U.S. support for Israel’s genocide against Palestine is rooted not only in campaign financing but other factors, including a rigid ideology stuck in the shadow of World War II, writes Joe Lauria.
America as ‘Savior,’ Israel as ‘Victim’
Updated to include quote from Jared Kushner and mention of U.S. defense contractors.
The world-historical crisis in Gaza might in the long-term bring about radical change in both the U.S. and Israel, but in the interim the greatest crimes the two nations have jointly taken part in has stiffened their defenses against unprecedented criticism.
The fear of blasting Israel has been breached. The taboo broken. Tel Aviv and Washington have never faced this before. As both are settler nations, having wiped out natives across the land, they are circling their wagons on a new frontier. They can only respond with the most profound denial and viciousness.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who addressed a joint-session of Congress on Wednesday as the subject of a requested arrest warrant at the International Criminal Court, has demanded the United States shield Israel from criticism while continuing to arm and support its genocide — and the U.S. has answered his call.
When the Biden administration withheld a symbolic shipment of weapons to Israel, Netanyahu counted on Congress to draft a law that would withhold funding for the State Dept. and the Pentagon if President Joe Biden did not give Netanyahu the weapons he needs to “finish the job” in Gaza.
Biden’s withholding of the shipment was designed to fool U.S. voters critical of his Gaza policy. But the assault on Rafah — despite Biden’s supposed red line — continues, and so will unconditional U.S. support for Israel. The question is why.
Why will U.S. politicians risk losing elections to continue supporting the most unimaginable crimes? The answer lies beyond elections and individual politicians.
Continued support for Israel in the midst of genocide threatens the very legitimacy of U.S. post-war rule as the world turns increasingly against the U.S. and Israel.
Despite this, what makes U.S. leaders so enthralled to a foreign nation and leader who has angered several U.S. presidents?
For instance, why did U.S. leaders, essentially on the say-so of that foreign leader, turn against their own university students on U.S. soil peacefully protesting both Israel’s genocide and Washington’s complicity in it?
In a video address to America delivered April 24 in his American-accented English, Netanyahu ordered that anti-genocide protests on U.S. campuses be stopped. And they have been. It is worth quoting his entire remarks. He said:
“What’s happening on American college campuses is horrific. Anti-semitic mobs have taken over leading universities. They call for the annihilation of Israel. They attack Jewish students. They attack Jewish faculty.
This is reminiscent of what happened in German universities in the 1930s. It is unconscionable. It has to be stopped. It has to be condemned and condemned unequivocally.
But that’s not what happened. The response of several university presidents was shameful. Now fortunately, state, local, federal officials, many of them have responded differently but there has to be more. More has to be done.
It has to be done not only because they attack Israel, that’s bad enough. Not only because they want to kill Jews wherever they are. That’s bad enough. It’s also, when you listen to them, it’s also because they say, not only death to Israel, death to the Jews, but death to America.
And this tells us that there is an anti-semitic surge here that has terrible consequences. We see this exponential rise of anti-semitism throughout America and throughout Western societies as Israel tries to defend itself against genocidal terrorists who hide behind civilians.
Yet it is Israel that is falsely accused of genocide. Israel that is falsely accused of starvation and all sundry war crimes. It’s all one big libel. But that’s not new.
We have seen in history that anti-Semitic attacks were always preceded by vilification and slander. Lies that were cast against the Jewish people that are unbelievable, yet people believe them.
And what is important now, is for all of us, all of us who are interested and cherish our values and our civilization to stand up together and to say: enough is enough.
We have to stop anti-Semitism because anti-Semitism is the canary in the coal mine. It always precedes larger conflagrations that engulf the entire world.
So I ask all of you, Jews and non-Jews alike, who concerned with our common future and our common values, to do one thing: Stand up, speak up, be counted. Stop anti-Semitism now.”
Brazen
Netanyahu uttered a dozen lies in that 339-word message, which got 18.4 million views on X. There are five lies in the first five sentences alone:
1). the students are not “anti-semitic mobs” but protestors, many Jews, against genocide; 2.) they are calling for a free and independent Palestine, not the “annihilation” of Israel; 3.) they are not attacking Jewish students, but Israel’s war; 4). they are not attacking Jewish faculty, unless calling out Israel’s crimes is considered an attack on Jews; and 5). Jews were banned from German universities in the 1930s, making such a comparison to the U.S. today a ludicrous lie.
And what exactly does Netanyahu mean by the “annihilation” of Israel, a phrase he repeatedly utters?
If Israel granted full citizenship rights to Palestinians in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, would that mean the “annihilation” of Israel, or the annihilation of apartheid in Israel? The real annihilation going on is that of Gaza by Israel.
More outrageous was Netanyahu’s lie that American student protestors “want to kill Jews wherever they are” and want “death” to Israel and America. He lies about a “surge” of anti-Semitism. In a clinical case of projection, Netanyahu said Israel is “falsely accused of genocide” of “starvation” and of “all sundry war crimes.”
In Lock-Step
Instead of outrage at this litany of obvious falsehoods, U.S. officials and media echoed Netanyahu’s words. The White House, Congress, newspapers, universities and police responded in lock-step, criminalizing students in their own their country for opposing an active genocide.
At the Capitol for Holocaust Remembrance Day on May 7, Biden framed the Oct. 7 attack as purely motivated by hatred of Jews, whitewashing the entire 80-year history of ethnic cleansing and occupation of Palestinians by Israel. ………………………………………………………………
……………………………………………….Obedient Media
The U.S. media has long told the story almost exclusively from Israel’s point of view. That has conditioned the U.S. public, and its political leaders, to give unconditional support for Israel and expect ostracization for criticizing it.
CNN’s chief political correspondent, Dana Bash, for instance, editorialized on a news show a week after Netanyahu spoke about U.S. campus protests that the students had “lost the plot.” …………………………………………………..
as Chicago University professor John Mearsheimer asks, was there an anti-Semitism problem on American campuses before Israel’s attack on Gaza?
Could Have Stopped It
Biden could have stopped the genocide immediately by withholding all weapons, military aid and diplomatic cover — which any decent man with such power would have done. Instead Biden engaged in public relations while the Gazan public was decimated, pretending to oppose Netanyahu and caring for Palestinian civilians.
Likewise Biden’s State Department tried to play it both ways: feinting to the American public that it was ready to criticize Israel for its mistreatment of civilians, while taking no action. The State Department even said it had evidence Israel may have broken international humanitarian law, but not enough to cut off arms shipments.
“The Biden administration believes that Israel has most likely violated international standards in failing to protect civilians in Gaza but has not found specific instances that would justify the withholding of military aid, the State Department told Congress … the report — which seemed at odds with itself in places — said the U.S. had no hard proof of Israeli violations.”
For Netanyahu’s and members of his cabinet who have expressed genocidal intent, this is the chance they have been waiting for, to fulfill Israeli Founding Father David Ben Gurion’s promise of a Greater Israel. The war to wipe out Hamas is a cover for wiping out the Palestinians from Gaza.
Whatever Biden or the State Department says, Israel will continue with its genocidal urban renewal plan in Gaza by bombing buildings with people still living in them with a view to replacing them with Israeli and Western-owned beachfront property (with an Israeli gas pipeline through it). It is evidently a plan Biden and Blinken, and presumably Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, agree with. (Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, whose family are close Netanyahu friends, said, ““Gaza’s waterfront property could be very valuable … It’s a little bit of an unfortunate situation there, but from Israel’s perspective I would do my best to move the people out and then clean it up.”)
According to the Jewish News Syndicate:
“Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir declared at the event [on May 14] that the government should encourage voluntary emigration of Palestinians from the Strip.
‘Two things must be done: One, return to Gaza now, return home, return to our holy land. And two: encouraging emigration. To encourage the voluntary departure of the residents of Gaza. It’s moral, it’s rational, it’s right, it’s the truth. This is the Torah and this is the only way—yes, it is also humanitarian,’ the minister told attendees.”
In response to Biden’s “pause” in shipments, Netanyahu said Israel would fight with its “fingernails” if it needed to in Rafah.
Angered US Presidents
Several American presidents have in rare instances stood up to Israel. President Dwight D. Eisenhower threatened sanctions against Israel over the 1956 Suez Crisis to get Tel Aviv, Paris and London to end its military operation against Egypt and for Israel to withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula.
Ronald Reagan in 1983 withheld F16s to Israel until it withdrew from Lebanon. “While these forces are in the position of occupying another country that now has asked them to leave, we are forbidden by law to release those planes,’ he said.
And in 1992, George H.W. Bush threatened to withhold a $10 billion loan guarantee if Israel continued building settlements in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, according to The Washington Post. And yet Israel always seems to get its way.
In his review of Netanyahu’s memoir Bibi: My Story, As’ad AbuKhalil wrote last year in Consortium News:
“Netanyahu’s analysis of U.S.-Israeli relations is simple: no matter what Israel does, and no matter how many wars and invasions it launches, the ‘alliance with the U.S. will take care of itself.’ He correctly believes that U.S. presidents will stand by Israel no matter what … ” (p. 84).
Despite this, we learn from the book that a succession of U.S. presidents disliked Netanyahu but would not stand up to him as previous presidents had to earlier prime ministers………………………………………………………….
‘America Can Be Easily Moved’
Ultimate obedience to Netanyahu in the U.S. brings to mind a video of him speaking to an Israeli settler family in Hebrew in 2001 about how easy it is to manipulate the Americans.
He says, “With the U.S., I know how they are. America is a thing you can easily maneuver and move in the right direction. Even if they say something, so what? Eighty percent of Americans support us.”
About the Palestinians, Netanyahu says: “The main thing is, first of all, to strike them, not once but several times, so painfully, that the price they pay will be unbearable. So far the price-tag is not unbearable.”……………………………..
Why?
Why then do American politicians, universities and media slavishly follow whatever Israel demands? There is more than one answer:
1. Money: AIPAC’s campaign financing and defense contracts;
2. Lingering guilt over the holocaust and fear of being labeled an anti-semite;
3. A natural, historical connection between settler, colonial nations founded on ethnic cleansing and genocide;
4. Power-sharing in the Middle East with overlapping regional and international empires;
5. Israeli intelligence possessing kompromat on U.S. politicians.
6. Keeping a World War II ideology alive to justify global and local supremacy.
Money
The answer most often given to the question is campaign contributions for politicians, who want to avoid being “primaried” by Israel Lobby money. The American–Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) raises more than $100 million a year, which it spends on lobbying and campaign contributions to U.S. political candidates.
Universities are also dependent on wealthy donors, many who demand total loyalty to Israel, which goes a long way to explaining why U.S. universities asked police to break up peaceful, anti-genocide protests on their campus.
And of course American defense contractors stand to gain mightily by continued Israeli bombardment of Gaza.
But it isn’t only about money.
Holocaust
Western governments retain inherited guilt for their deplorable behavior during the Second World War regarding the Holocaust. Germany, naturally, is at the top of the list of the still guilty parties, and is the second largest arms supplier to Israel after the United States.
This residual guilt has created a condition in which the descendants of the victims are still immune to criticism 80 years later in an almost inexhaustible supply of sympathy that Israeli leaders clearly exploit. ……………………………………………………………………..
There is deep ignorance in America about the foundation of Israel, exploded by some Israeli historians, especially by Ilan Pappé, whose book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, documented the intent of Israel’s founders to drive more than 700,000 of the indigenous population off their land into neighboring countries, and killing hundreds of thousands more in an unbroken process now playing out in Gaza. ………………………………………..
“As early as 1937, Ben-Gurion wrote that the ‘boundaries of the Zionist aspirations are the concern of the Jewish people and no external factor will be able to limit them.’
Ben-Gurion also hoped for the expansion of ‘Zionist aspirations’ to Israel’s ‘biblical borders’ (which stretch all the way to Iraq). There is no mention of or reference to the Indigenous population in this vision.”………………………………………….
The launch of Israel and the Greater Israel project coincided with the beginning of the post-war U.S. global empire, which overlapped in the Middle East with Israel’s burgeoning regional empire. Israel and its regional ambitions became a natural footprint for U.S. dominance in the region: namely the subjugation of Arab peoples and rulers.
Thus for the continuance of U.S. empire and all the benefits it accrues to U.S. rulers in the face of growing worldwide opposition, it is natural for Washington to continue supporting Israeli expansionism — no matter the horrendous human cost.
Blackmail
One cannot easily dismiss talk of Israeli intelligence gathering blackmail dirt on American politicians to keep them in line beyond campaign bribes. According to Ari Ben-Menashe, a former Israeli military intelligence official, such blackmail is a part of Israeli tactics. For instance, he told Consortium News‘ CN Live! in 2020 that the child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein was collecting such kompromat on powerful Americans.
Part of the ideology driving the America-Israel dominance regionally and globally is mired in the shadow of the Second World War: the delusion that the U.S. is still the world’s savior and that Jews are still active victims of history. It’s as if 80 years have not passed.
Jews were certainly among the war’s greatest victims, but America was not the sole or even the chief savior, given the outsized role of the Soviet Union in destroying the Nazis.
After the war, the United States was left with troops around the globe, in areas of great natural resources in a devastated world, whose devastation didn’t touch the American mainland.
A worldwide empire was the result. U.S. leaders have been dedicated to expanding and maintaining it ever since by installing and propping up governments that serve U.S. economic and strategic interests and removing those that don’t. This is done through electoral interference, coups and invasions that have killed millions of innocent lives in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Latin America and elsewhere.
To maintain a kind of moral veneer to justify America’s global marauding as “spreading democracy” a connection to the moral war against fascism needs to be maintained. So World War II is invoked constantly by American leaders when embarking on new overseas adventures. ……………………………………………
How cynical is it for descendants of survivors of the Second World War genocide to invoke the Holocaust to perpetrate a genocide of their own?
This confusion still clearly pervades Germany today. In their guilt over their genocide of the Jews and their determination never to let it happen again they are stuck in the World War II past and cannot accept that Israel can possibly be the perpetrators of genocide 80 years later.
So protests against Israeli actions in Germany are seen as protests against Jews and have to be stopped, as the police did in May at Humboldt University in Berlin in the very plaza where Josef Goebbels led the Nazi burning of books.
German police shut down an academic conference about Gaza that month in Berlin. In their misguided fervor to stop another genocide the Germans are supporting one, sending more arms to perpetrate the massacres in Gaza than any nation but the United States. …………………………………….. more https://consortiumnews.com/2024/07/24/netanyahu-commands-us-obeys/
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