The Israeli Agenda and the Scorecard of the Zionist Power
Configuration for 2008
James Petras
February 2008
The Israeli Agenda openly defended, publically practiced and
aggressively pursued by the Zionist power configuration (ZPC) has greatly
influenced the US Presidential elections and the likely future course of
Washington’s Middle East policy.
The strategy of the Jewish state is the complete Zionization of
Palestine, the takeover of land, water, offshore gas (estimated to be worth $4
billion dollars) and other economic resources and the total dispossession of the
Palestinian people. Tel Aviv’s tactics have included daily military assaults,
giant walls ghettoizing entire Palestinian towns, military outposts and controls
undermining commerce and production to force bankruptcy, poverty, severe
deprivation and population flight. The second priority of the Israeli colonial
state is to bolster the Jewish state’s political and military supremacy in the
Middle East, using preposterous arguments of ‘survival’ and ‘existential
threats’. The key postulate of Israeli Middle East policy is to destroy
or intimidate the principle adversaries of its Zionization of Palestine
and its expansionist Middle East policy. In pursuit of that policy, it invaded
southern Lebanon to destroy Hezbollah, bombing neighborhoods and critical
infrastructure in Beirut and other cities, bombed Syria as a provocation.
Earlier the Israeli state played a major role in directing the ZPC in
formulating US war policy toward destroying Iraq as a viable nation. Recently
Israel, through the ZPC in the US, has engaged in a comprehensive, intense and
highly charged political, diplomatic, economic and military campaign to isolate
and ultimately destroy the Islamic Republic of Iran as a political counterweight
to its ambitions in the Middle East (“Israel: Iran building Nuclear Arms”,
Aljazeera February 12, 2008). The principal propaganda tool of the ZPC
and its Israeli patrons is to claim Iran represents a ‘military threat’ to
Israel, Iraq, the Gulf oil producers and the US. This outlandish charge is
repeatedly made by ZPC ideologues. According to the 2008 edition of the
International Institute of Strategic Studies Military Balance, Iran’s
total defense spending for 2006 was nearly 55% less than Israel despite having
ten times the population of the Jewish state and facing hundreds of US-
supported terrorist incursions across its borders. Per capita, Israeli military
expenditures were 17 times more than Iran ($1,737 per Israeli – not counting US
direct military assistance – versus $110 for each Iranian citizen). It is
widely acknowledged that Israel has over 200 nuclear weapons capable of striking
Iranian population centers while Iran has none. Israel receives over $3 billion
US dollars a year in direct US military aid, including the most advanced
offensive military technology – while Iran receives no foreign military aid and
has little defensive technology. According to US Budgetary Hearings, from 2009
to 2018 Israel will receive a $30 billion dollar package of direct foreign
military financing from the US, while Iran will receive nothing from any foreign
state.
Contrary to Israeli and ZPC propaganda, the Gulf States, Iraq and many US
military commanders do not consider Iran a military threat, but rather a factor
in stabilizing the volatile situation. The Gulf States invited Iran to their
annual meetings; Iraqi government leaders meet with Iranian officials on trade
and security and Saudi Arabia is following a similar course by inviting Iranian
leaders to Mecca for the Hadj.
After the destruction of the secular republic of Iraq, the job of the ZPC has
been to push for greater US military aggressin against Israel’s perceived
adversaries – Iran being the prime target – by massive falsification of the
actual correlation of military forces between Israel and Iran.
Israeli and ZPC Intervention in the US Presidential Elections and Economic
Policy
The second task of the ZPC in pursuit of Israel’s agenda is to ensure no major
political candidate debates or questions Israeli genocidal policies toward the
Palestinians and its military ambitions in the Middle East. In the US
Presidential election of 2008, the ZPC’s role is to ensure that all major
candidates endorse, support and promote the Israeli political agenda, despite
its genocidal policies (see Gideon Levy, “The Lights have been turned off”,
Haaretz February 4, 2008) and repudiation of international law. The ZPC
has imposed on all Presidential candidates Israel’s bellicose posture toward
Iran, and its explicit policy of liquidating Hamas political leaders. According
to Israeli Minister of Housing and construction, Zeev Boim, “all members of
Hamas political leadership are involved in terrorist acts against Israel…so they
must be liquidated.” (Israeli Army Radio- Galei Tzahal, February 9,
2008 cited in Haaretz).
The third task of the ZPC is to use their strategic positions in the White
House, Treasury, Pentagon and State Department to undermine Iran’s economy,
politically isolate it and provoke internal and external confrontations.
Israel 2008: The Theory and Practice of Genocide
Israel has totally shredded any and all verbal commitments made at
the Bush-organized Annapolis Middle East Conference in November 2007. The
Jewish state is building 1000 new housing units in “Palestinian” East
Jerusalem. It allows 100 new settler posts to occupy Palestinian land. It has
attacked and killed Palestinian civilians, police and supporters of its
‘negotiating partner’ Abbas throughout the West Bank. Israel retains its 300
checkpoints throughout the West Bank, undermining travel, transport, trade and
medical treatment. Jewish colonial settlements expand, further encroaching on
Palestinian land, under the flimsy pretext that the peace process only precludes
whatever the Jewish officials designate as ‘new settlements’, in effect
isolating and reducing Palestinian East Jerusalem into a walled enclave.
Israeli leaders have intensified their military assaults on Gaza,
killing nearly 800 and wounding over 1,000 Palestinians since the democratically
elected Hamas government took effective control over Gaza in 2007 (‘IDF to
step up Gaza Assassinations’ Haaretz February 13, 2008). Worse
still they have imposed the genocidal strategy of starving 1.4 million residents
of Gaza into submission, practicing the internationally outlawed practice of
collective punishment against civilians in order to incite them into
overthrowing their elected government. Israeli officials have publicly embraced
and defended their totalitarian policies of cutting off electricity generation
in the Gaza Strip, thus drastically reducing or eliminating the supply of safe
water, halting all sewage treatment, electricity for hospitals, refrigerators,
food and vaccine storage, home, school and business lighting. The Israeli
Supreme Court has approved this policy of mass, brutal collective punishment of
over 1.4 million civilians. (Haaretz February 2, 2008). They have
imposed a tight blockade on food and medical supplies resulting in what the
United Nations officials and international human rights groups have called a
humanitarian disaster of unprecedented magnitude with widespread disease and
famine becoming a reality. The Israeli Army blocks even the movement of sick
and critically injured children. The Israeli judicial system led by its Supreme
Court judges has ruled in favor of the power cuts, bombing of generators and
water treatment plants and blockage of food, providing an unprecedented ‘legal’
framework for genocide.
The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations
have publicly defended Israeli genocidal policies and the ZPC has been
successful in securing the support of both major US political parties and
presidential candidates for Israeli collective punishment against Palestinian
civilians.
Deliberate State Genocide in the Service of Colonial Aggrandizement
Israeli policymakers claim that their totalitarian tactics are a
‘response to ‘rocket attacks’ by Palestinian ‘terrorists’. In fact there are no
attacks from the West Bank – not a single rocket attack throughout the past two
years. Even more significant, Israel has repeatedly rejected Hamas offer to
sign a joint comprehensive long-term ceasefire involving an end to rocket fire
in exchange for an end to Israeli military air and tank assaults. All Israeli
leaders have categorically rejected Hamas cease-fire offers and have refused to
even negotiate with or recognize the duly elected Hamas leadership.
The Jewish state has affirmed its policy of political extraterritorial
assassinations of democratically elected political leaders irrespective of
rocket or other attacks as part of its strategy of practicing international
state terrorism against the Palestinian people, in violation of international
law.
In summary, genocide and state terror at the service of ethnic dispossession and
racial-ethnic colonial settlements is the openly stated, judicially sanctioned
practice of the Israeli state. There is no basis for speaking of a Jewish,
Zionist or Israeli ‘conspiracy’ against the Palestinians. State terror is
practiced openly and publicly defended by the Supreme Court while international
law is publicly dismissed as irrelevant to the extent that it infringes on the
freedom of action, expansion and ‘security’ of Jewish territorial ambitions,
military superiority in the Middle East and Israeli influence over US Middle
East policy.
As Israeli policy makers clearly embrace totalitarian policies,
engaging and justifying international assassination of adversaries and the
collective punishment of over 1.4 million civilians in Gaza, their political,
academic and journalistic apologists rely on unadulterated vituperation and
paranoid screeds against Israel’s critics in the US. The now deceased
super-Zionist Congress-person Tom Lantos (Democrat California), accused
ex-President Carter of being filled with ‘venom’ for comparing the oppression of
the Palestinians to South African Apartheid. Zionist zealot, Eugene
Kontorovich, Professor of Law (sic) at Northwestern University, claims that the
Geneva Conventions do not apply to Israel’s violent seizure and settlement of
Palestinian lands (Daily Alert February 15, 2008). Alex Safian ‘refutes’
Professors Walt and Mearsheimer’s classic study of the Israel Lobby in the
United States as ‘a fraud’. Israeli Ambassador to Canada, Alan Baker, refers to
Israel’s privileging of Jews over Palestinians in the Occupied Territories as ‘the
poisonous myth of Israel’s Apartheid’ (National Post-Canada cited in
the Daily Alert February 15, 2008).
The violent vituperative language follows the deep frustration that
Zionist leaders feel in failing to stem the growing rejection of Israel’s
totalitarian politics. Their belief that no one should ever attack Israel’s
colonial and racist policies leads them to blind rage, blacklisting, censorship
and vicious character assassinations. Israel’s expansionist and militarist
policies, in violation of international law, are accompanied by a powerful
tendency among mainstream Zionist leaders to reject international law, vilifying
the United Nations and insulting the International Court of Justice.
Pro-Israel Western leaders adopt Israel’s paranoid style of politics and
translate it into the American political discourse. Zionist zealot and head of
US Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, engages in widespread internal espionage
of US citizens in violation of constitutional protections. Zionist fanatic, US
Attorney General Michael Mulkasy, refused to investigate the illegal, but widely
acknowledged practice of torturing suspects in US custody, including
water-torture (water-boarding), considering this internationally outlawed
torture to be ‘acceptable under certain conditions’. The most egregious example
of Israel’s political and intellectual degeneration is found in the logic of its
chain of enemies. Israeli military targeting starts with attacking the
Palestinian armed resistance; then it extends to their family members,
neighbors, their homes, schools, workshops, offices and fields. It implicates
civilians, ambulances and food distribution outlets. It proceeds to target the
entire community, a whole people, with round-ups of all males less than 45 years
of ages. Paranoia leads to verbal assaults of overseas European and US critics
of Israeli crimes against humanity. Israeli death squads cross borders and
assassinate political leaders, train terrorists in Iraq, Iran, Colombia and
elsewhere to weaken countries, regimes and groups, which politically support the
Palestinian struggle for independence and sovereignty.
Accompanying the Israeli policy of permanent global war and paranoia
are the entire leadership of the Zionist Power Configuration in the US. The
ZPC’s introduction of the Israeli paranoid style of politics in our country
becomes one of the biggest threats to American freedoms and our desire to avoid
Israeli entrapment in another brutal war in the Middle East.
The Zionist Power Configuration: 2008
The ZPC is made up of all the major Jewish organizations, pro-Israel
plutocrats, media barons and government officials who are Israel Firsters. In
the face of the unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe imposed by Israel’s food
and energy blockade of Gaza, and its thorough repudiation of the terms of the
Annapolis peace negotiation the Zionist power configuration had its work cut out
for it in selling the Israeli genocidal agenda as a defensive, justifiable
policy of a peace-loving democracy. The second task of the ZPC was to overcome
the 2007 US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran which refuted Israeli
and White House propaganda painting Iran as a nuclear threat. The Israeli state
propaganda machine went on an all out assault of the NIE, claiming to have
superior knowledge of hidden Iranian research programs – without providing a
shred of reliable evidence. Once the Israeli state defined its position to the
NIE, the entire leadership of the Conference of the Presidents of Major
American Jewish Organizations (CPMAJO), all the major Zionist- controlled
propaganda centers (‘think tanks’) and an army of Israel-First academics
(self-styled ‘intelligence experts’) and ideologues deluged the print and
electronic mass media with attacks on the NIE report, echoing and citing the
rhetoric and claims of the Israeli state. The White House and Congress (with
few exceptions) followed the line of the ZPC, downplaying and distorting the
NIE, escalating their bellicose rhetoric and pressure for sanctions on Iran in
the UN Security Council and among the EU and NATO countries. The success
of the ZPC in sustaining US confrontational policies against Iran, and
forcefully selling the Israeli policy to the US political elite even against the
findings and report of all the US intelligence agencies is a measure of the
decisive power of the ZPC over US Middle East policy. Never in the entire
history of the US has a small and economically insignificant foreign power
wielded so much influence over Washington in a strategic region through its
overseas representatives over and against the advice of America’s entire
intelligence establishment.
The key to Zionist power is its ability to leverage and
multiply its influence through non-Zionist congressional, media, pension
fund managers, state and municipal officials and a host of trade union, academic
and other notables and civic organizations. Strategically placed
Zionists focused on the single issue of Israel, bring to bear the
economic and organizational resources of their 1 million affiliates, supporters
and media publicists on targeting policy makers in all relevant fields. The
targeted individuals and organizations representing many millions of American
Gentiles and non-Zionist Jews usually capitulate to the pressure or payoffs or
are persuaded to follow the lead of the aggressive focused Zionist zealots. The
propaganda value of having non-Zionists with a mass organizational base carrying
out Israeli policies is immense. Leveraging the ‘others’ allows the pro-Israel
liberal ideologues to obfuscate, downplay and dilute the real power of Israel
and the ZPC in the making of US Middle East policy. As a consequence, we find
what I call ‘mish-mash’ analyses which argue that “The Zionist pro-Israel lobby
(sic) is only one of many groups and interests influencing US Middle East
policy”. In other words, Zionist leveraged politicians are given a degree of
autonomy and attributed a set of interests, which effectively hides Zionist
initiatives, pressures and tactical leverage.
In 2008 Zionist direct and leveraged power is
manifested in several decisively important areas of US politics, especially in
foreign policy.
The ZPC and the Presidential Elections
All of the major presidential candidates have slavishly followed the
most extreme pro-Israel positions promoted by the Presidents of the Major
American Jewish Organizations. John McCain, the Republican front-runner
declares his unconditional support for Israel’s territorial expansion,
settlements and genocidal policy toward Gaza. According to the Jewish weekly,
The Forward (February 13, 2008), “On Israel,…McCain has been
uncharacteristically conventional. He offers unqualified support, expressed in
years of public statements…” The same article emphasizes how in 2006 McCain
capitulated to Zionist pressure in a matter of days by recanting his position on
Israel returning to its 1967 borders: “I’ve never held the position that
Israeli should return to the 1967 lines and that is not my position today.”
On February 7, 2008 McCain defined US-Iranian policy on strictly Zionist terms:
“Those (Democratic) senators won’t recognize and seriously address the threat
posed by an Iran with nuclear ambitions to our ally Israel in the region.”
(McCain’s speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference, February 7,
2008, quoted in Haaretz Februaru 10, 2008). In 2007, McCain happily
echoed Israeli demands to bomb Iran with the vulgar and sinister new refrain to
an old Beach Boys rock song… “Bomb, Bomb, Bomb…Bomb-bomb Iran”.
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have supported every major position
and demand of the ZPC: Both have pledged unconditional support for Israel; they
have backed Israel’s genocidal policies against Gaza, the expansion of
settlements and the total takeover of Jerusalem. Hillary Clinton urges
recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital – contrary to the United Nations, the
European Union and even the Bush Administration’s position. Zionist ideologues
are among the top foreign policy and Middle East advisers of all three top
contenders for their party’s presidential nomination. The public record reads
Zionist decisive influence over the next US President’s Middle Est policy. The
only possible deviation is Obama’s statement that he is willing to negotiate
with the Iranian government – a policy that the Bush regime, in part, already
practices at a lesser official level via meetings in Iraq. For his minor
discrepancy from the Zionist war rhetoric toward Iran, Obama was chastised by
Malcolm Hoenlein, head of the CPMAJO (Haaretz January 18, 2008). To
compensate for talking too much about ‘change’ which worries the paranoid Jewish
leaders, like Hoenlein, Obama went out of his way to blame the civilians living
in Gaza for the Israeli campaign to starve them into surrender and called on
them to revolt against their democratically-elected Hamas government. The ZPC
is the only major national political-social apparatus, which engages in a
comprehensive, persistent and intensive campaign to direct US foreign policy
into a full-scale (diplomatic, military and economic) confrontation with Iran.
Silencing Potential Critics of the ZPC
Almost every major centrist, leftist or progressive journal, weekly
magazine, radio and web site has refused to discuss the singular influence
of the ZPC over the Presidential candidates’ Middle East policy - a further
indication of the reach and influence of the ZPC. The best
indication that the ZPC is not ‘just another lobby’ as Mearsheimer and Walt
claim, or a simply another bellicose neo-conservative current of opinion, is
found in their slavish adherence to the Israeli state’s policies, even when they
blatantly defy and repudiate the rightwing policies of President Bush.
At Annapolis (November 2007) President Bush called on Israel to cease building
new settlements in order to further peace negotiations. Exactly three months
later Israel announced plans to build over 1,000 (1,250) new Jews-only homes in
Palestinian East Jerusalem (BBC News, February 12, 2008). The Daily
Alert propaganda sheet of the CPMAJO immediately endorsed the Israeli
position and set in motion its major lobbyists, op-ed ideologues and media
‘experts’ to justify Israel’s crass repudiation of its agreement with President
Bush.
Rather than confront this flagrant, highly public, unilateral and
shameful Israeli repudiation of its agreement with the White House, President
Bush , Secretary of State Condeleeza Rice and Defense Secretary Gates all played
‘Mickey the Dunce’. White House press secretary, Dana Perino, claimed she had
not seen the report about Israel’s plans to build new apartments in East
Jerusalem – though it was ‘news’ in all the mass electronic and print media. In
fear of the ZPC, Perino responded as if the entire affair was simply a problem
for the Palestinians: “But obviously, there is no doubt that an announcement
of that sort (building 1,125 new Jews-only segregated apartments) would make the
Palestinians concerned” (Santa Barbara News-Press February 12, 2008).
Zionist Power: Treasury Department
Within the government, the principal architect and key operative of
the US worldwide campaign to strangle the Iranian economy is a top Treasury
Department official, Stuart Levey, a zealous Zionist and key agent of the ZPC in
the executive branch. Levey has successfully browbeat the reticent, persuaded
the gullible and teamed up with co-thinkers who control state, municipal and
private pension funds to withdraw investments from any enterprise which deals
with Iran. Levey is a major architect of the Treasury’s economic sanctions
policy, which Washington has promoted in the United Nations Security Council.
Levey’s policies have succeeded in blocking Iranian private bank transactions.
They have received the support of the White House and the National Security
Council despite the NIE report, which found that Iran was not engaged in a
nuclear weapons program. Mohamed El Baradei and the International Atomic Energy
Agency have confirmed the position of the NIE (Associated Press, February
23, 2008). Unlike Levey, the NIE and the IAEA are agencies, which are not
influenced by the Zionist power configuration.
Nevertheless, the Israeli demands (pushed by the ZPC) for further sanctions
based on unfounded claims of continued nuclear arms programs trumps the NIE and
IAEA intelligence findings. The White House, France, England and Germany demand
new and harsher sanctions against Iran. Never in the history of Israeli
influence over US Middle East policy has the pro-Israel power configuration so
much influence as it has today: The US government (President to Congress to
Presidential hopefuls) repudiate its own intelligence agencies in favor of the
‘intelligence’ claims of a foreign power. Never has the US Treasury Department
been so influenced by Israel Firsters, like Stuart Levey, Daniel Glaser and
their colleagues in putting the interests of Israel above and beyond the
interests of the major US and European oil companies.
At every AIPAC meeting since 2004, in every publication of the
Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations over the past 5 years, in each
and every state and citywide conference of Jewish community councils, every
effort has been made to promote US military action or economic sanctions against
Iran. In fact, the ZPC escalated its campaign against Iran after
the NIE was published and intensified their campaign in favor of Israel’s
fabricated ‘intelligence claims’ (Daily Alert, November 2007 – February
2008). The dual power position of Israel Firsters in key policy positions and
civil society defines their influence over US Middle East policy.
The International Dimension
The US ZPC has been immensely aided in securing its bellicose
anti-Iranian agenda by the appointments of prominent Zionists to key foreign
policy positions in England and France. David Milliband, the British Foreign
Minister, has close family ties with Jewish settlers from Britain colonizing the
occupied West Bank. During a visit to Israel, he spent several days with
Israeli officials and an evening with his relatives, while totally ignoring the
issue of the 1.4 million Palestinians in Gaza suffering from Israel’s genocidal
blockade. Milliband has been a fierce defender of keeping the ‘military option
on the table’, heightening economic sanctions against Iran and is an
unconditional supporter of Israel’s brutal policy preventing the shipment of
food and fuel from reaching the suffering people of the Gaza strip.
Bernard Kouchner, the French Foreign Minister is a lifelong zealous
Zionist who, upon taking office, pronounced himself in favor of a military
attack on Iran ‘if negotiations fail’. As the new Foreign Minister,
Kouchner went to US occupied Iraq and praised the occupation and puppet
‘government’ despite the over 1 million civilian deaths and 4 million destitute
refugees which has resulted from the invasion and occupation. Kouchner
(appointed by French President Sarkozy – under pressure from the Zionists), like
president Bush gave strong backing to any Israeli ‘military pre-emptive
action’ (offensive military assault), though a strong negative reaction from
the French public forced him to tone down his overt support of Israeli military
actions.
With such powerful political allies and co-thinkers in the American, French and
British governments and the controlling role of the ZPC over US
policymakers in the United Nations, it comes as no surprise that Israel received
no reprimand for its daily murders and abductions of civilians and Palestinian
officials in Gaza and the West Bank. Zion power prevents the UN from even
applying its own basic international principles to prosecute crimes against
humanity, including torture and collective punishment. Since its founding in
the late 19th century and its spread to the US, especially after
WWII, organized Zionism has never been so influential in so many spheres of
government and had so much control over US Middle East policy as it possesses
today. Most major pro-Israel Jewish leaders in moments of candor have publicly
acknowledged that they are at the pinnacle of influence, to the effect that
‘we have never had an administration as favorable to Israel as under President
Bush.’ Certainly this is an understatement that speaks to an underlying
truth : Never has the US engaged in a very costly Middle Eastern war to benefit
a foreign power; never has the US deliberately prevented big oil companies from
signing billion dollar oil contracts by imposing economic sanctions on Iran in
order to weaken a regional opponent of Israel.
The Show Must Go On
Not only does the ZPC directly influence US policy against
Palestine, Iraq and Iran, but it has extended its campaign against ‘third
parties’, countries like China which have economic relations with Sudan (a
Muslim nation with an independent foreign policy which supports Palestinian
rights). To an overwhelming degree, the propaganda campaign behind the
so-called “Darfur genocide campaign’ is the Israeli state and its political
apparatus in the US, namely the ZPC. Most of the media celebrities, led by
prominent Hollywood Zionist director Steven Spielberg, have engaged in an
exercise of selective moral indignation – supporting Israel, while ignoring its
starvation blockade of Gaza, supporting the US occupation of Afghanistan and
Iraq while attacking China for its ‘immoral’ oil contracts with the Sudan. The
CPMAJO has focused on the Darfur ‘genocide’ because by doing so it favors the
brutal separatists in southern Sudan, armed and advised by Israel, as a means of
depriving pro-Palestinian Sudan of a large oil rich region in the south of the
country. The Darfur campaign deliberately and systematically excludes any
mention of the Israeli Supreme Court’s approval of Israel’s food and fuel
blockade and deliberate prevention of the movement of medical personnel in Gaza
and the West Bank, its approval of Israel’s practice of torture (‘forceful
interrogations’), armed assaults on the vital infrastructure and civilian
population centers of Gaza.
Hollywood’s Darfur sideshow is a sham propaganda effort at selective
humanitarian concern, which does not deviate a millimeter from the official line
promoted by the Israeli state and publicized in the US by the Daily Alert,
the principle bulletin of the ZPC.
ZPC: Scorecard for 2008
From January to the middle of February 2008, Israeli had killed,
wounded and arrested nearly a thousand Palestinians, mostly but not exclusively
from Gaza. Over half of those killed, arrested and wounded were unarmed
civilians, the rest include Hamas and PLO security officials, militia members
and anti-colonial resistance fighters. Of the 700 primitive rockets and shells
launched from Gaza, not a single Israeli Jew was killed and fewer than a dozen
suffered serious bodily harm. Only a contract farm laborer from Ecuador died on
the Israeli side from the rockets.
In a speech to Jewish-American leaders in mid-February, Prime
Minister Olmert spelled out the gist of Israel’s totalitarian strategy.
According to the BBC News (February 18, 2008) “Mr Olmert said, ‘Israel
had a free hand to respond and attack anyone who has any kind of
responsibility. This applied to everyone, first and foremost Hamas,”
(my emphasis). The entire leadership of the major Jewish organizations,
whole-heartedly approved the use of unrestrained and unlimited violence (a
‘free hand’) against the entire Palestinian population (‘any kind of
responsibility’), which would include individuals who transport, feed,
educate, shelter, vote for or interact with Hamas, their family members,
friends, neighbors – 99% of the residents of Gaza. Giving priority to targeting
‘first and foremost Hamas’ includes several hundred thousand voters who
elected Hamas in free and democratic elections.
The ZPC has succeeded in securing the near unanimous US
Congressional support for Israel’s mass arrests and daily assaults on Gaza, even
when a few mass media outlets published photos of Israeli colonial soldiers
parading eighty arbitrarily arrested Palestinian civilians bound and blindfolded
to notorious Israeli interrogation centers (BBC News February 18, 2008)
for unlimited detention with no legal guarantees against physical and
psychological torture.
The ZPC has swamped the US mass media with praise of Israel’s cross
border assassinations, such as the international political murder of Hizbullah
leader, Imad Mughniyeh in Damascus, Syria (Daily Alert February 15,
2008). Reproducing articles from the Israeli press (Jerusalem Post,
Haaretz) and Zionist think tanks and weeklys (Washington Institute for Near
East Policy, New York Jewish Week, YNET News, CAMERA,
New York Sun, and Middle East Strategy at Harvard) the Daily Alert
has provided legitimacy to international assassinations by official
state-directed death squads thereby extending the violence and counter-violence
throughout the world. This is a fact recognized by the US FBI and Israeli
officials. Heads of the Israeli international secret police, the MOSSAD, openly
acknowledge the role of Israeli assassinations in provoking terrorist reprisals
by putting a world-wide alert to Jews to avoid Islamic and Arab countries as
well as locations where “there is a high concentration of Israelis”
(Prime Minister’s Office, reprinted in the Daily Alert February 15,
2008). The Israeli practice of staging international assassinations of
opposition leaders in major cities will not only invite retaliation against
Israelis and Jews but also endanger sites in the US and EU, for tolerating these
acts of state-sponsored terror. In other words, Israeli terror invites
terrorist counter attacks like September 11, 2001. Israel, by provoking a new
round in the Palestinian ‘war through global terror’ and the US and EU by
embracing an Israeli car bomb assassination in Damascus endanger Western lives
everywhere. The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish
Organizations, their publicists and op-ed ideologues in the mass media are
opening the entire Western world to terrorist attacks. By supporting Israeli
terror and increasing the chance of Muslim reprisals, the ZPC strengthens the
repressive structure of a growing police state in the US. (The ‘professional’
killing by Israeli operatives of a major figure in Damascus, Syria raises the
question of the role of Israeli operatives in the as-yet unsolved series of car
bomb assassinations in Lebanon – given Israel’s desire to maintain a state of
internal tension in that country.) The brilliant and precocious Ivy League
academic apologists of each and every act of official Israeli state-sponsored
international terror apparently dissociate these acts of assassination from
likely reprisals in our country and the consequent further destruction of
our remaining precarious democratic freedoms. Could it be that Zionist American
intellectuals welcome more US police state agencies and laws in order to
prosecute a rising number of Americans who are critical of Zionist influence
over the American political process? They might do well to recall that
police state structures and laws could be used against them in the future.
Except for a small, courageous and isolated band of
Anglo-American-Canadian Jewish intellectuals and academics, all the mainline
Jewish organizations raised not a single question, let alone criticism regarding
Israel’s role in instigating international terror.
From the beginning of the year, the ZPC has intensified its campaign
to strangle the Iranian economy through US-promoted sanctions in the UN. They
raised the ante in demonizing Iran as a military-nuclear threat to Israel, the
US and the Gulf States. Almost a third of every issue of the Daily Alert
(from January 1 to February 20, 2008) is devoted to reproducing propaganda
pieces from Israeli officials claiming the Iranians are a nuclear threat and are
advancing toward nuclear war. They repeat Israeli propaganda about an
‘existential threat to the survival of Israel’. The CPMAJO never mention that
Israel has a current Middle East monopoly of over 200 nuclear weapons and
missiles. Since most leading US Zionists believe that they will not have
another President as servile to Israeli interests as the current President Bush
(a doubtful proposition) they are pushing hard to find a pretext for a US attack
or an Israeli strike backed by Washington before Bush leaves office. While the
White House has raised its bellicose rhetoric and aggressively pursued new
sanctions, Washington and its backers in the ZPC have failed to isolate Iran.
In late 2007 and into 2008, Iran has met with top Iraqi politicians in Baghdad
and Teheran, reached agreements with US military officials to stabilize Iraq,
addressed the Gulf Cooperation Council at their annual meeting in Doha, while
the Saudi monarch invited Iranian President Ahmadinejad to fulfill the Hadj
pilgrimage in Mecca in December 2007 ( Al Jazeera, February 16, 2008).
In other words the ZPC’s militarist anti-Iran strategy has succeeded in
isolating the US form its conservative Gulf allies, split US civilians and
military policymakers and cost major US and EU oil companies over $20 billion
dollars in lost Iranian oil contracts. While the ZPC, via its influence in the
mass media and contributions to the leading presidential candidates, has shaped
elite opinion in defense of Israeli genocide in Gaza and war policy toward Iran,
it has failed to ‘turn’ the great majority of the American public opposed to
Middle East wars from favoring the prompt withdrawal of US troops from Iraq and
condemning the officially acknowledged use of torture in detainee
interrogations.
Cracks in the Zionist Monolith
There are even some cracks in the ZPC monolithic control of public
debate on the Israeli colonization of Palestine and the disastrous role of the
pro-Israel power configuration in formulating US domestic security and war
policy. Despite the Daily Alerts reproduction of at least a dozen
vitriolic, histrionic, ad hominum attacks on Professors Mearsheimer and Walt and
their book on the Israel Lobby and former President Jimmy Carter’s book on the
Israeli apartheid policy against Palestinians, the issues they raise have
circulated widely and continue to influence millions of Americans. Jewish
critics, both secular and religious, Zionist and anti-Zionist (especially the
younger generations), are publicly challenging the pretense of the mainline
Jewish organizations’ claim to speak for the Jewish community with regard to
Israel and US Middle East policy.
Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East, a primarily
anti-Zionist Jewish organization, has joined with the province of Ontario’s
biggest public sector trade union in denouncing Israeli colonial policy in
Palestine and challenging Zionist dominance of the Jewish community and
influence over the Canadian trade union movement.
Major protestant denominations in the United States, including the
Presbyterians and Methodists are supporting divestment of US companies aiding
Israel’s brutal colonial rule in the West Bank and Gaza. In the first week of
February, the student government at the London School of Economics voted by an
overwhelming majority in favor of divestment campaign against companies
supporting Israeli occupation. A growing number of universities organized
well-attended teach-ins throughout North America, protesting Israel’s apartheid
regime and policy, despite vitriolic attacks from prominent Jewish
administrators and Zionist academics.
Top US military commanders, active and retired, have taken
initiatives that directly contravene the ZPC dictates on Iran by praising its
cooperation in stabilizing Iraq and playing a critical supporting role in
overthrowing the Taliban in Afghanistan.
The major intelligence agencies in the US report on Iran’s absence
of a nuclear weapon development program, contradicting the propaganda line of
the Administration. This has struck a powerful blow against the ZPC warmongers
and their Israel-First agents in the Treasury Department (Levey, Glaser), the
National Security Council (Elliott Abrams), the White House (Joshua Bolton),
State Department (Wolfowitz) and Pentagon (Shumsky).
We are engaged in a life and death struggle against war, terror and
genocide – against Imperial and Zionist barbarism. As the ZPC push for a
military confrontation with Iran before Bush leaves office; as the ZPC back
Israel’s policy of economic blockades to starve the people of Gaza, assassinate
its leaders and shred all public order in Gaza; as the ZPC back Israeli
state-sponsored extra-territorial murders (likely to provoke new terror
retaliatory attacks in the US and EU and the end of democratic freedoms in
America); and as the ZPC actively support the shredding of constitutional and
judicial liberties of American citizens and residents and the expansion of a
repressive security state, we should recognize the following: In the
final instance, in fighting the ZPC, we should be aware of powerful enemies in
high places, acting against the interests of our country. But we should
recognize we also have enormous support among the American people and even
tactical allies among some officials in the military and intelligence
community. We have a new generation of active dissident Christian, secular and
Jewish critics of Israel and the ZPC, as well as billions of supporters among
Muslims world wide, among secular Arabs and the majority of citizens in Europe,
Latin America, Asia and Africa. Above all, we are defending our own, hard-won
democratic freedoms, our own families’ and communities’ security from
Israeli-provoked terrorist attacks and, even more important, our right to
develop policies in the interest of the American people, free from the dictates
of Israel and its agents.
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