[The following is a lightly edited
version of a speech I gave on March 1
st in Washington during the
anti-AIPAC and Netanyahu visit
demonstrations. Two days later Israeli
Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan, whom I
cite below, was sitting in the House VIP
visitors’ gallery beaming as he listened
to Netanyahu’s love fest with Congress.
It might have been the first time a
clandestine agent for a foreign country
who spied on the United States was so
honored but I would observe that the
event was doubly significant in that the
speaker Prime Minister Netanyahu was
also involved in the same theft of
American nuclear technology.]
[Here is the video of the event,
just received:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYXOsBMktWI&feature=youtu.be
. Miko Peled is well worth hearing and
many of the questions are very
interesting, revealing the depth of
revulsion for AIPAC and all its works.]
March 11, 2015 "ICH"
- "UR"
- I would like to concentrate on two
issues. First is the nature of the
special relationship between Israel and
the United States and second is the role
of the Israel Lobby and most
particularly AIPAC in shaping that
relationship. I was a foreign policy
adviser for Ron Paul in 2008 and
consider myself politically
conservative. I respect the fact that
nations must be responsive to their
interests, but because of my personal
experience of living and working
overseas for many years I have come to
recognize that the United States is an
anomaly in that it persists in going
around the world doing things that just
do not make any sense. This has been
particularly true during the past
fourteen years, with invasions,
interventions and targeted
assassinations having become the
preferred form of international
discourse for Washington.
Many would agree with
what I have just observed, but few
recognize the role of the special
relationship with Israel in shaping what
the United States has become. Quite
frankly, the relationship is both
lopsided in terms of favoring perceived
Israeli interests as well as being
terrible for the long suffering
Palestinians, very bad for the United
States as it damages the American brand
worldwide and even bad for Israel as it
enables its governments to act in ways
that are ill advised and ultimately
self-defeating.
I would first like to
address the often repeated mantra that
Israel is America’s best friend or
closest ally as it is a bedrock issue
that is frequently trotted out to excuse
behavior that would otherwise be
incomprehensible. Apart from being a
recipient of more than $3 billion per
year from the US taxpayer, Israel is no
ally and never has been. There is no
alliance of any kind with Israel, in
part because Israel has a border that
has been moving eastward for the past
fifty years as it continues to absorb
Palestinian land. Without an
internationally recognized border it is
impossible to define a relationship
between two nations. Israel also has no
strategic value to the United States, so
to speak of an alliance, which posits
reciprocity is ridiculous.
But that is not to say
that Israel does not interact with
Washington. Indeed, some might say that
it is possesses a disproportionate voice
relating to some foreign and domestic
policies. The penchant to use force as a
first option in international
interactions is perhaps itself due to
Washington imitating Tel Aviv or vice
versa as neither the United States nor
Israel seems any longer interested in
diplomacy.
American protection of
Israel in international bodies like the
United Nations is a disgrace, making the
United States de facto complicit in
Israeli violations of international law,
to include its settlement expansion, as
well as its war crimes. Under Bill
Clinton the United States more or less
adopted the Israeli model in dealing
with terrorism, which consists of
overwhelming armed response and no
negotiations ever. Washington’s
uncritical support for Israel
politically and militarily was a major
factor in motivating the perpetrators of
the 9/11 terror attack.
Deferring to Israel
often results in U.S. policies that are
absurd and highly damaging to other
interests. Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice described Israel’s
devastation of Lebanon in 2006 in which
nearly 1,000 civilians were killed and
more than $2 billion in infrastructure
was destroyed as the “birth pangs of a
new Middle East” Rice, who also spoke of
fear of a nuclear mushroom cloud rising
above Washington to justify invading
Iraq, far from being discredited due to
her lack of discernment, is currently a
professor at Stanford University and is
now being spoken of as a possible
Senator from California or,
alternatively, as the next Commissioner
of the National Football League. So much
for accountability in the United States.
One might well
conclude that Israel is not only not an
ally but also not much of a friend. It
has run massive spying operations inside
the United States to include hundreds of
Art Students and celebrations by the
employees of an Israeli moving firm
located in New Jersey when the twin
towers were going down. Israel is
regularly named by the FBI as the most
active friendly country in terms of
running espionage operations against the
U.S. but nothing ever happens. Israeli
spies are sent home quietly and
Americans who spy for Israel are rarely
prosecuted. Last year we witnessed
Hollywood producer and Israeli citizen
Arnon Milchan receiving an Oscar even as
stories were circulating about his
criminal collusion to obtain restricted
American technology to enable Israel to
build nuclear weapons. The Justice
Department has not seen fit to do
anything about him.
Israel also has a hand
in what is going on domestically in the
United States. Many states now have
their own departments of homeland
security and many of the companies that
obtain contracts to provide security
services are Israeli. Airport security
is a virtual Israeli monopoly.
Increasingly militarized American police
officers now use federal government
grants to travel to Israel for training
based on the Israeli experience with the
Palestinians. Israelis have advised CIA
and Pentagon torturers and Israeli
advisers were also present at Abu Ghraib.
Israel’s influence
over Washington policies frequently
means war. American officials extremely
close to the Israeli government were
behind the rush to war with Iraq. If the
Washington goes to war with Iran in the
near future it will not be because
Tehran actually threatens America, it
will be because Israel and its powerful
lobby in the U.S. have succeeded in
creating an essentially false case to
mandate such action. Congress is
obligingly advancing legislation that
would commit the United States to
intervene militarily in support of a
unilateral Israeli attack, meaning that
Israel could easily be empowered to make
the decision on whether or not the U.S.
goes to war.
Israel interferes in
American elections, in 2012 on behalf of
Mitt Romney, and also this week by
aligning itself with the Republicans
against the President of the United
States to harden existing policy against
Iran. Looking ahead to elections in
2016, two Jewish billionaires have
already stated clearly that they will
spend whatever they have to to elect the
candidate that is best for Israel. As
Sheldon Adelson is a Republican and Haim
Saban is a Democrat both major parties
are covered and I would warn “Watch out
for Hillary,” Saban’s candidate of
choice.
Israel has corrupted
our congress which we will witness again
on Tuesday. Benjamin Netanyahu publicly
rebukes and belittles our own head of
state, its government ministers insult
and ridicule John Kerry, and its
intelligence officers have free access
to Capitol Hill where they provide
alarmist and inaccurate private
briefings for American legislators. In
short, Israel has no reluctance to use
its enormous political and media clout
in the US to pressure successive
administrations to conform to its own
foreign and security policy views.
Beyond the corruption
of our political process, I believe many
in this room would agree that the
depiction and treatment of the
Palestinians has been disgraceful.
Israel has engaged in land and water
theft and is doing its best to make
Palestinian life so miserable that they
will all decide to leave. Some would
describe that as ethnic cleansing. Just
last week there were reports of how
Israeli authorities cut off water and
electricity to parts of the West bank
and also won a bogus court case in New
York City that will bankrupt the
Palestinian authority.
Netanyahu’s policy is
to punish the Palestinians incessantly
no matter what they do. The United
States has certainly embraced a lot of
unpleasant policies over the past
fourteen years, but I honestly think
that most Americans would be appalled if
they knew how Palestinians really have
been treated. Unfortunately the Israel
propaganda machine has been able to
maintain a tight grip on the narrative
promoted in the mainstream media. Arabs
are depicted as terrorists while
Israelis are seen as folks just like us.
How does all this
happen? Because of money which enables
the Israel firsters to control the media
and buy the politicians, but
unfortunately no one is allowed to say
that lest Abe Foxman of the Anti
Defamation League accuse one of
propagating a stereotype that is an
“anti-Semitic myth.” American media
corporations and national politics are
in fact totally corrupted by money and
the control that it buys and not just on
behalf of Israel. One would have to be
blind not to recognize that fact.
This is where groups
like the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee better known as AIPAC come in.
AIPAC is only one part of the octopus
like Israel Lobby but it might well be
regarded as the most effective
component. AIPAC has an annual budget of
$70 million and 200 full time employees.
It has thousands of volunteers and tens
of thousands of contributors and
supporters, many of whom are in
Washington right now. On Tuesday they
will descend on Congressional offices to
pressure congressmen to agree to conform
to AIPAC talking points.
AIPAC, which is an IRS
501(c)4 lobbying organization, is able
to keep its donor list secret. It
characteristically operates in the
shadows. It prepares position papers
that are then distributed in congress
and many congressmen, largely ignorant
of the issues, parrot what AIPAC gives
them. AIPAC operative Steve Rosen once
boasted that he could have the
signatures of seventy Senators on a
napkin in twenty-four hours.
Congressmen know that
crossing the Israeli Lobby is career
damaging. Senators William Fulbright and
Chuck Percy were among the first to feel
its wrath when they were confronted by
well-funded challengers backed by
effective media campaigns who defeated
them in spite of their own outstanding
records as legislators. The founder of
my own organization the Council for the
National Interest Congressman Paul
Findley also suffered the same fate when
he fell afoul of the Lobby. Within the
government the purge has also been
widespread with the traditional Arabists
at State Department forced out to be
replaced by friends of Israel, many of
whom have been political appointees
rather than career diplomats.
There is no easy
solution to what I have been telling
you. Certainly a more honest media would
produce American voters who are better
informed, but even though AIPAC has long
been defending the indefensible the
corruption in Congress runs deep and it
is difficult to find a constituency
anywhere in the United States where it
is possible to vote for a candidate who
is not openly and enthusiastically
supportive of the Israel relationship.
In Virginia last year there were several
important congressional elections. All
the candidates were vetted for their
views on Israel well before the voting
took place.
But to return to AIPAC
there should be demands that it and
other similar Israel-advocacy
organizations register under the Foreign
Agents Registration Act of 1938. That
would require them to have complete
transparency in terms of their funding
and it would also tell the American
people that the organizations themselves
are not necessarily benign and acting on
behalf of U.S. interests, which is the
subterfuge that they currently engage
in. It is certainly past time to push
back against an organization that is
brazenly promoting the interests of a
foreign government at the expense of the
American people. Thank you.
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