Israel Shamir has provided an excellent summary of Judonia Rising: The Israel Lobby and American Society, What the Israel Lobby Really Is, How It Hurts the USA, What to Do About It, A Working Paper, Part I: The State of the Lobby. I fixed some minor typos, tried to make some minor improvements in formating, and added a little more detail in red on economic issues that seem more important today that when I was drafting the original version. The long paper exists in both PDF and HTML formats.
Israel Shamir about a new paper by Joachim Martillo…
Joachim Martillo wrote an important paper called
Judonia Rising: The Israel Lobby and American Society, purporting to explain, "What the Israel Lobby Really Is". He spoke with Stephen Walt, of Walt and Mearsheimer fame, he followed the discussions of Philip Weiss, he corresponded with Noam Chomsky and Joseph Massad, he had read Israel Shamir's
Pardes as well as James Petras'
The Power of Israel in the United States, and he has had email exchanges with Kevin MacDonald. An American scholar Martlllo has some Polish background, and he reads German, Yiddish, Hebrew, and Polish as well as some Arabic. In his view, understanding the Israel Lobby can be based only on a thorough hard-nosed ("non-exceptionalist") analysis of Eastern European Jewish history. This is a heretical view, very close to ours.
It is heretical, because the very far away border of permitted anti-Zionist discourse still remains short of discussion: whether Jews did similar things before Zionism, or do we have a temporary aberration connected with the State of Israel. The moment one integrates modern Jewish behavior with the pre-modern Jewish behavior, the moment one notices continuity of pre-Zionist and Zionist Jewish politics, the moment one leaves the safe ground of condemning occupation, - one crosses into totally forbidden "anti-Semite" territory. Martillo dared and ventured there, and came with strong and startling conclusions: the real issue is not Palestine. Unless they are neutralized, Israel lobbying groups, Israel advocates, Zionists, Neoconservatives, and Friedmanites will steal America and effectively abolish the Constitution in all but name to create a society of servitude for all Americans except for those belonging to the hyper-wealthy transnational Zionist political elite.
This is exactly our view: Palestine is a symbol, a quintessence of the trouble, but the real issue is our enemy's attempt to enslave the world. Martillo begins where Walt and Mearsheimer end their journey. In his view, in order to understand Jews, it is not necessary to venture into days of Jesus Christ; history of Poland will do. He goes to the days of Rzeczpospolita, the Polish Commonwealth (from 1505 until 1795), then ethnic Ashkenazim constituted economic elite of the realm. They lost this status in the partitions of Poland. This is the destroyed Temple; in Martillo's view, these are good old days the Jews miss. They want to be the elite as they were in the days of Rzeczpospolita. Jews did well after the collapse of the Polish Commonwealth, notes Martillo, but not the level as they would have liked.
"Despite supposedly onerous Czarist oppression, Russian Jews had higher incomes, more education, and longer life spans than the non-Jewish populations among whom they lived. They were highly disaffected because of exclusion from the status and access to which they believed they were entitled, but they were not obviously more oppressed than the majority of the Czar's subjects and less oppressed than others. Yuri Slezkine belies the myth of Jewish powerless during the lead-up to WW2 in
The Jewish Century."
In the US, the Jews (or Ashkenazim, in Martillo's terminology) resurrected their social structure and rebuilt it, like ants who rebuild anthill after being removed to a new ground. This structure is ostensibly "Israel advocacy" or "Israel Lobby" but actually advocating Israel's cause ("Israel Lobby proper") is a small part of its effort. He soberly states that a USA, whose dominant elite is Jewish, is not necessarily bending to the Israel Lobby proper when it pursues of pro-Israel foreign policy. The State of Israel may be a client state of America, but America is a client state of the American Jewish Zionist elite, which is probably in the process of establishing itself as the permanent national "meritocratic" elite.
This program has proven so successful because historically Eastern European Jewish culture strongly controlled social and intellectual deviation. Many of the social control mechanisms continue to exist, have evolved in the American environment, and may help explain why liberal Jews have so empowered the Neocons to the detriment of US foreign policy interests as
James Petras has described.
It is not necessary to look for Freemasonry, the Elders of Zion, the Illuminati, dark Talmudists, malicious Cabbalists, or some other group of secret puppeteers: Israel lobbying activities constitute a natural evolution of Jewish, especially ethnic Ashkenazi, communal organizations. The structure of Israel lobbying is a response to historical developments generally unrelated to Zionism. Because there has been a sort of Darwinian selection in both the official and unofficial organizations as well as in their techniques, all of which go back often as much two centuries in European environments, Israel lobbying is naturally far more effective than a lobby that was put together over the last few decades or so in response to a specific issue or to serve a specific corporate interest.
Does the so-called "Israel Lobby" merely act to secure the interests of the State of Israel or is the real goal enhancement of the wealth, status, and power of those who pay for it? Not only does Israel not pay the "Israel Lobby," but The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy does not give a hint who really does, and in any case large sections of the "Israel Lobby" like the Hollywood Crowd do not appear in the book even though scholars like Melani McAlister have investigated the Hollywood-foreign-policy connection in books likes Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East, 1945-2000. With such gaps in the analysis of the "Israel Lobby," no one should be surprised with the weakness of the proposals that Professors Mearsheimer and Walt make for responding to the "Israel Lobby."
Because Friedmanites have been so prominent in the economic regime that the occupation has attempted to impose on Iraq, the common identification of Milton Friedman's economic thinking merely with Cato Institute libertarianism looks incorrect. In today's political intellectual environment Friedmanism (or Neoliberalism) looks more like an adjunct of Neoconservatism (in the sense of Jabotinskian or American Revisionist Zionism) than like an independent political movement.
Israel Lobbying in Comparison with Ordinary Lobbies
Martillo notices that the Jewish lobby has many interests quite unconnected with Israel but equally nefarious.
In Boston the Jewish Alliance for Law and Social Justice (JALSA), which is a spin-off of the American Jewish Congress, has an ongoing project in regendering American society according to feminist and gay liberation principles. (See
here.)
Israel lobbying efforts benefit from organizational memory that does not exist in other lobbying situations. The longevity of Jewish Federation organizations can give Israel Lobbying efforts a generational aspect not seen elsewhere. For example, Israel Advocacy organizations worked for fifty years to delegitimize Arabist points of view in the foreign service and state department, to drive out Arabist officers or bureaucrats, and to replace them with Israel sympathetic personnel (see
The Marginalization of U.S. Mideast Experts).
Possibly because of long-standing relationships with government officials, because of the fear of the accusations of anti-Semitism, or simply because Jews are disproportionately represented among government officials especially in the legal and regulation enforcement divisions, Israel advocacy is unique among lobbying efforts.
While the American public has not fully comprehended the nature of power relations, Israeli leaders do, and the American Zionist elite calls all shots on issues of importance to the American elite from "Who is a Jew" to whether the USA should attack Iraq or Iran first.
The political relational hierarchy and the domination of an American Zionist elite over all validate the Finkelstein and Massad critiques of The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy.
The alliance between Israel and the USA is in the process of creating an internal American caste system that will be dominated by a small class of hyper-wealthy Zionists. With the sort of permanent war that has been envisioned since the beginning of the twentieth century by a segment of the Zionist elite under the influence of Sorel and with the application of the Friedmanite Shock Doctrine as described by Naomi Klein, this caste system will spread globally. (See
The Shock Doctrine, The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, by Naomi Klein.)
Because Zionist Sorelianism has clear affinity with Friedman's ideas, the absence of the any discussion of the connections and interrelations between Friedmanism and Jabotinskianism in The Shock Doctrine, The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, by Naomi Klein is a glaring omission. While Jabotinskian Neoconservatism is for the most part a Jewish sect or special interest, Friedmanist Neoliberalism actively proselytizes itself to non-Jews as the true economic religion, whose high priesthood tends for the most part to consist of Jews. Non-Jews like Cheney, Rumsfeld, or Woolsey often come to accept Jabotinskian Neoconservative foreign policy ideas after indoctrination with Friedmanite Neolibeal market theory.
Not only is Klein completely misleading when she implies that Israel's love affair with disaster capitalism only begins after the expections of the Oslo Process proved illusory, but she failed to mention that the erasing of the native population from areas under Zionist control in 1947-8 (Holoexaleipsis or Nakba) with concomitant seizure of practically all movable and immovable assets from Palestinian refugees is probably the earliest and purest example of massive Friedman-style transfer of wealth from the poor of the developing world to a Western elite (the Zionist political leadership) backed by a Western economic elite (mostly New York Jewish investment bankers and the Cousinhood of the wealthiest British Jews). The creation of the State of Israel on the shards of Arab Palestine is the Zionist version of the Shock Doctrine.
Klein neglects to mention that the hyper-wealthy US Zionist elite and Israeli government have been heavily involved directly and indirectly in manipulating the US economy in criminal violation of SEC regulations by stoking, financing, and picking winners in the homeland security investment bubble that she describes in Chapter 14 of her book.
The Israeli economy or more properly a small segment of hyper-wealthy Israeli Jews linked by family and business relations to the dominant US Zionist elite is thriving as the US economy is tanking and Iraq is being ground down. It is the outcome of which leading Zionists dreamed in the twenties, and it has a high probability of spreading from the ME throughout the Muslim world to South America, and to parts of the former Eastern block.
The Kremlin, which has never had much tolerance for internal competing power centers or external powers mucking in its backyard, saw danger in the extension of a transnational hyper-wealthy Zionist political elite to Russia and has taken preventive action against Jewish oligarchs within the territories of the former Soviet Union. It was stunning how quickly Jewish and Friedmanite groups rushed to support Mikhail Khodorkovski in his power struggle with the Russian government.
Among religious, leftist, and right wing ethnic Ashkenazim there has long been a current of thought that Jews are safest in alliance (or better in dominating) an undemocratic government. Thanks to the Patriot act and other actions of the Bush administration, the undemocratic Zionist future is coming into being right before our eyes, and McCain looks like the most likely of current present candidates to bring about the fulfillment of the ultimate globalized Zionist dystopia, but Zionists throughout the political system are poised to influence any other possible victor except Ron Paul, whom Zionist facilitators and gate-keepers in the US media are trying to starve of media attention.
Abolishing Israel and eradicating Zionism would not eliminate the exploitive tendencies of globalization but would destroy the focal point of the forces that are aiming for the worst of all globalized futures.
The Zionist movement assumed from its earliest phases that it would be dependent on wealthy and influential Jews in the Diaspora. Members of the Counsinhood of Britain's wealthiest Jews probably paid for the Balfour Declaration. After the propaganda reverses of the first Intifada, the need for an even wealthier and more influential class of Jewish Zionists in the USA became obvious.
[In this strategic framework, the Zionist movement also depends on Jews, who are not necessarily wealthy but are in critical positions to serve the Zionist movement especially in intelligence or logistics matters. Such individuals are today called saya`nim. The spy Jonathan Pollard is a particularly egregious saya`an, who was caught. I have expanded the meaning of the term in this document to include Jewish stealth helpers in Israel Lobbying efforts.]
In addition to
saya`nim, Zionists have often used
Shabbesgoyim like Orde Wingate during the pre-State period or more recently John McCain III and his father Admiral John McCain, Jr., who absolved Israel of blame in the attack on the USS Liberty. (See
here.) The Zionist movement has tended to recruit and reward
Shabbesgoyim in families. New York Zionist campaign contributions have rewarded John McCain throughout his political career. Today McCain represents the combined Neoconservative Friedmanite position in Republican politics without — until recently — a lot of the social conservative baggage to which many American Jews and Friedmanites object.]
Zionist connections in the investment banking industry led to earlier IPOs in the 90s with little or no evidence of profitability. Subprime mortgages were a similar class of dubious investments, whose true nature was obscured in CDOs (collateralized debt obligations), and the valuation of Google and similar companies like Facebook has similar dubious characteristic. Some serious forensic financial analysis is needed to understand these economic developments, but the end result has been very clear in the development of a powerful new American hyper-wealthy political-economic class that is mostly Jewish and willing to put a lot of money into Israel advocacy and into influencing the US government.
While many members of this New Jewish Elite would reflexively put money into Israel because of long Zionist indoctrination, they also need Israel as a means to hide their wealth because Israel has a level of economic transparency and corruption comparable to Italy or Egypt. The Bar-Lev line in Tel Aviv is an early indicator of the degree of embezzlement and sweetheart deals in Israeli economics and politics. Israelis have long made a lot of money in providing money laundering and other transaction hiding services both to Jews and non-Jews. Obviously, all parties in this sort of business have an interest in preserving the State of Israel to make sure that this sort business continues.
Post-9/11 Islamophobic scare-mongering as well as the Iraqi occupation has created a growth industry in hardware and software for security, control, and checkpoints. This industry understands that its profitability depends on international policies that maintain conflict through unconditional support of Zionism.
A Web of Influence, Conditioned Thinking and Reflexive Behavior
Ongoing Zionist indoctrination of the American public has produced a Zionist web of influence, conditioned thinking and reflexive behavior that is breath-taking in its pervasiveness.
Even without the presence of media gatekeepers and facilitators, journalists in print, broadcast and cable media almost invariably misrepresent relevant Middle Eastern or Eastern European current events or history. There is little reluctance to turn Zionist or IDF press releases into news reports with no qualifications.
American news organizations almost invariably misquote and mistranslate Iranian President Ahmedinejad, and America media use tendentious Zionist language like the "right to self-defense," "Muslim extremism," and "Arab intransigence" while almost never conceding a similar right of Palestinian or Arab self-defense or addressing issues of Jewish racism, extremism or fanaticism. During the recent Lebanon war, the American media with rare exceptions took the Israeli point of view.
Only recently have American media begun to concede the role of Russian Jews in the Russian Revolution and the murder of the Czar's family. While scholarly journals discuss the Jewish role in the Soviet security apparatus before the end of WW2, no inkling of the Soviet Jewish role in mass murder, ethnic cleansing and genocide is allowed to reach the general public. Such facts would interfere with the Zionist legitimization narrative which requires European Jews to be innocent powerless victims of the German Nazis, and reasonable people would drawn the obvious analogy between Soviet Ashkenazi and Zionist Ashkenazi ethnic cleansing or genocidalism.
Only occasionally does accurate depiction of Zionist ethnic cleansing in 1947-8 ever reach the American public, and descriptions of the start of the 1967 war — even on NPR — still include descriptions of the movement ("barreling") of Egyptian tanks through Sinai to attack Israel.
Roman Catholics according to statistical analysis are less sympathetic to Zionism than other Americans. It is intriguing that practically every time the Boston Globe runs a story that features a Catholic cleric expressing a criticism of Israel, within approximately a week, it also runs a story about a Catholic cleric sex scandal sometimes featuring events from as much as 25 years ago as if to provide some crude sort of "balance" that even CAMERA and HonestReporting do not advocate. It is an often-unconscious behavior more often associated with an angry ethnic press, and it may be significant
- that the Boston Globe Editorial Board includes Lawrence Harmon, who was editor at the Boston Jewish Advocate and
- that paid entry level newspaper jobs in the USA nowadays seem to be found mostly at the ethnic Jewish press.
The hyper-wealthy Zionist elite is trying to provide American colleges and universities with Israel Studies programs in which only Zionistically correct scholars will teach while stealth and overt Israel advocacy groups and individuals attempt to drive any scholars critical of Zionism from American education. (See
here.)
Nadia Abu el Haj, Finkelstein, Arun Gandhi, Massad, Dabashi, Saliba, Debby Almontaser (Khalil Gibran International Academy, New York City) and many others have been subjected to such attacks. (See
here,
here, and
here.)
Altogether Israel Lobbying efforts are grinding down American Constitutional rights and Israelizing society to the point where the American political system is under attack by a wide-ranging seditious conspiracy, and the side-effect of Islamophobic and Arabophobic incitement against Arab or Muslim investments or university contributions or charitable donations, is discouraging the flow of capital from Saudia and the Gulf when the US economy most desperately needs such liquidity.
Even if American gets over the current economic crisis, the alliance with Israel at this point has probably cost every current US taxpayer at least $10,000.00, and the costs at this point are rising at least geometrically thanks to Neocon-orchestrated policies.
Fighting Back to Save America
Pointing out the cost of Israel to each and every American is a good starting point to counteract Israel lobbying and advocacy.
The Zionism of Christian evangelical fundamentalists is part of a generational program of Jabotinskians (see
Backgrounder) but is not particularly deep. Obviously, Rapturists do not care much about the cost of Israel to America, but Christian Zionism can be fought by scriptural disputation, by questioning the patriotism of its leaders and by exposing surreptitious Jewish funding and organizing.
In other areas Israel advocates have had so much success because in today's America Jews play by a set of rules completely different from all other Americans, and even not particularly Zionist Jews have no real incentive to challenge the system, which
- confers upon them the status of Moral Arbiters,
- makes them Major Players in a dramatic narrative of national rebirth,
- renders them Deserving Beneficiaries of programs like Taglit (Birthright Israel) as well as of Jewish networks in academia, the professions or politics, and
- gives them Total Certainty of their own righteousness as Wielders of the Sword of the all-powerful accusation of anti-Semitism.
At the college level, the International Hillel Society acts like a junior auxiliary to the KKK by running racist programs like Taglit/Birthright Israel and by hosting extremist speakers that incite murder and genocide against Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims or simply deny that they are human.
Jewish organizations, no matter how much they campaign against laws and candidates, get a completely pass of the rules and regulations of 501(c)(3) organizations. The tax fraud probably reaches tens of billions of dollars at this point.
Neutralizing Israel lobbying and advocacy groups will be extremely difficult without a push for the US government to enforce laws equally for Jews and non-Jews. Then once a good part of the American public realizes that Israel is a terror state, the USA will be forced to apply anti-terror laws apply and seize assets of organized Jewish community along with those of Zionist billionaires as terrorism supporters just as Islamic charities have been stripped of their funds.
Until the US government begins to enforce laws equitably, activists will have to research real estate transactions and investigate who is paying for Israel advocacy programs. They will have to put together a who's who of Zionist subversion in the USA.
To change the consciousness of Americans, activists must fight American Holocaust religion and work for recognition
- that the mass murders of Jews during WW2 were not exceptional or unique,
- that Palestinians, Armenians, Balkan Muslims, and Circassians have all been genocided from the nineteenth through the twentieth century and
- that Soviet Jews were up to the eyeballs in mass murder, ethnic cleansing and genocide long before German Nazis, Eastern Europeans, and liberated Soviet nationalities began to kill Jews systematically out of fear and hatred resulting from the Jewish role in the Soviet Union.
Activists will have to challenge American Jews socially at interfaith activities, community events and elsewhere. They must demand clarification of Jewish loyalties and force Jewish leaders to acknowledge
- that Americans are not obligated to support Israel and
- that hating Jews for what they do (unlike hating Jews for being Jews) is not anti-Semitism.
Activists need to make effort to counter Israel advocacy and Holocaust studies at the high school and even grammar school levels. They need to work for coordination among groups consisting of anti-Zionist Arab Americans, Muslim Americans, genuinely anti-Israel Jewish Americans, conservatives, liberals, and religious people (especially Roman Catholics).
Bottom line: Joachim Martillo came to the same conclusion as Israel Shamir and James Petras, namely, it is not only about Palestine. And we have to deal with it, if we want to liberate Palestine, or stay free wherever we are.
Israel Shamir is a regular columnist for Novakeo.com
A native of Novosibirsk, Siberia, a grandson of a professor of mathematics and a descendant of a Rabbi from Tiberias, Palestine, he studied at the prestigious School of the Academy of Sciences, and read Math and Law at Novosibirsk University. In 1969, he moved to Israel, served as paratrooper in the army and fought in the 1973 war. After his military service he resumed his study of Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, but abandoned the legal profession in pursuit of a career as a journalist and writer. He got his first taste of journalism with Israel Radio, and later went freelance. His varied assignments included covering Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in the last stages of the war in South East Asia. In 1975, Shamir joined the BBC and moved to London. In 1977-79 he wrote for the Israeli daily Maariv and other papers from Japan. While in Tokyo, he wrote Travels with My Son, his first book, and translated a number of Japanese classics.
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