dissidentvoice.org,
September 1st, 2010
The
State and Local Bases of Zionist Power in America
by James Petras
Any serious effort
to understand the extraordinary influence of the Zionist power
configuration over US foreign policy must examine the presence
of key operatives in strategic positions in the government and
the activities of local Zionist organizations affiliated with
mainstream Jewish organizations and religious orders.
There are at least 52 major American Jewish organizations actively
engaged in promoting Israel's foreign policy, economic and technological
agenda in the US (see the appendix). The grassroots membership
ranges from several hundred thousand militants in the Jewish Federations
of North America (JFNA) to one hundred thousand wealthy contributors,
activists and power brokers in the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee (AIPAC). In addition scores of propaganda mills, dubbed
think tanks, have been established by million dollar grants from
billionaire Zionists including the Brookings Institute (Haim Saban)
and the Hudson Institute among others. Scores of Zionist funded
political action committees (PAC) have intervened in all national
and regional elections, controlling nominations and influencing
election outcomes. Publishing houses, including university presses
have been literally taken over by Zionist zealots, the most egregious
example being Yale University, which publishes the most unbalanced
tracts parroting Zionist parodies of Jewish history.1 New heavily
funded Zionist projects designed to capture young Jews and turn
them into instruments of Israeli foreign policy includes "Taglit-Birthright"
which has spent over $250 million dollars over the past decade
sending over a quarter-million Jews (between 18-26) to Israel
for 10 days of intense brainwashing.2 Jewish billionaires and
the Israeli state foot the bill. The students are subject to a
heavy dose of Israeli style militarism as they are accompanied
by Israeli soldiers as part of their indoctrination; at no point
do they visit the West Bank, Gaza or East Jerusalem.2 They are
urged to become dual citizens and even encouraged to serve in
the Israeli armed forces. In summary, the 52 member organizations
of the Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations which
we discuss are only the tip of the iceberg of the Zionist Power
Configuration: taken together with the PACs, the propaganda mills,
the commercial and University presses and mass media we have a
matrix of power for understanding the tremendous influence they
have on US foreign and domestic policy as it affects Israel and
US Zionism.
While all their activity is dedicated first and foremost in ensuring
that US Middle East policy serves Israel's colonial expansion
in Palestine and war aims in the Middle East, what B'nai B'rth
euphemistically calls a "focus on Israel and its place in
the world", many groups 'specialize' in different spheres
of activity. For example, the "Friends of the Israel Defense
Force" is primarily concerned in their own words "to
look after the IDF", in other words provide financial resources
and promote US volunteers for a foreign army (an illegal activity
except when it involves Israel). Hillel is the student arm of
the Zionist power configuration claiming a presence in 500 colleges
and universities, all affiliates defending each and every human
rights abuse of the Israeli state and organizing all expenses
paid junkets for Jewish student recruits to travel to Israel where
they are heavily propagandized and encouraged to 'migrate' or
become 'dual citizens'.
Method: Studying Zionist Power:
There are several approaches for measuring the power of the combined
Zionist organizations and influential occupants of strategic positions
in government and the economy. These include (a) reputational
approach (b) self claims (c) decision-making analysis (d) structural
inferences. Most of these approaches provide some clues about
Zionist potential power. For example, newspaper pundits and journalists
frequently rely on Washington insiders, congressional staff and
notables to conclude that AIPAC has the reputation for being one
of the most powerful lobbies in Washington. This approach points
to the need to empirically examine the operations of AIPAC in
influencing Congressional votes, nomination of candidates, defeating
incumbents who do not unconditionally support the Israeli line.
In other words analyzing the Congressional and Executive decision-making
process is one key to measuring Zionist power. But it is not the
only one. Zionist power is a product of a historical context,
where media ownership and wealth concentration and other institutional
levers of power come into play and shape the current decision-making
framework. Cumulative power over time and across institutions
creates a heavy bias in the political outcomes favorable to Israel's
organized agents in America. Once again the mere presence of Jews
or Zionists in positions of economic, cultural and political power
does not tell us how they will use their resources and whether
they will have the desired effect. Structural analysis, the location
of Zionists in the class structure, is necessary but not sufficient
for understanding Zionist power. One has to proceed and analyze
the content of decisions made and not made regarding the agenda
of Israel's backers operating in the USA. The 52 major Zionists
organizations are very open about their claims to power, their
pursuit of Israel's agenda and their subservience to each and
every Israeli regime.
Those who deny Zionist power over US Mid East foreign policy are
left-Zionists namely Noam Chomsky and his acolytes. They never
analyze the legislative process, executive decision-making, the
structures and activity of the million member Zionist grassroots
and the appointments and background of key policy makers deciding
strategic policies in the Middle East. Instead they resort to
superficial generalizations and political demagogy, imputing policy
to "Big Oil" and the "military-industrial complex"
or "US imperialism". Categories devoid of empirical
content and historical context about real existing policy making
regarding the Middle East.
The Making of Zionist Power in the US Government
To understand US submission to Israeli war policies in the Middle
East one has to look beyond the role of lobbies pressuring Congress
and the role of political action committees and wealthy Zionist
campaign contributions. A much neglected but absolutely essential
building block of Zionist power over US foreign economic, diplomatic
and military policy is the Zionist presence in key policy positions,
including the Departments of Treasury and State, the Pentagon,
the National Security Council and the White House.
Operating within the top policymaking positions, Zionist officials
have consistently pursued policies in line with Israel's militarist
policies, aimed at undermining and eliminating any country critical
of the Jewish States' colonial occupation of Palestine, its regional
nuclear monopoly, its expansion of Jews only settlements and above
all its strident efforts to remain the dominant power in the Arab
East. The Zionist policymakers in Government are in constant consultation
with the Israeli state, ensuring coordination with the Israeli
military (IDF) command, its Foreign Office and secret police (MOSSAD)
and compliance with the Jewish State's political line. Over the
past 24 months not a single Zionist policymaker has voiced any
criticism of Israel's most heinous crimes, ranging from the savaging
of Gaza to the massacre of the humanitarian flotilla and the expansion
of new settlements in Jerusalem and the West Bank. A record of
loyalty to a foreign power which even exceeds the subservience
of the Stalinist and Nazi fellow travelers in Washington during
the 1930's and 1940's.
Zionist policymakers in strategic positions depend on the political
backing and work closely with their counterparts in the "lobbies"
(AIPAC) in Congress and in the national and local Jewish Zionist
organizations. Many of the leading Zionist policymakers rose to
power through a deliberate strategy of infiltrating the government
to shape policy promoting Israel's interest over and above the
interests of the US populace. While a degree of cohesion resulting
from a common allegiance to Tel Aviv can account for suspected
nepotism and selection, it is also the case that the powerful
Jewish lobbies can play a role in creating key positions in Government
and ensuring that one of their own will occupy that position and
pursue Israel's agenda.
Stuart Levey: Israel's Foremost Operative in the US Government
In 2004, AIPAC successfully pressured the Bush Administration
to create the office of Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial
Intelligence (UTFI) and to name its protégé Princeton
graduate Stuart Levey to that position. Before, but especially
after his appointment, Levey was in close collaboration with the
Israeli state and was known as an over the top Zionist zealot
with unbounded energy and blind worship of the Israeli state.
Within the confines of his Zionist ideological blinders, Levey
applied his intelligence to the singular task of turning his office
into the major foreign policy venue for setting US policy toward
Iran. Levey more than any other appointed official in government
or elected legislator, formulates and implements policies which
profoundly influence US, European Union and UN economic relations
with Iran. Levey elaborated the sanctions policies, which Washington
imposed on the EU and the Security Council. Levey, organizes the
entire staff under his control at Treasury to investigate trade
and investment policies of all the world's major manufacturing,
banking, shipping, petroleum and trading corporations. He then
criss-crosses the US and successfully pressures pension funds,
investment houses, oil companies and economic institutions to
disinvest from any companies dealing with Iran's civilian economy.
He has gone global, threatening sanctions and blackballing dissident
companies in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and North America which
refuse to surrender economic opportunities. They all understood
Levey operated at the behest of Israel, services Levey has proudly
performed.
Levey coordinates his campaign with Zionist leaders in Congress.
He secures sanctions legislation in line with his campaigns. His
policies clearly violate international law and national sovereignty,
pressing the limits of extra territorial enforcement of his administrative
fiats against a civilian economy. His violation of economic sovereignty
parallels Obama's announcement that US Special Forces would operate
in violation of political sovereignty on four continents. For
all intents and purposes, Levey makes US policy toward Iran. At
each point he designs the escalation of sanctions, and then passes
it on to the White House, which shoves it down the throats of
the Security Council. Once new sanctions approved by Levey and
staff are in place they are there to enforce them: identifying
violators and implementing penalties. Treasury has become an outpost
of Tel Aviv. Not a single leftist, liberal or social democratic
publication highlights the role of Levey or even the terrible
economic pain this Old Testament fanatic is inflicting on 75 million
Iranian civilian workers and consumers. Indeed like Israel's Judeo-fascist
rabbis who preach a "final solution" for Israel's enemies,
Levey announces new and harsher "punishment" against
the Iranian people.3 Perhaps at the appropriate moment the Jewish
State will name a major avenue through the West Bank for his extraordinary
services to this most unholy racist state.
The Strategic Role of Local Power
The Israel Lobby Archive recently released declassified documents
of the American Zionist Council (AZC) subpoenaed during a US Senate
investigation between 1962-63. The documents reveal how the Israeli
state through its American Jewish conduits - the mainstream Zionist
organizations - penetrated the US mass media and propagated its
political line, unbeknownst to the American public. Stories written
by a host of Jewish Zionist journalists and academics were solicited
and planted in national media such as The Readers Digest, The
Atlantic Monthly, Washington Post among others, including regional
and local newspapers and radio stations.4 While the national Zionist
organizations procured the journalists and academic writers and
editors, it was the local affiliates who carried the message and
implemented the line. The level of infiltration the Senate subpoenaed
Zionist documents in the 1960's reveal has multiplied a hundred
fold over the past 50 years in terms of financing, paid functionaries
and committed militants and above all in structural power and
coercive capability.
While the national leaders in close consultation with Israeli
officials receive instructions on which issues are of high priority,
the implementation follows a vertical route to regional and local
leaders, politicians, and notables who in turn target the local
media and religious, academic and other opinion leaders. When
national leaders ensure publication of pro Israeli propaganda,
the locals reproduce and circulate it to local media and non-Zionist
influentials on their "periphery". Letter campaigns
orchestrated at the top are implemented by thousands of militant
Zionist doctors, lawyers and businesspeople. They praise pro-Israel
scribes and attack critics; they pressure newspapers, publishing
houses and magazines not to publish dissidents. The national and
local leaders promote hostile reviews of books not promoting the
Israeli line, influence library decisions to pack their shelves
with pro Israeli books and censor and exclude more balanced or
critical histories. Local militants in co-ordination with Israeli
consuls saturate the public with thousands of public meetings
and speakers targeting Christian churches, academic audiences
and civic groups; at the same time local Zionist militants and,
especially millionaire influentials, pressure local venues (university
administrators, church authorities and civic associations) to
disinvite any critic of Israel and their supporters from speaking.
In the last resort, local Zionists demand that a pro-Israel propagandist
be given equal time, something unheard of when an Israel apologist
is scheduled to speak.
Local Zionist organizations make yeoman efforts to recruit mayors,
governors, local celebrities, publishers, church people and promising
young ethnic and minority leaders by offering them all expenses
paid propaganda junkets to Israel and then to write or give interviews
parroting what they were fed by Israeli officials. Local leaders
mobilize thousands of militant activist Zionists to attack anti-Zionist
Jews in public and private. They demand they be excluded from
any media roundtables on the Middle East.
Local Zionist functionaries form rapid response committees to
visit and threaten any local publisher and editorial staff publishing
editorials or articles questioning the Israeli party line. Local
leaders police ("monitor") all local meetings, speaker
invitations, as well as the speeches of public commentators, religious
leaders and academics to detect any "anti-Zionist overtones'
(which they label "covert anti-Semitism"). Most of the
major Jewish religious orders are lined up as the clerical backbone
of local Israeli fundraising, including the financing of new "Jews
only" settlements in the Palestinian West Bank.
Local functionaries are in the forefront of campaigns to deny
independent Middle East specialists and public policy academics,
appointments, tenure or promotion, independently of the quality
of their scholarship. On the other hand, academic hacks who toe
the pro-Israel line, by publishing books with blanket attacks
on Israeli critics among Christians and Muslims and countries
like Turkey, Iran or whoever is a target of Israeli policy, are
promoted, lauded and put on the best seller list. Any book or
writer critical of Zionist Power or Israel is put on a local and
national 'index' and subject to an inquisition by slander from
a stable of Jewish Torquemadas.
Conclusion
The power of Israel in the US does not reside only in the influence
and leadership of powerful Washington based "pro-Israel lobbies",
like AIPAC. Without the hundreds of thousands of militant locally
based dentists, podiatrists, stockbrokers, real estate brokers,
professors and others, the "lobby" would be unable to
sustain and implement its policy among hundreds of millions of
Americans outside the major metropolises. As we have seen from
the Senate declassified documents, over a half-century ago, local
Zionist organizations began a systematic campaign of penetration,
control and intimidation that has reached its pinnacle in the
first decade of the 21st century. It is no accident or mere coincidence
that University officials in Northern Minnesota or upstate New
York are targeted to exclude speakers or fire faculty members
critical of Israel. Local Zionists have computerized databanks
operating with an index of prohibited speakers, as the Zionists
themselves admit and flaunt in contrast to "liberal"
Zionists who are prone to label as "anti-Semitic" or
"conspiracy theorists" writers who cite official Zionist
documents demonstrating their systematic perversion of our democratic
freedoms.
Over the decades, the distinction between Zionist power exercised
by a "lobby" outside the government and operatives "inside"
the government has virtually vanished. As we have seen, in our
case study, AIPAC secured the undersecretary position in Treasury,
dictated the appointment of a key Zionist operative (Stuart Levey)
and accompanies his global crusade to sanction Iran into starvation
and destitution. The planting of operatives within key Middle
East positions in government is not the simple result of individual
career choices. The ascent of so many pro-Israel Zionist to government
posts is part of their mission to serve Israel's interest at least
for a few years of their careers. Their presence in government
precludes any Senate or Congressional investigations of Zionists
organizations acting as agents of a foreign power as took place
in the 1960's.
As the major Zionist organizations and influentials have accumulated
power and abused the exercise of power on behalf of an increasingly
bloody racist state, which flaunts its dominance over US institutions,
public opposition is growing. The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions
campaign is gaining strength even in the US (see Harvard divestment
in Israeli companies). US public support for Israel, by all measures,
has dropped below 50%, while polls in Western Europe show a marked
increase in hostility to Israel's ultra-rightist regime. Anti-Zionist
Jews are growing in influence especially among young Jews who
are appalled by the Israeli slaughter in Gaza and assault on the
humanitarian flotilla. Equally important the presence of anti-Zionist
Jews on panels and forums has given courage to many otherwise
intimidated non-Jews who heretofore were fearful of being labeled
"anti-Semitic".
The Zionist power configuration rests on a declining population
base: most young Jews marry outside the confines of the ethno-religious
Jewish-Israeli nexus and many of them are not likely to form the
bases for rabid campaigns on behalf of a racist state. The Zionist
leadership's high intensity and heavily endowed effort to fence
in young people of Jewish ancestry via private schools, subsidized
"summer programs" in Israel etc. are as much out of
fear and recognition of the drift away from clerical chauvinism
as it is an attempt to recruit a new generation of Israel First
militants.
The danger is that the US Zionist support for the ultra-rightist
and racist regime in Israel is leading them to join forces with
the far right in the US. Today Jewish and Christian Manhattan
rednecks are fermenting mass Islamic hatred (the so called "Mosque
controversy") as a distraction from the economic crises and
rising unemployment. Zionist promotion of mass Islamofobia, so
near to Wall Street, where many of their fat cats who profit from
plundering the assets of America operate, is a dangerous game.
If the same enraged masses turn their eyes upward toward the wealthy
and powerful instead of downward to blacks and Muslims, some unpleasant
and unanticipated surprises might rebound against, not only Israel's
operatives, but all those wrongly identified as related to a misconstrued
Jewish Motherland.
Appendix
Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations
Member Organizations
1. Ameinu
2. American Friends of Likud
3. American Gathering/Federation of Jewish Holocaust Survivors
4. America-Israel Friendship League
5. American Israel Public Affairs Committee
6. American Jewish Committee
7. American Jewish Congress
8. American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee
9. American Sephardi Federation
10. American Zionist Movement
11. Americans for Peace Now
12. AMIT
13. Anti-Defamation League
14. Association of Reform Zionists of America
15. B'nai B'rith International
16. Bnai Zion
17. Central Conference of American Rabbis
18. Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America
19. Development Corporation for Israel/State of Israel Bonds
20. Emunah of America
21. Friends of Israel Defense Forces
22. Hadassah, Women's Zionist Organization of America
23. Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society
24. Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life
25. Jewish Community Centers Association
26. Jewish Council for Public Affairs
27. The Jewish Federations of North America
28. Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs
29. Jewish Labor Committee
30. Jewish National Fund
31. Jewish Reconstructionist Federation
32. Jewish War Veterans of the USA
33. Jewish Women International
34. MERCAZ USA, Zionist Organization of the Conservative Movement
35. NA'AMAT USA
36. MCSK" Advocates on behalf of Jews in Russia, Ukraine,
the Baltic States & Eurasia
37. National Council of Jewish Women
38. National Council of Young Israel
39. ORT America
40. Rabbinical Assembly
41. Rabbinical Council of America
42. Religious Zionists of America
43. Union for Reform Judaism
44. Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America
45. United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism
46. WIZO
47. Women's League for Conservative Judaism
48. Women of Reform Judaism
49. Workmen's Circle
50. World ORT
51. World Zionist Executive, US
52. Zionist Organization of America
1. Financial Times book review section August 28/29 2010. [?]
2. Boston Globe August 26, 2010. [?] [?]
3. Stuart Levey, "Iran's New Deceptions at Sea Must be Punished"
FT 8/16/2010, p. 9. [?]
4. Israel Lobby Archive, August 18, 2010. [?]
James Petras, a former Professor of Sociology at Binghamton
University, New York, owns a 50-year membership in the class struggle,
is an adviser to the landless and jobless in Brazil and Argentina,
and is co-author of Globalization Unmasked (Zed Books). Petras'
most recent book is Zionism, Militarism and the Decline of US
Power (Clarity Press, 2008). He can be reached at: jpetras@binghamton.edu.
Read other articles by James, or visit James's website.
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