two-thirds of Freedom Riders, the young men from the North, who came down South to wake the Blacks up, were Jews[2]. It sounds like a fairy tale, for nowadays, the policies of the Jewish community are anything but egalitarian, but before 1968, Jewish activists inspired the Blacks of the South to fight for their civil rights, and brought unrest to the campuses. They were supported by very unlikely allies, by the crème of the Jewish community, New York bankers and newspaper owners.

It was unexpected alliance, for in the past, the Jews have been prominent slave-traders In West Indies, the slave trade was in the Jewish hands since Sixteenth century. The Jews in the US utilised their connections in West Indies and brought the Black slaves to the plantations of the South. An important Jewish leader, Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, opposed Lincoln and supported the right “to buy and sell black savages”[3] It is often said that the Jewish tradition stands by human dignity and equality, but Maimonides, the greatest Jewish religious authority, denied humanity of Blacks and approved of slavery[4].

The Jewish support of the Blacks’ rights could be conceived as a tactical move designed to promote the Jewish interests by using the Blacks’ anger and energy. In these days, the Jews were still a separate social body, outside of the traditional elites, ‘pariah elite’ in words of witty Lenni Brenner. Facing the assault of the Blacks led by Jewish activists, the old elites were forced to open the doors to the Jews. With integration of the Jewish elite into the new elite of America, the Jewish activism collapsed. The revolution of ’68 was betrayed. The previously liberal Jewish newspapers like the NY Times began to preach a new agenda: the bracing mix of neo-liberalism and Jewish supremacy. The activists disappeared, went into business, opened furniture shops, or were marginalized, as if they were satisfied to establish ‘meritocracy’, the foundation stone of the New World Order.

The Black foot-soldiers of the revolution remained without their partners, even worse: they were attacked by yesterday’s allies. Martin Luther King was assassinated when his movement for equality and integration of the Blacks went too far; as far as wealthy Jewish suburbs. When the Blacks started to move into the privileged areas in the North, King was killed and the civil rights movement was rolled back. The suburbs remained Jewish; the Blacks remained in their ghetto; I was told by a prominent Jewish American participant of the events.

Lenni Brenner[5] dates the Jewish volte-face by 1967, when the predominantly Jewish teachers and lawyers of New York went into action to stop Black children from receiving proper education and competing for jobs: ‘them niggers can’t even keep their cotton pickin’ hands off our graft’, as he put it.

III

An outsider would imagine that we Jews are professional double-dealers; that we preached the rights of the Blacks but planned just to use them and promote our own agenda. But I am not an outsider, and this sort of duplicity can not be imagined outside of fiction. The young Jewish activists of pre-68’ America were sincere people, but their success was partly due to support of their parents, of Jewish banking and media elite. When the elite made a full turn around, the revolutionaries were lost, as soldiers forgotten by their commanders far beyond enemy lines. It was a deep personal tragedy for many of them. A small remainder of the Jewish progressive forces survived the shift, but it was not reinforced by younger members of the community. After 1968, the young and dynamic Jews were sent by their parents to Israel, hitherto a far-away place of little importance.

It is often said that the great and impressive victory of Israeli forces in the Six Day War of 1967 caused this turn to Zionism. But this claim (stated by Norman Finkelstein and others) does not survive critical examination. In 1956, Israel achieved no less of a spectacular victory, but the American Jews were not interested. In 1968, they turned to Israel for a very different reason: Zionism was promoted as an alternative cause for the young Jewish activists to keep them off the revolutionary cause.

The betrayal of the equality cause by the Jewish elite was a rational step. Revolution is similar to a marriage: people enter it for different reasons. Whenever the traditional elites lose, it is the big time for the next-in-line. Betrayal (Thermidor, in terms of French Revolution) is a normal bourgeois response to successful revolution going too far. The Jewish elite did not care about Blacks, about equality or about flower-power, but just used it to undermine the traditional structure of the society.

Incidentally, this U-turn derailed the old anti-Semitism, as it had strong right-wing roots. Anti-Semites used to view Jews as crypto-Communists, but after 1970, even Genghis Khan would not believe it. The left-wing contained too many pre-68’ Jews and did not understand why it was ditched by the previously friendly Jewish community. Only now, as generation changed, lamentations have been replaced by anger[6].

“The fortunes of American Jewish population changed from humble beginnings to the present position of wealth, power and influence”, wrote Anton Baumgarten[7] and asked: “What were the turning points of this development? When and how Jewish bourgeoisie gained entrance into the largely anti-Semitic Establishment and, especially, into its holy of holies, the big finance capital, the Wall Street? What role if any did the "civil rights movement" of the 60s, with the NY Times as its mouthpiece, have in promoting not only the rights of black people but of Jewish bankers as well ("the cunning of history")?”

The U-turn became evident soon, as the Jews fought affirmative action, besmirched independent Black activists and suborned others. In 1978, National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinsky compiled a secret confidential memo NSC-46, calling to fight the Black movement in the US as the Afro-Americans naturally oppose the Jewish supremacists. This call was heard, and the armed gangs of the Jewish community, the Jewish Defence League targeted, assassinated and framed the Black leaders, McKinney told her supporters.. FBI connived with the JDL as it still does: though this terrorist gang is outlawed, it freely operates in the United States and in Israel.

The most promising black diplomat Andy Young was dismissed from service and his career was terminated when he dared to show some independence of spirit. He was followed by others, all the way to Cynthia, as the Jewish minders kept the blacks under their control. It is not strange that the positions of the Afro-Americans went downhill, while the positions of American Jews, their former allies, constantly improved.

IV

Last year I visited Atlanta, Cynthia McKinney’s home town. It is a modern soulless megapolis of high rise office buildings and the usual suburban spread of rather segregated neighbourhoods. No spirit of Scarlet O’Hara or her black companion haunted the place. I was a guest of Emory University, supposedly the best in the state. I came to preach the idea of integration of Jews and Palestinians in the Holy Land. The Jewish students’ organisation objected to integration and called for boycott. They offered to pay all expenses, just cancel the lecture and kill my message. In the end, the lecture went on, but I still did not receive even my travel expenses back from the Emory.

In Atlanta, I saw the true beneficiary of the great struggle for Blacks’ liberation. After bussing and fights with KKK, after many Black casualties, now the Jewish students constitute forty per cent of the elite Emory, while the Blacks, the plurality of Atlanta, retain a statutory 10 % presence. The Jewish students do not come to university from integrated schools their fathers and uncles demanded: they go to superb private segregated schools.

The blacks do not compete with the Jews in the universities, as they are preferred tenants of private-managed and profit-making jails. While the percent of Jewish students increased, “the number of black men in jail has grown fivefold”, reported the New York Times[8], and there are “more black men behind bars than are enrolled in colleges”. Twenty years ago, there were one hundred fifty thousand black prisoners and half a million black students. Now eight hundred thousand blacks are in jail and only six hundred thousand are enrolled in colleges or universities.

The Blacks began to understand they’ve got a raw deal. The Black Commentator[9] summed up the feelings of many Afro-Americans:

“The electoral defeat of Rep. Cynthia McKinney signals the end of any "special relationship" between African Americans and mainstream organized American Jewry. The final break has been a long time in the making, the relentless attacks on affirmative action mounted by mainstream Jewish groups beginning in the Seventies sundered Black-Jewish connections. But when the relationship is truly over, both parties know it.

“Jewish American mainstream organizations have fallen under the sway of racist right-wingers in both Israel and the United States. They have acted in concert with the Christian and corporate Hard Right to undermine Black political cohesion and independence. They promote the careers of Black surrogates to thwart the genuine aspirations of the people. This is the conduct of an enemy. These organizations have acted with cruel, gratuitous arrogance. They brag and strut, revelling in their power to intervene in the politics of the Black community. They have lied and smeared and, yes, conspired to foist their own candidates upon Black people. On the Jewish Left, the near-silence is appalling. To us, that signifies either cowardice or capitulation to the racists of the congregation”.

These words wouldn’t mean much: the Black-Jewish “special relationship” was declared[10] dead long ago, but the rumours of its death were premature. However, now the Jewish leadership, in a new sharp turn of policies, decided to support racist agenda. I wrote about this shift in Poisoning Wells[11]:

“They steal our money and rape our daughters”, - this concept is promoted by the Jewish propaganda network, this globe-embracing conglomerate of media moguls, obedient journalists, deferential university professors. Hitler or Stalin never had had such a network in their disposal. The mighty machine rolled out the Ku Klux Klan scaremongering image of a crouching dark-skinned rapist, lusting the white skin and golden hair of Aryan maidens of Denmark. Imported from the great KKK-worshipping silent movie by Griffith, The Nation Is Born, the racist image opens a new film of Men in Black II: big Negro with big knife and big teeth attacks a White woman in the park. The film was produced by the creator of Schindler’s List, Stephen Spielberg”.

V

The Afro-Americans should think of a new mode of action, look for new allies and prove their ability to act independently. The debacle of Cynthia shows that two official established parties offer no way out. They take the blacks for granted. Mercifully, people are increasingly tired of the two-party system trap. It is time to change patterns, to form new alliances, and to reject the old rivalries and hatred.

The people of the South, blacks, whites, Native Americans, immigrants have to live together and decide the future of the South. Much of inter-communal hostility was imported from New York for ‘Divide and Rule’ purposes.[12] The most extreme groups, from KKK to Black Panthers, had connections in the same circles.

A few days ago, the NY Times[13] made an unusual promotion campaign for a racist Rev. Matt Hale, “America's scariest hatemonger”. Francis Boyle, the well-known lawyer and a friend of Palestine, responded to this write-up: “Hale was nothing more than a small time Central Illinois bigot and racist until Dershowitz came along, and deliberately gave Hale tens of millions of dollars of free publicity on the world's news media in order to promote his violent racial hatred against Blacks, Jews, Asians and now Latinos and Native Americans. The [Jewish] ADL also supported Hale”.

The people of the South should understand who promoted the divisions of the past and reject it. Confrontational approach leads nowhere, and it is good that there is readiness to proceed from disunity to cooperation. The legacy of slavery does not have to mean an eternal confrontation. The Russian peasants were freed from their serfdom in 1861, almost simultaneously with the Blacks’ liberation. However, now a descendant of a Russian serf feels no animosity to a descendant of Russian squire, and vice versa.

The War Party media and opinion-making bodies stand on the way of peaceful coexistence, as they actively demonise all parts of the Southern population. They present the white folks as white supremacists, racists, lynching mob. They present blacks as criminals, lazy, layabouts. They present immigrants as nasty Usama fanatics. However in Atlanta, the local folks who cherish the heritage of Confederacy understood their true interests, and actively supported Cynthia.

Memory of Confederacy does not have to divide; it could be uniting glue, as there were many blacks and Native Americans in the defeated army as well. It is not a secret that so-called whites and blacks of the South are often brothers or cousins. This division could become as irrelevant, as the division of Yaman and Kais among the Arabs. The Civil War had ruined the South for many years; it brought no happiness to blacks or local whites. Its memories had kept the South divided, while the power eluded the people. However, the Southerners of all shades of skin can live together in mutual respect, rejecting the Divide and Rule goading.