(Part II)
Jewish-Zionist Cultural-Political Hegemony in the US
Jewish Zionist hegemony over the political narrative in the US has grown in recent years, evidenced by the support or, at most, tepid criticism, found in the major literary and political journals and magazines.80 In the beginning the ZPC imposed their view that Israeli conquest and wars against the native people of Palestine and its Muslim neighbors was a war of “national liberation” or “independence”.
This first phase culminated with Jewish-Zionist success in convincing President Johnson to cover up Israel’s bombing of the USS Liberty during the Seven Day War.81 From the 1970-90 Zionist-Jewish hegemony extended from its traditional bastion in the film, TV and radio mass media to a whole series of former left-of-center and conservative weekly and monthly publications and the establishment of new publications on the far right.82
The formerly liberal New Republic became a pulpit for virulent attacks on any critics of Israel.83 Commentary, formerly a liberal cultural journal, became a mouthpiece for neo-conservative apologists of Israeli wars … and war crimes …The conservative National Review moved firmly into the ‘Israel First’ camp, purging any critical dissent on Israel and its unconditional supporters in the US.
As Zionist hegemony in intellectual and popular cultural print and mass media was established, committed Israel-Firsters gained influential positions in US State Department and foreign policy apparatus.84 “Think Tanks”, thinly veiled propaganda mills, produced pro-Israel position papers.85 Their staff elbowed their way into the mass media as “experts” and into foreign policy advisory positions serving various politicians and Administrations.
They rose to the highest levels of government in the Clinton Administration and expanded further during the Bush-Obama regimes.86 Zionist entry into key positions of structural political power mirrored their long march through the cultural institutions. Their influence was reinforced by billionaire Jewish-Zionists’ contributions to established think tanks, like the Brookings Institute, and to both political parties. Contributions influenced the nominations and candidates for office from local mayors to the Presidency of the United States.
It is estimated that as high as 60% of Democratic Party contributions came from Israel First benefactors, securing an automatic 90% Congressional vote on whatever issue the Israeli Foreign Office marks as priority for its US Fifth Column.87 With very rare exceptions neither liberal, progressive, radical or “Marxist” writers, academics, editors, journalists broach the issue of Zionist-Jewish cultural-political hegemony, nor its economic structural underpinnings.88
The “left” is equally hegemonized by Zionist-Jewish influence, to the point that not a few join the vile ad hominem chorus slandering critics of the ZPC as “veering on anti-Semitism:…89
Even today, at the end of the first year of the Obama regime, the Zionist presence in strategic positions in foreign policy making has been ignored by leftist and liberal critics of US Middle East policy. Few, if any critics, look at the structural determinants of that policy. One is more likely to find “data” in the business press.
For example, an article in the Financial Times, criticizing President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s “inconsistent” position on Israeli settlements in Palestine’s West Bank, points to the “…problems with the administrations message – including its inconsistent policy on Israel-Palestine – can be traced back to the White House, where Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel (dual Israeli-US citizen) keeps a firm grip on foreign policy. Some ex-diplomats say they have never seen power so centralized …
Mrs. Clinton’s own deputy, Jim Steinberg, is widely perceived as a White House enforcer, who polices even relatively minor policy statements that often leaves State Department spokesmen (sic) mouthing near meaningless talking points.”90 Emanuel has been active in the Israeli military and is suspected of ties to its spy agency (MOSSAD). Steinberg is just a high powered “native born” Israel Firster, marginalizing the State Department from any alternative policies to pandering to Israel and its US Fifth Column.
Hegemonized American liberals and leftists maintain their “support” for Israel on the basis of the fiction that the “bad” Israelis are the fanatical Likud party leaders while Labor and Kadima party leaders and the Israeli people want peace and a just settlement. Unfortunately for these supporters of “progressive” Zionism, the Defense Minister Barak who directed the bloody massacre in Gaza is the leader of the Labor Party and is backed by his party in support of all the new aggressive Israeli land seizures and colonial settlements.
The genocidal wars and violent settlements have the support of the vast majority of the Israeli Jewish population. Public opinion polls carried out by the Israel National News published in mid-November 2009 reveals that 53.2% of Israeli’s say the solution to the conflict with the Palestinian people is their forceful dispossession and ethnic cleansing – “transfer” is the Zionist euphemism for a crime against humanity.91 Such are the “just wars” receiving unconditional support by the ‘51’ Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations.
The point is that not even the Israeli-Jewish majority’s embrace of a totalitarian final solution shakes Zionist hegemony in the US. The embrace of inconvenient positions, such as genocide approval, is not publicized in the Zionist mass media. Instead we continue to hear the chattering classes mouthing the clichés of a “dialogue” and “negotiated solution” between the expropriators and the dispossessed.
The question of Zionist cultural and political hegemony, where it is even been acknowledged by non-Jews and Jews, revolves around several mistaken partially distorted conceptions. One key idea held by anti-Semites and Zionists alike is that Jews possess special qualities (“blood” or “genetic”).
Many cite the importance of a Jewish historical tradition, which emphasizes education and learning. Others still, claim success and power comes from knowledge, merit and achievement. Recent studies refute the idea of a special, unique Jewish “gene pool” – as most contemporary Askanazi Jews are descendants of Central Asian Khazari converts to Judaism in the 8th Century A.D., who subsequently were pushed into Eastern Europe by the Mongols and beyond.92
Israelis are not descendants of the ancient Jews of Israel, many of whom converted to Christianity and later Islam and whose descendants are most certainly the modern-day Palestinians (as conceded by early Zionists myth-makers, like David Ben-Gurion).
Secondly, for over one thousand years Jewish “scholarship” revolved around sterile debates and exegeses of the minutiae of the Talmud and bodies of law based on religious myths. Critical philosophers like Spinoza were looked at as renegades. The rise of scholarship and scientific thinking among Jews coincided with the growth of the Enlightenment and the establishment of liberal laws, which opened doors for promising Jewish scholars, scientists to break out of the sterile confines of the Rabbinal intellectual ghettos.
Many of the great thinkers were called “Jews” because of their ancestry, like Spinoza, Karl Marx and Leon Trotsky although they did not practice Judaism nor identify as “Jews”. Recognition and success of Jews came from business and financial activity as well as from occupations like money managers in the West and overseers of feudal lords in Poland.93 A Jewish authored scholarly history of the Jewish people was not written till the 19th century and even then it treated biblical legends as fact.94
Equally questionable is the notion that the rise of Jewish-Zionist hegemony is a product of “merit” or “achievement”. But here we must distinguish between the mass of Jews who occupy middle or lower middleclass positions in society and those few individuals who have made major contributions.
Moreover it is important to not confuse the rise of individuals to economic power through the exploitation of labor, the extraction of rent from tenants and speculation and achievement through “merit”, namely, skills applied to advancing knowledge for the greater good of working people. Zionists’ “superior race” theorists lump successful Wall Street speculators with innovative scholars as examples of “Jewish superiority” justifying or “explaining” hegemony.
Zionist race theories, which claim a homogenous ‘Jewish’ people bound by common history and horizontal and vertical ties, is more an ideological manifesto ignoring profound class and even ideological divisions (at least in the past and perhaps emerging today).
Jewish-Zionist hegemony in the US is the result of a supra or meta-historical mythology with mystical religious foundations in the Old Testament. The rise of American Zionism is tied to a virulent exclusivist tribal religious loyalty to Israel as the “mother state”. The driving force of US Zionism is the subordination of US civil society organizations and the instrumentalization of the US military and economic resources to service Israeli colonial expansion and projections of power in the Middle East.
What needs to be understood is that the present subjection of our Middle East policy to the Zionist Power Configuration is a result of the latter’s accumulation of power and political-cultural conditions within the US, which weakened the articulation of alternative values and policies and a defense of American working class interests embodied in a democratic foreign policy.
The Decline of US National Identity and Working Class Politics
The rise of Zionism, as a virulent form of tribal-religious identity linked to a foreign state and its successful exercise of hegemony within US society, has been facilitated by the abdication by the US ruling class ‘establishment’ of any ‘national’ identity and its interlocking economic ties with Zionist power brokers in strategic economic sectors.
The “globalization” of US capitalism, the process of world wide empire building, has shifted the focus of the US ruling class toward international issues, as the center of its concerns, even as it intervenes in domestic economic policies to secure state protection, subsidies and bailouts, none which trespass on Zionist priorities.
Going “global” and the emergence of “global consciousness” has worked against challenging the Zionist pursuit of the colonial agenda of the state of Israel. The ZPC has filled a ‘power vacuum’ left by the ‘globalized elite’ and has been able to instill and impose a Zionist conception of US “national interest” relatively uncontested.
The rise of the Zionist business elites into the top echelon of investment banking, financial institutions, real estate and insurance led to the inter-mixing of Zionist and non-Zionist members of the ruling class, in which one side had a deep and abiding political commitment to Israel, while the other sector gave exclusive primacy to the accumulation of wealth and guaranteeing that state economic policy ensured profits, a deregulated financial sector and bank bailouts, policies which they shared with their Zionist partners.
Given the low salience of Israeli politics, the non-Zionist sectors of the ruling class were not willing or able to engage in a fight with their Zionist financial colleagues.95
However, there are divisions, both in government and within policy advisory bodies, over Zionist control. As mentioned earlier, the 16 major intelligence agencies issued a report on Iran’s nuclear program in late 2007, which debunked the Israeli-Zionist claims of an active Iranian nuclear weapons program.
Likewise a Pew Foundation Study of the Council on Foreign Relations, taken between October 2 – November 16, 2009, found that over two-thirds of its members (67 percent) believe the US favored Israel too much – yet the same percentages claimed Obama is “striking the right balance” and “Iran is a major threat to US interest”(Jeff Blankfort “What the US Elite Really Thinks About Israel” Counterpunch 12/8/09).
What is striking about these ‘dissident’ opinions within the policy elite is that they have had no impact on Obama’s subservience to Israel on all major issues promoted by the ZPC. Whatever the CFR “really thinks” has not “really” affected the power of the ZPC to shape policy via its stooges in Congress and its assets in State (Clinton) and Treasury (Stuart Levey).
In other words, Zionist power at the top is uncontested and free to work the lower echelons of the political system and class structure for its own interest. This includes the wholesale purchase of political parties and the retail buyout of congressional politicians on key foreign policy committees.
The latter is facilitated by the success of the Israel First Political Action committees (PAC) which promotes the selection of Zionist Congress people to key committee posts. Four of the top fifteen Congress people funded by Wall Street speculators are Zionists. Eleven of the top fifteen are Democrats, who receive 60% of their contributions from Zionist multi-millionaires in Los Angeles, New York, and south Florida and other metropolitan centers.96
The political class, party leaders, executive and congress people, have also eschewed pro-American working class economic policies, endogenous growth and the avoidance of foreign entanglements (interventionism). The political class – particularly its dominant sector – favors military driven empire building – undermining any popular democratic definition of ‘national interest’.
Moreover, the military nature of empire building resonates with the Zionist-Israeli projection of regional military power and hegemony. Military-driven imperialism weakens any effort to develop alternative US overseas economic interests and policies, especially with Moslem and Middle East oil countries, to counter Israeli-Zionist policies designed to privilege Israeli military expansion and colonial interests.
If the majority of the US ruling class has surrendered to the Zionist definitions of US Middle East policy, and facilitated the rise of Zionist hegemony, the decline of the values embedded in working class solidarity and defense of republican virtues and interests has opened the door for the minority of Zionist cadres to influence mass culture and civil society organizations and divert American trade union pension funds to Israeli investments with no opposition.
For decades, predominantly Afro-American and Hispanic female workers in garments, textiles and related activities have been members of trade unions run by Zionist functionaries, who channeled hundreds of millions of member pension funds and dues into purchasing Israel bonds, rather than building co-operative housing as was done previously when the union workers were mostly Jews.
Many current (minority) leaders of trade unions and Afro-Hispanic ethnic organizations have been co-opted by the ZPC though junkets to Israel and subject to propaganda campaigns promoting Israeli interests. In universities, municipal politics, professional associations, Israel Firsters operate to stifle any debate, let alone criticism, of Israeli war crimes.
Zionists in America are the most pernicious force eliminating debate on American democratic foreign policy options in the Middle East and favoring unconditional submission to Israel. Millions of individuals, who may question the “Israel First” option, are frightened, intimidated and/or unwilling to face the onslaught of organized, zealous Zionist-Jewish notables, who can and will influence their employers and jeopardize their jobs and promotions.
Conclusion: Alternatives to Zionist Hegemony
In other countries, especially where independent class conscious trade unions, autonomous and organized anti-Zionist professional and academic groups exist, Zionist power in civil society is contested, challenged and its heinous blackballing of critics is weakened. Where internationalist movements are strong, as in support for Palestinian resistance to Israeli colonialism, the local ZPC has not been able to use their economic power and media ownership to impose their hegemony over civil society. This is especially true in those locales where the international solidarity movement is active in impacting society.
While there are pockets of international solidarity among some universities and trade unions in the US, especially the dock and warehouse workers in San Francisco, the major potential counterweight to Zionist Israel First hegemony in the US would be in a revival of patriotic working class consciousness. America’s “special relation” with Israel has been at an enormous cost to the working class, amounting to over $1.5 trillion dollars in foreign aid, loan guarantees, hijacked technological innovations, lost overseas investment opportunities, not to mention the wars on Israel’s behalf and the lost lives in fighting Israel’s war in Iraq. There is a ‘material base’ for a mass patriotic working people’s revolt against the crass submission of the entire political class to the ZPC and its patrons in Tel-Aviv. But today tens of millions of Americans are disillusioned with “patriotic” appeals, whose purpose is to promote imperial wars (including ironically wars for Israel) at the expense of their living standards. Right wing pro-capitalist politicians use patriotic rhetoric to deflect attention from the domestic failures of capitalism and the massive transfers of wealth to Goldman-Sachs and other Wall Street speculators. The devaluation of “patriotism” is evident in the right wing’s perverse manipulation of ‘nationalism’ to turn native born workers against immigrant workers, instead of against the ZPC’s costly pro-Israel agenda. This, in turn, hinders the growth of a national popular movement against the Wall Street speculators at home and the wars for Israel and Empire abroad.
What is striking about the lack of mass based movements against Wall Street is the fact that literally less than 5% of the population even trusts the financial sector. A vast outpouring of letters and protests denounced Obama’s initial bank bailout plan, forcing a temporary postponement. Unorganized mass resentment persists and is smoldering, waiting for effective popular organization.
Likewise, family and relatives of the Zionist power configuration, in and out of the government, who promote US wars for Israel in the Middle East, are rarely to be found in the Armed Forces, least of all at the frontlines (or for that matter in any war zone). If we exclude non-Zionist Jews – mostly immigrants from the former Eastern Bloc and USSR – the figure would be one-thirtieth of one percent. It is a biting irony that more American Zionists are more eager to join the Israeli ‘Defense’ Forces than to put on an American uniform.
Yet Zionists in public office, in the Pentagon, executive branch and the White House, who design and promote war policies and military-driven sanctions, are in the forefront of shedding American working class lives, especially now when jobless American workers, including many minorities, are forced to seek employment in the military.
A soldier’s anti-war movement could be organized and energized under the banner: “A Zionist war is a not the American workers’ fight” if the left and pacifists were not so beholden to their Jewish colleagues ‘sensibilities”. The anti-war leaders have been reluctant to raise the issue of the Zionist/ Israeli influence in promoting US war policies.
Genuine patriotic solidarity is weak at the top and bottom, lacking any meaningful recall of our anti-colonial, anti-slavery, anti-imperialist and anti-fascist identity. In contrast, the Zionist fifth column is driven by a powerful mythological-tribal race-driven identity, which in some cases is religious driven and in others embedded in a deep-rooted secular sense of racial superiority.
Israeli hegemony, embedded in a Zion-centric cultural universe, has not been challenged by Anglo-America’s flaccid intellectuals. Their intellectual cowardice is covered by a thin veneer of “cosmopolitan” impotence. Their pusillanimous silence and even complicity is intended to ‘protect the sensitivities’ of their Zionist colleagues regarding any forthright critique of Zionist power in America.
Only a revived working class movement, which recovers its historical memory of class solidarity and inspires the popular imagination with an independent American republic free from foreign dictates, will be able to displace Zionist hegemony and Wall Street pillage.97
Our study raises several central questions that need to be addressed by Americans concerned about Zionist power and hegemony over public debate regarding US wars for Israel in the Middle East.
Can we oppose Israeli war crimes and expansion and US government support of Israel by confronting the ZPC?
Can we open a debate on US, Middle East policy by fighting Zionist authoritarianism, witch hunts and hate crimes?
Can we discuss and propose a democratic foreign policy, which opposes military intervention, sanctions and economic blockades, by tackling American militarists and Israel’s foreign agents?
If we answer in the affirmative, what can be done?
What practical measures can be pursued and supported?
We can educate the American public about the Obama regime’s charade – of talking peace to the American people while supporting the Israeli war machine; of talking about an evenhanded Middle East policy while appointing committed Zionists to top policy positions.
We can demand the Justice Department enforce the Foreign Agents Registration Act toward the ‘51 Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations’ and especially AIPAC.
We should oppose all dual citizens’ appointments to key policymaking posts.
We should demand that Undersecretary of Treasury and Israel Firster Stuart Levey be investigated and prosecuted for gross malfeasance of office for his refusal to investigate the illegal billion-dollar money laundering operations by US Zionists in the funding of illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank and for his promotion of economic sanctions against trade with Iran, which have cost US workers thousands of jobs and the crippled US economy billions of dollars in lost trade.
We should oppose military and economic aid to Israel, especially when the average per capita income of Israeli’s exceeds that of 40% of Americans.
We should demand the end of trade privileges for Israel in light of the US’ multi-billion dollars trade deficit with Israel, which has destroyed tens of thousands of American jobs in industry and services.
We should combat widespread Zionist hate propaganda, organized and publicized by the ZPC, against Muslin Americans and Arab American, their cultural foundations and charities.
We should demystify Zionist claims that the Jews’ ancestral homeland is Israel, rather then North Africa and Central Asia, and that there is no historic basis for the Right of Return.
We should support the class and popular struggle against finance, real estate and insurance billionaires (Wall Street) for their pillage of the American economy and exploitation of American workers and for their corruption of American politicians to serve their interests and US and Israeli war aims.
Note: James Petras’ last book, Global Depression and Regional Wars (Atlanta, Clarity Press, 2009) is the third in a series, including Zionism, Militarism and the Decline of US Power (Atlanta, Clarity Press 2008) and The Power of Israel in the United States (Atlanta, Clarity Press 2006), analyzing the influence of militarism and Zionism in American foreign policy.
Prof. James Petras
Notes
1 The major sources which inform this article include: The Daily Alert a bulletin published daily by the 51 Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations; press releases and reports published by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, The New York Times, Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times and the Boston Globe; the US Congressional Research Services. The mailings of articles from a plethora of publications by Sid Shoniad were of enormous help, though, of course, the analysis and interpretations found in this article are solely my responsibility, Web sites such as Information Clearing House (www.informationclearinghouse.info), Al Jazeera and the BBC were also consulted on a daily basis.
2 The claim is found on the webpage of the Daily Alert the official propaganda vehicle of the Presidents.
3 See the report prepared by the Jewish Community Task Force published in the Boston Globe, Sept. 20, 2009. See Elliott Abrams on the “threat” of intermarriages, Faith and Fear: How Jews can Survive in Christian America, (NY Free Press 1999). See Natan Sharansky “Assimilation is Eating the Jews”, (Haaretz, 11/8/09)
4 In the face of faltering interest in Israel among young Jews, the Anti-Defamation League, Bnai Brth, Chabad House and Hillel have organized all-expenses-paid summer junkets to Israel – with mixed results.
5 See Stephan Lendman, Jewish Opposition to Zionism Dec. 7, 2009 at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. The list includes over a dozen secular and religious groups..
6 See Yakov Rabkin, Jewish Opposition to Zionism (Halifax: Fernwood 2006) for a religious critique of Israel and its overseas Zionist supporters. For a secular version see Israel Shahak Jewish History, Jewish Religion (London Pluto Press 2002).
7 See Barbara Yaffe “Over-the-top criticism of Israel is the new face of anti-semitism: Vancouver Sun, December 2, 2009. Systematic campaigns to fire critics of Israel by the ‘51 Presidents’, especially the ADL, led to the firing of Professor Norman Finklestein and prolonged academic harassment for Professor Robinson at the University of California at Santa Barbara and Nadia Abu El-Haj at the University of Chicago/Barnard, as well as numerous other writers and academics in Middle Eastern studies programs at Columbia and UCLA. See Stephan Lendman, “Will Congress Criminalize Israel Criticism”, Dec. 4, 2003. lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
8 A handbook put by Congregation of Conservative synagogues details the precise tactics in pressuring civic and political groups and leveraging them to support the Israeli state line.
9 For a detailed account see my The Power of Israel: The United States (Atlanta Clarity Press 2006) especially Ch 1-3. Rulers and Ruled in the US Empire (Atlanta Clarity Press 2007) especially Ch 8 – 10; Zionism, Militarism and the Decline of US Power (Atlanta Clarity Press 2008); Global Depression and Regional Wars (Atlanta Clarity Press 2009) Ch 9 – 11.
10 In their otherwise fine book The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux 2007), the authors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt confine their analyses to Washington and political pressure on the legislative branch by neo-conservative Zionist Jews, (see Ch 4 “What is the ‘Israel’ Lobby”, pp 111 – 150). Needless to say the entire spectrum of Zionists from the Left to Right attempted to trash the book, fabricating non-facts, ad hominem slanders and minimizing the scope and depth of the findings.
11 A survey of the Daily Alert, the propaganda organ of the ‘51’, between January 2001 to December 3, 2009 – namely over 2500 issues — revels nary a single critical article on any Israeli action. Even more revealing, every issue echoes the policy line of the Israeli government, defends every Israeli massacre, military invasion and dispossession of Palestinians and condemns every human rights group, country, and political leader who criticize Israel in the best fashion of the hardest line unconditional Stalinist apologist of the Soviet purge trials of the 1930’s.
12 Pluralist political theorists emphasize the importance of numerical weight of the working class electorate as a counterweight to the great concentrations of wealth, property and media power of the capitalist class under the misconception that unorganized masses are an equal power to an organized financial oligarchy. The classic formulation of pluralist theory is found in Robert Dahl, Who Governs (New Haven: Yale University Press 1961).
13 Between the publication of the Goldstone Report in the fall of 2009 to the end of November, the Daily Alert published an average of three articles a day defending Israel war crimes, viciously attacking the Report, and slandering the author, Richard Goldstone, drawing on articles from the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Jerusalem Post and the entire stable of Israel-First “experts” housed in the Zionist think tanks. Once Netanyahu established trashing the Goldstone Report as a ‘number-one’ priority, the entire international Zionist propaganda network went into full gear, especially in North America. The Daily Alert published over 30 articles savaging the ‘Report’. Its affiliates went into overdrive securing over 80% of Congressional support demanding that President Obama reject the Report and veto its approval by the Security Council. Netanyahu and his American agents succeeded – overfilling their quota of articles published in all the US mass media and securing submissive Congressional votes. See also Paul Craig Roberts “Israel Lobby Routs Obama”, Information Clearing House (www.informationclearinghouse.info) November 12, 2009.
14 According to Aljazeera.Net, November 4, 2009, Steven Rothman, a prominent Zionist Democratic congressman from New Jersey claimed to have read only the 20 page executive summary of the Report, prepared by the office of his fellow-Zionist Congressman Berman (D-California), instead of the full 575 page report, – a summary full of errors, lies and distortions, which were pointed out by Justice Goldstone.
15 See Thalif Deen “U.N. Affirms Israel-Hamas War Crimes Report” Inter Press News Service, (www.informationclearinghouse.info) November 6, 2009.
16 Jewish anti-Zionist organizations in North America, including Independent Jewish Voices, have played an important role in building the Boycott Disinvestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israeli war crimes: See their web site, www.independentjewishvoices.ca
17 For articles and reports on the BDS among trade unions, see independentjewishvoices.ca
18 Trials on Israeli war criminals are scheduled in Belgium, Spain and possibly the UK.
19 Among the publications we can include the Nation, the Progressive and Mother Jones as well as all the Marxist quarterlies,
20 The Zionist Fifth Column and their apologists claim that analysts, academic researches and journalists who document the power of Israel in the US, are reminiscent of past “anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists writing about secret Jewish cabals”. This slander of empirical researchers overlooks the fact that most studies rely on public documents, including boasts by the Zionist organizations themselves, as well as the testimony of ex-functionaries of AIPAC. This slander is part of the campaign led by the “anti” Defamation League; Abe Foxman, to intimidate and discredit serious research.
21 Haaretz 11/10/09.
22 ibid.
23 ibid.
24 Shlomo Sand The Invention of the Jewish People (London: Verso 2009) Ch 3 and 4. Arthur Koestler The Thirteenth Tribe: The Khazan Empire and its Heritage (New York: Random House 1976).
25 The annual AIPAC meetings, attended by the vast majority of congressmen and executive officials, sponsor the participation Israel’s top officials, who literally dictate top Israeli priorities to be implemented by the Zionist delegates and their congressional flunkies in the audience.
26 See Grant Smith Foreign Agents (IREP Washington 2008)
27 From the early 1950’s to the mid 1960’s, the US Justice Department (especially under Robert Kennedy) sought to have the forerunner of AIPAC (American Zionist Council) register as a foreign agent. Influential Zionists undermined his efforts. See Grant Smith, “The Justice Department’s Battle to Register the Israel Lobby as Agents of a Foreign Power” in America’s Defense Line (Washington: Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy 2008).
28 See my Power of Israel in the United States (2006) cc 5 – 8; Lenni Brenner Jews in America Today (New Jersey: Lyle Stuart 1986) Ch 3 Lee O’Brien American Jewish Organizations and Israel (Washington D.C: Institute for Palestinian Studies 1986).
29 Declassified documents of the US Justice Dept. revealing the role of the major Zionist organization (American Zionist Council) as Israeli foreign agents can be found in Grant Smith Declassified Deceptions (Washington: IRMEP 2007) pp183 -200. Grant Smith Foreign Agents IRMEP 2007: Washington D.C.) Ch. 1
30 Grant Smith Spy and Trade (1Rmep: Washington D.C. 2008) See pp 66 passion “Military Industrial Espionage” and pp 120 – 138 for unclassified FBI documentation.
31 Forward, December 23, 2005.
32 For a complete inventory of Kadish’s theft of strategic weapons secrets see Grant Smith Spy Trade, pp 80, 85, 115.
33 See Grant Smith Spy Trade, pp 19, 43, 46, 60, 66, 67, 69, 74, 80, 122, 154.
34 See Carl Cameron Investigates (Part 1-4) Fox New Network, December 17, 2001, available at http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article5133.htm
35 James Petras Zionism, Militarism and the Decline of US Power (Clarity Press: Atlanta 2008) p 156.
36 The Washington Post, New York Times, and a coalition of 125 rabbis attacked the AIPAC, Rosen-Weissman spy trial as “anti-Semitic” while Amy Goodman and liberal-left pundits charged it was a violation of the First Amendment. See Grant Smith Spy Trade pp 117 – 119. Grant Smith Foreign Agents, pp 134-145.
37 Petras, Zionism, Militarism and Decline of US Power, p 156.
38 See Grant Smith Declassified Deceptions, p 229.
39 James Petras “Barack Obama: America’s First Jewish President” Information Clearinghouse, January 31, 2008.
40 James Petras Global Depression and Regional Wars (Atlanta: Clarity Press 2009) Ch 10, pp 153-155. Jewish Telegraph Agency, April 27, 2009.
41 Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, a middle level official in the Pentagon eventually resigned in protest.
42 ibid.
43 Between November 2007 and January 2008, The Daily Alert, propaganda mouthpiece of the ‘51’ Zionist organizations, reproduced over two dozen articles from the major media condemning the November 2007 US National Intelligence Estimate and parroting Israeli disinformation on Iranian nuclear bomb.
44 Mearsheimer and Walt The Israel Lobby Ch 6, Dominating Public Discourse, pp 168-196, Lee O’Brien American Jewish Organizations and Israel Ch 5.
45 Despite the general consensus among most Washington observers and congressional staff people regarding the power of what they call the Israel Lobby and despite the enormous influence of known Zionists in important foreign policy positions over the past 20 years (in the Clinton, Bush and Obama regimes) one looks in vain for any critical essays on Zionist power in the New Left Review, New Politics, Against the Current, Socialist Register, International Socialist Review, Critique etc. If anything, when a book appears, like Mearsheimer and Walt’s The Israel Lobby or my The Power of Israel in the US, we are much more likely to receive a more balanced review in libertarian conservative publications like antiwar.com and informationclearinghouse.info, than from what appear to be Marxist…Zionist fellow travelers. Exceptional cases of critiques of Zionist power have appeared in Canadian Dimension and Z Magazine, though I am told that “left” Zionists readers have complained and threatened to cancel subscriptions and/or contributions.
46 See Alex Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair The Politics of Anti-Semitism (Oakland: AK Press 2003).
47 Mearsheimer and Walt, The Israel Lobby op cit.
48 Several publications have enumerated the media outlets, which parrot the political line of the ZPC and the Israeli regime, principally the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post (and with occasional minor deviations) the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, The New York Post, The Sun, as well as CNN, CBS, NBS and, of course, Murdoch’s Fox News. However, these studies lack a systematic analysis of the organizational links between the pro-Zionist/Israel message, the media owners, editors and directors and their ties to the ZPC. Glimpses of the Zionist Power Configuration in the media appear in the writings of Edward Herman, Norman Finklestein, Grant Smith, Alexander Cockburn, Joel Kovel, Mearsheimer and Walt. A general resume is found in Edward Abboud Invisible Enemy/Virginia: Vox 2003) Ch 4, 49.
49. Most of the essays, which identified Zionist zealots in power positions in the Bush regime, have been published in the website, antiwar.com. The authors include Justin Raimundo, Philip Giraldi, Paul Craig Roberts, Alison Weir and Jonathan Cook.
50 Exceptions include Edward Said’s writings, Edward Tivnan, The Lobby, Grant Smith Spy and Trade. See also Edward Said and Christopher Hitchens editors, Blaming the Victim (London: Verso 1988).
51 Privileging “Jewish” or “Israeli” sources is the favorite device of writers across the political spectrum and includes non-Jews and Jewish critics in all the progressive blogs and published work.
52 This is an argument that I have heard and read from some of the leaders of newly formed Jewish organizations critical of Israel. One wonders whether this is not a replay of the exclusivist outlook featured in the rabbinical canon: keeping the ‘dirty wash’ in the family.
53 See Stephen Lendman, “Jews Against Zionism”, December 7, 2009 at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
54 The major trade unions supporting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement include Canadian public sector unions, Irish trade union confederation, British, Italian, French, Greek and Spanish trade unions.
55 In recent times the most notorious effort by the US and Canadian ZPC to blackball and oust academic critics of Israel revolve around the tenure case of Norman Finklestein at DePaul University and the censure of William Robinson at UC Santa Barbara. The ZPC succeeded in securing the ouster of Finklestein despite strong faculty support and several major book publications but failed in the Robinson case. In Canada the ZPC has set up a nationwide campaign to ban activities around the anti-apartheid issue on university campuses.
56 Daily Alert has re-published over two dozen op-ed pieces from in the Washington Post, Wall street Journal and Zionist think-tanks in Washington defending Israel violations of international law from November 1 to December 7, 2009.
57 The scorecard is pro-Israel articles 49 to 1 article critical between October – November 2009.
58 From September 1 to December 1, none of the above mentioned media allowed a single critical non-Zionist commentator to present a view favorable of the Goldstone Report.
59 Ultra-Zionist academics holed up in so called prestigious Ivy league universities include Michael Walzer at Princeton, and Dershowitz at Harvard, Friedman at University of London, Kagan at Yale, Cohen at Johns Hopkins and a flock of others penning apologies for Israeli state terror.
60See the excerpts in the Daily Alert from September through December 2009.
61 Michael Walzer, Just Wars and Unjust Wars (New York: Basic Books 2006. President Obama’s address to the Nobel Peace Prize committee in December 2009 relied heavily on Walzer’s “Just War” polemic
62 When Goldstone forwarded his reply to Congressman Berman detailing the lies and distortions in the latter’s ‘summary’, which accompanied a US Congressional resolution defending Israeli war crimes, Berman merely repeated his fabrications. Such are our contemporary “Stalinists” who know only one “truth” – how to parrot and defend the Israeli party line. What is amusing is how few of the lifelong Jewish anti-Stalinist writers have raised any questions about the neo-Stalinist Zionists in their midst….
63 The combination of scientist, racist and ideologue among Zionist advocates of the biblical myths is not uncommon among twentieth century colonial and imperial regimes. On Israeli-Zionist fabricated racial myths see Nadia Abu El-Haj, Facts on the Ground op cit; Joel Zerulavel, Recovered Roots (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1995) Ch2, 3; Israel Shahak Jewish History, Jewish Religion (London: Pluto Press 1994) Ch 2 -4.
64 Theodore Adorno et al The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Basic Books 1950). It is curious that very few psychological-clinical studies of Zionist socio-pathological behavior have been produced. Jewish psychologists and sociologists, many of whom claim expertise in the ‘psychology of terrorism’ and the effects of fear on civilian populations, are especially prominent in their embrace of Israeli crimes against humanity. Given the large number of Jewish psychiatrists and psychologists, this suggests how important ideology is in defining scientific projects.
65 According to the Guardian (November 16, 2009), 50% of MP’s in the shadow cabinet are Conservative Friends of Israel who have received ten million pounds over the past 8 years. The British television Channel 4 documentary program Dispatches broadcast ‘Inside the Pro-Israel Lobby’ with investigative journalist Peter Osborne, from November 16-20, 2009. This astonishing report revealed the deep penetration of the three major parties by the Zionist Power Configuration and the centrality of lobby funding in securing British defense of Israeli policies and war crimes. Zionist control of the British mass media is as pervasive as in the US: the International Television (ITV) network’s two most influential companies, Carlton Communications and Granada Media Plc, are under Zionist management and ownership. The BBC TV has turned from being a fairly objective news outlet to being a cheap propagandist over the past half decade, under the direction of managing director Tony Cohen. Zionist ownership of the principal dailies include The Daily Express, the Daily Star and the Murdoch chain (The Sun, The Times, The News of the World) which controls over 80% of British readership.
66 Channel 4 op cit.
67 See the web site independenjewishvoices.ca for complete coverage of the Canadian government’s close ties with the leading Zionist organizations, its pursuit of Israel’s agenda and moves to criminalize criticism of Israel. See also the news report on the Canadian Jewish Congress Vancouver Sun, Dec. 2, 2009.
68 New York Times November 11, 2009.
69 See Eric Wingerter and Justin Delacour, “Playing the Anti-Semitism Card against Venezuela” http://www.venezuelanalysis.com, Sept. 4, 2009.
70 ibid.
71 Interviews with Argentine Jewish immigrants to Israel, April – May 2004, March 2006.
72 The Argentine Communist Party was said to have a greater representation of members in the financial sector than any other party in the world. Its Jewish members were more likely from the Co-operative Banks than the meat packing or car manufacturing sector – Interviews, March 2006.
73 Interviews Buenos Aires, April – May 2002.
74 President Cristina Fernandez met with President Shamir and Abe Foxman of the ADL in Buenos Aires and with the top Zionist leaders during a visit to New York, before and after speaking at the United Nations. Fernandez is the leading proponent of Israel’s privileged status in MERCOSUR.
75 Engel’s threats had little impact: Brazil signed over 20 trade and investment agreements with Iran and Lula dismissed US Zionist efforts to dictate foreign policy to the dustbin of history. On December 4, 2009, Secretary of State Clinton threatened dire consequences for countries developing economic ties with Iran, targeting Brazil, Bolivia and Venezuela (La Jornada December 4, 2009). President Evo Morales of Bolivia charged the US has no authority to speak against terrorism since it is the biggest practioner (La Jornada, December 13, 2009).
76 Avi Lieberman’s visit was an Israeli foreign policy disaster, provoking major protests in Argentina and Brazil, as well as a very cold reception from heads of state.
77 Most heads of state, especially the new center-left regimes governing most of the region, have unpleasant memories of Israel’s close ties with the bloody dictatorships of the 1970’s and 1980’s. Israel provided intelligence, military advisers and arms to the genocidal Somoza regime in Nicaragua, Rios Mont terror state in Guatemala and the death squad regime in El Salvador. Israel had a special relation with Argentina
following the bloody military coup in 1976, replacing the US as the main military supplier, overlooking the murderous campaign against all Argentine progressives including many Jews, who were taunted by anti-Semitic torturers. Bishara Bahbah Israel and Latin America (New York: St. Martins Press 1986) Ch 3, 4 5.
78 The Israeli-Jewish media, with the rare exception of an occasional article in Haaretz, was vehement in support of the rape of Gaza, as was the Israeli-Jewish public reported in a number of polls published in January 2009. Dozens of Israeli democratic stalwarts took beach chairs, picnic baskets and binoculars to survey the terror bombing of Gaza from adjoining hills.
79 Julian Benda, The Betrayal of the Intellectuals, (Boston: Beacon Press 1955).
80 Under moderate pro-Israelite editors, The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the Nation and Progressive have “debated” the pro and con of Obama’s pro-Israel policies avoiding any mention of the Zionist penetration of its Mid-East policy apparatus.
81 See Stephan Green Taking Sides (New York: Morrow 1984) Ch. 9. James Bamford, Body of Secrets (New York: Doubleday 2001). James Ennes, Assault on the Liberty (New York: Random House 1980).
82 These include the National Review and the Daily Standard on the right, the New Republic on the liberal left, and the New Yorker which publishes Seymour Hersh’s exposes and hack jobs on the critics of the Zionist power structure.
83 The transformation of Jewish liberalism into virulent Zionist extremism is evident subsequent to the take-over of the New Republic by Martin Peretz in 1974 and Norman Podhoretz “right turn” at Commentary in the early 1960’s. The Seven Day War and Israel’s military victory was a major factor in bringing out all the chauvinists strains latent within many formerly liberal and progressive Jews who subsequently combined liberal domestic politics with blind support for the most extremist measures adopted by the Jewish state.
84 Under Bush see by Power of Israel in the United States, Ch1, 2 and under Obama see my Global Depression and Regional Wars, Ch 9, pp 131 – 135 and pp 151 – 158.
85 See Mearscheimer and Walt The Israel Lobby Ch 6, esp. 175 – 178. At least eleven “think tanks” function directly under Zionist control in the greater Washington/NYC area.
86 See Grant Smith, The Spy Trade, pp. 111 – 113; The Power of Israel in the United States, Ch.2. Prominent Zionists in top policy positions making Middle East policy under Clinton included Dennis Ross, Martin Indyk, Richard Holbrook, Lawrence Summers, Robert Rubin, Madeline Albright, Eliot Cohen and a host of other political advisers.
87 See Mearscheimer and Walt Israel Lobby pp. 153-62, 163-64.
88 Among the leading left academics ignoring ZPC influence in the lead-up to the Iraqi war and Iranian sanctions include Perry Anderson, Robert Brenner, Norm Chomsky, Howard Zinn, among a long list of who’s who in the Anglo-American left.
89 One prominent progressive rabbi suggested to me that my critique of the ZPC was “veering on Anti-Semitism”; others have even raised the idea that identifying organized Zionist influence over US Middle East policy “reads like the Protocols of Zion”. See Norman Finklestein on the abuse of the anti-Semitic “blood libel” (to quote Israel’s prime minister) in The Holocaust Industry, Verso 2003, especially Ch. 3, and Joel Kovel, Overcoming Zionism, Ann Arbor Pluto Press, 2007, Ch 1 – 3.
90 Financial Times November 21/22, 2009, P2.
91 Information Clearing House, November 20, 2009.
92 Shlomo Sand The Invention of the Jewish People, op.cit. Ch 5, pp 256-279. Israeli-Jewish “scientist”, engage in the same type of pseudo research in “Jewish genes” that their German Nazi counterparts researched on the “Aryian Genes” practiced in the 1930’s. Totalitarian ideology guides research in defense of genocide and ethnic expulsion. ZPC objections to the Nazi comparisons would be better directed at Israeli state funded Jewish gene research.
93See Albert Lindemann, Esau’s Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews (Cambridge (UK): Cambridge University Press 1997) pp. 59. Lindemann’s historical survey of the socio-economic position of Jews is a balanced account describing the power, wealth and property of Jews in Europe, as well as their persecution and dispossession. The study puts the lie to the Zionist notion that “Jews” suffered oppression and persecution for 2000 years. The question is: Which class of Jews was persecuted in which countries, under which regimes in what time frame. For example Lindemann details the extraordinary political, media, financial and commercial power of Jews in Hungary (Budapest), Austria (Vienna), Germany (Berlin) during the fifty years before the 1920’s. See pp. 119, 138, 188, 189-190.
94 Shlomo Sand The Invention of the Jewish People, Ch.2.
95 See James Petras’ Zionism, Militarism and the Decline of US Power (Atlanta: Clarity Press 2008) Ch 1-2; James Perkins Rulers and Ruled in the US Empire, Ch 8, 10.
96 My calculations based on Congressional reports on campaign funding.
97 While liberal critics of the “Israel Lobby” posit a notion of the “national interest” without any clarification of which class interests in the nation are central, our perspective defines the national interest in terms of what benefits the wage and salaried classes.