The Power of Israel in the United States
James Petras' New Book: "The
Power of Israel in the United States"
By Stephen Lendman
10/26/06 "Information
Clearing House" -- -- James Petras is Professor
Emeritus of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York. He's a
noted academic figure on the US Left and a well-respected Latin
American expert and longtime chronicler of the region's popular
struggles. He's also an advisor to the landless workers in
Brazil and the unemployed workers movement in Argentina. Along
the way, he managed to find time to write many hundreds of
articles and 62 books published in 29 languages including his
latest one in which he discusses another vital world region he
has extensive knowledge of and has written frequently about -
the Middle East and specifically the state of Israel and its
relations with its neighbors, the Palestinians and, most
importantly and the subject of this book, the US.
Petras' powerful new book is titled
The Power of Israel in the United States. It's a work of
epic writing and essential reading documenting the enormous
influence of the Jewish Lobby on US policy in the Middle East.
It focuses like a laser to assure that policy conforms with
Israel's long-term goal for regional hegemony. The Lobby's
influence is broad and deep enough to include officials at the
highest levels of government, the business community, academia,
the clergy (especially the dominant Christian
fundamentalists/Christian Zionists) and the mass media. Petras
shows how together they're able to assure the full and
unconditional US support for all elements of Israel's agenda
going back decades even when that agenda harms our interests
such as the unwinnable war in Iraq, any future one against Iran
if it's undertaken, and the appalling and brutal subjugation and
colonization of the Palestinian people that serves no US
interest whatever. In spite of it, the Lobby is able to get the
US to go along with Israel unconditionally with no serious
opposition to it tolerated.
The book is divided into four parts. This review will cover each
one in detail, and what's discussed will likely surprise any
reader unfamiliar with the thoroughly documented account
presented in it so compellingly. Petras sets the table in his
introduction for what's to come in the later chapters. He notes
what author JJ Goldberg reported in his book Jewish Power:
Inside the Jewish Establishment. Goldberg wrote in the early
1990s that 45% of the Democrat Party's fundraising and 25% of
that for the Republicans came from Jewish-funded Political
Action Committees (PACS). Petras then updates the numbers using
the ones Richard Cohen published in the Washington Post showing
them now at 60% and 35% respectively, and that this funding
relates to a single core issue - unconditional US support for
Israel's agenda including those parts of it human rights
activists and observers of conscience judge most egregious and
illegal. Petras stresses that no other single US lobby including
Big Pharma, Big Oil, agribusiness, or any other one has this
kind of dominant influence over the political process here. He
refers to "Zioncon" ideologues and policymakers whose main goal
is to make the Middle East into a "US-Israeli Co-Prosperity
Sphere" under the fraudulent cover of promoting democracy in the
region - but doing it through the barrel of a gun.
Petras explains the root of the Lobby's power lies in the high
proportion of Jewish families who are among the wealthiest and
most influential ones in the country. He cites Forbes magazine
that reported 25 -
30% of the wealthiest families here are Jewish despite the small
percentage of Jews in the population overall. They include
billionaires with enormous influence, and along with all others
comprising the Jewish Lobby, have created a "tyranny of Israel
over the US" with consequences grave enough to threaten world
peace and stability, the global economy, and the very future of
democracy in this country.
That democracy and our constitutionally protected rights now
hang by a thread after the recent passage of the Military
Commissions Act (aka the "torture authorization act" or more
accurately the "US Constitutional annulment act") that makes
everyone everywhere an "enemy combatant" subject to arrest and
detention out of sight anywhere in the world without regard for
our (no longer) constitutionally guaranteed rights. The new law
also applies to US citizens as the Jose Padilla case showed.
We've effectively lost our habeas and due process rights even
though technically we still have them.
Because of the Lobby's power, Petras reports, the US has
unconditionally supported Israel's wars of aggression since
1967. It's influence also led to the US Gulf war in 1991 and the
second Iraq war begun in
2003, now raging out of control and seen by some noted analysts
as unwinnable and causing potential irreparable economic and
political harm to the nation. Nonetheless, it persists with no
plan agreed on to end it. The Lobby also guaranteed this
country's unconditional support for Israel's illegal wars of
aggression against Lebanon and Palestine with all the
devastation they caused and the horrendous consequences from
them unresolved. The Palestinian conflict still rages under the
radar, and the status in Lebanon hangs by a hair trigger ready
to erupt again any time Israel decides to resume hostilities.
But inflaming the Middle East powder keg to a near boiling point
is the strong possibility the US and/or Israel will attack Iran
because Israel wants it and the Jewish Lobby put its powerful
support behind it. More on this, Palestine and Lebanon below.
Today the situation in the Middle East is so dire, Petras
reports a large majority of Europeans and a growing number of
Americans believe Israel is the greatest of all threats to world
peace and stability. Nonetheless, the Bush administration, in
acquiescence to the Lobby, has "bludgeoned" its European
partners to go along with its uncompromising support for the
Jewish state despite all the obvious perils from it. In this
country, open debate is stifled, public figures and academics
daring to air one truthfully are pilloried, ridiculed, called
anti-semitic and even threatened, and no serious dissent is ever
tolerated in the corporate-run media or their funded and
controlled so-called public radio or PBS parts of it.
No publication is more servile to, supportive of, or more
influential than the nation's so-called "paper of record"
publishing "All the News That's Fit to Print" - the New York
Times. It's important because the stories it features
prominently resonate around the country and the world. This
dominant newspaper pledges unconditional support and fealty to
the state of Israel whatever it does. The rest of the major
media go along unquestioningly putting out regular one-sided
pro-Israel uber alles propaganda with no opposition voices
allowed to represent other points of view. We call that a free
press - but only for those who own one. The state of the
corporate-controlled media in this country is now so pathetic
that Reporters Sans Frontieres (Reporters without Borders - for
press freedom) just ranked the US 53rd in the world in press
freedom behind countries like Benin, Namibia, Jamaica, France
and Bolivia.
James Petras is a courageous independent voice who bucks this
disturbing trend and refuses to go along. He proves it in his
powerful and carefully documented new book that gives no quarter
countering the mendacity, deceit and danger of the Lobby, its
acolytes and hangers-on, and the corrupted major media. In his
introduction, he calls for a "counter-hegemonic movement" to
free us from our destructive "Israeli entanglements." It's
needed to begin rebuilding our democracy and freedoms that are
somewhere between life support and the crematorium. This book,
he says, is his modest effort toward that goal. Because of the
important information in it, it's considerably more than that.
It needs widespread exposure so people will know about it.
Hopefully this review will help arouse some of them to want to
find out in more detail.
Part I - Zionist Power in America
Petras begins with a discussion of who fabricated the lies about
Iraq's threat to our security and why. He mentions two competing
channels of policy makers and advisors - the long-in-place
formal structure of career military and civilian professionals
in the Pentagon and State Department and a parallel one Bush
administration neocons set up for this one purpose in the
Pentagon, staffed by political appointees, and called the Office
of Special Plans (OSP). It was the OSP's job to cook the books,
come up with the idea of weapons of mass destruction while
ignoring the clear evidence to the contrary and contrive a
fraudulent case for war against Iraq. The people in it were
those in Donald Rumsfeld's and Paul Wolfowitz's chain of command
and were closely connected to a number of influential
neoconservative and pro-Israel organizations. They planned a war
agenda based on lies because Israel wanted it for its security
and hegemony in the region - beginning with the overthrow of
Saddam Hussein followed by regime change in Syria, Lebanon, Iran
and even Saudi Arabia.
Petras points out, contrary to popular belief, this war happened
largely due to the efforts of the Jewish Lobby representing the
interests of Israel. Big Oil opposed the idea because it feared
attacking Iraq would jeopardize its business prospects with
other oil-producing states in the region. Still, Israel and the
Jewish Lobby got their war, and aside from the gain from high
oil prices, Big Oil may end up a longer-term loser from it. US
oil interests always prefer stability and normal relationships
with countries where they operate or wish to and were quite
comfortable dealing with Saddam Hussein without wanting to risk
a war that might upset an otherwise profitable arrangement.
Their fears proved justified as the war they feared created such
unresolved turbulence in Iraq, it's become too dangerous and
unprofitable to undertake new ventures there except perhaps in
parts of the Kurdish-controlled north. Big Oil also chafes at
not being allowed to deal with the Iranians for contracts now
let to its European and other competitors because US sanctions
prevent them from doing business there. It's hard to imagine
those interests would ever go along with US - Israeli
belligerence in the Middle East, but they dare not oppose it
publicly.
Petras observes there's never a public discussion allowed about
that relationship in the mainstream nor will there ever be any,
especially any hint the US attacked Iraq in service to Israel.
There should be plenty of it though because the Iraq and
Afghanistan wars have enraged hundreds of millions of Muslims
and all people of conscience worldwide. They've caused the US to
be seen as a pariah state and George Bush as a dangerous and
morally depraved president of a failed administration. He and
those closest to him like Richard Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld are
reviled around the world and increasingly here at home as
witnessed by the many thousands who took to the streets on
October 5 in over 200 US cities on The World Can't Wait Day -
Drive Out the Bush Regime. The cost of Bush's wars far exceed
any possible future benefits from them, our security has been
jeopardized, the nation's status has been compromised, and some
analysts believe the total dollar cost of the Iraq adventure may
eventually top $2 trillion - an amount extremely harmful to the
nation's economy that's now worrying key business leaders and
responsible people in government.
The only clear beneficiary of the Bush war agenda is Israel. It
removed its main adversary in the region and cut off the
political and economic support it gave the Palestinians. Petras
points out that Iraq along with Iran and Syria comprised the
core resistance to Israel's expansionist plans to crush the
Palestinians
(one down, two to go), ethnically cleanse them from their
homeland and seize their land as one part of a long-term goal
for a greater Israel and unchallengeable dominance in the
region. Israel is the only country in the world with undeclared
borders. It's kept that status to give itself maximum latitude
to annex all the territory it can toward the goal of a greater "Eretz
Israel" Zionists want that includes the ancient lands of "Judea"
and "Summaria," the West Bank biblical parts of Israel
Palestinians claim as their homeland.
With US help, Israel removed one threat to its plan for regional
supremacy, but it still faces determined resistance from the
Palestinians in spite of having crushed its democratically
elected Hamas government. It also faces a resilient Hezbollah in
Lebanon that humiliated the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) in the
summer war there as well as opposition from Iran and Syria. In
addition, there's internal opposition within Israel over its war
and colonization agenda because of its enormous cost plus the
added insecurity it causes. It's resulted in a level of
out-migration now exceeding new arrivals as well as an erosion
of the nation's social programs because the state needs the
resources for its aggression and annexation agenda. It's much
like what's happening under the Bush administration where the
people pay the price for imperial wars abroad and the moral
decay and authoritarianism at home.
Obstacles and setbacks aside, Israel has pursued its goal to
"democratize" the region through a belligerent policy of
neutralizing its enemies in it by force. The plan they crafted
is for a series of wars with its US ally taking the lead and the
eventual goal of joint US - Israeli control over the entire
region. Making it work depends on getting US administrations to
go along, which so far hasn't been a problem and has never been
easier with the Bush administration in power and the high-level
pro-Zionist officials in it with long-standing ties to Israel.
They have the most important policy-making positions in
government or are closely associated with the ones who do. These
officials have a history of dedication to Israel's interests
even when they conflict with those here at home. They're in the
administration, the Congress as well as in the most influential
Jewish organizations and lobbying groups like the Conference of
Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, the Anti-Defamation
League and what some observers believe is the single most
powerful lobby in Washington - AIPAC.
Committed support for Israel also comes from the "Jewish
Diaspora" that comprises thousands of dedicated activists here -
doctors, dentists, philanthropists, key individuals on Wall
Street, the major banks and the Federal Reserve and other key
segments of business, the major media, the clergy and academics
and journalists given special prominence because of their
willingness to corrupt their integrity in return for the
handsome benefits they get for their unconditional public
support and contrived rationalizations for the US -Israeli
agenda. This kind of influence and support has made Israel by
far the largest recipient in the world of US financial aid that
amounts upfront to about $3 billion a year with more forthcoming
any time as needed in added funding, weapons transfers and large
low or no-interest loans that may never have to be repaid.
Israel also gets the unheard of advantage of receiving the
latest and most advanced US arms and technology, unrestricted US
market access for its products and services, free entry of its
immigrants, unconditional support for its aggressive wars and
colonization of the Palestinians and South Lebanese, and
guaranteed US vetoes in the Security Council against all UN
resolutions unfavorable to its interests. It's also able to get
prominent Washington officials and the dominant corporate-run
and funded media to label all criticism of Israel anti-semitic
and freely uses this ruse whenever it serves its purpose. Israel
is allowed to get away with its intelligence operations here as
well including its covert penetration of military bases, the
FBI, IRS, INS, EPA and many other government agencies. In
addition, it's believed its agents knew in advance about the
9/11 attack but withheld the information knowing it would serve
its interests to let it happen. There's also considerable
evidence high US officials either knew about it themselves or
were complicit in carrying it out because they also knew it
would allow them the kind of reckless free reign at home and
abroad they never could have gotten any other way. This is a
story that won't go away nor should it, and one day we may
finally learn all the parts of it we can only speculate about
now.
Because of Israel's unparalleled ties to the centers of power
and dominant media, Petras notes it's able get back $50 in
return for every dollar it spends. That's how it's able to
finance its military and colonial settlements in the Occupied
Palestinian Territories (OPT) on annexed land. The Jewish
networks here support these practices as justifiable
compensation allowed victims of the "Holocaust" (the ones noted
author John Pilger calls "worthy victims") and circulate that
ideology in the corporate media. They also reinforce anti-Muslim
hysteria labelling all Arabs untrustworthy, radical Islamic
fundamentalists or Islamo-fascists ("unworthy" victims for John
Pilger), claiming the right to arrest, torture and mete out
summary justice to them in military tribunals or just attack and
kill them in imperial wars of "liberation."
The result for Israel and its people has been disastrous because
the Palestinians have refused for almost six decades to accede
to this abuse and have waged two Intifadas to end it. With
little more than a fierce determination, their bodies and crude
weapons, they've fought back with suicide bombings and attacks
on public facilities in Israel knowing what harsh retaliation
they'll face afterward. People in the US have also paid a heavy
price in the erosion of democracy and freedom. It's evidenced by
the Bush administration's harsh legislation beginning with the
infamous USA Patriot Act passed in short order right after the
9/11 attack, followed by other repressive laws and practices
allowed like illegal surveillance and secret renditions of
anyone targeted to torture-prisons with court acquiescence or
silence about most of them.
Petras points out that none of this deters powerful supporters
of Israel who raise billions of dollars to support the country's
war machine and finance its colonization of annexed Palestinian
land plus the Golan Heights (with its invaluable water
resources) seized and never returned to Syria after the 1967
war. Israel's economy is not self-sufficient, and without this
aid, it would have to make unacceptable cuts in social services,
reduce its military budget and curtail its expansionary plans.
With it, plus the $3 billion a year direct US contribution and
lots more help, US taxpayers (like it or not) have the burden of
funding Israel's belligerence and colonization agenda.
Petras itemizes what it all costs:
-- $3 billion annually in direct aid.
-- Billions more in loans as needed.
-- Millions annually for resettlement help for Soviet
(now Russian) and Ethiopian immigrants.
-- a $10 billion loan guarantee in 1990 and a further $9 billion
one in 2004 plus billions more for the asking and to be
forthcoming to pay the costs of the
2006 Lebanon and Palestine wars.
-- Since 1981, economic aid made in cash transfers, and since
1985 military aid done the same way.
-- $45 billion in repayment waved loans since 1974 and billions
more for the asking - free money at US taxpayer expense.
-- Since 1982, ESF cash transfers in one early in the fiscal
year lump sum with no strings attached while other countries
receiving them are paid quarterly with their use monitored.
Israel invests the money in US treasuries costing US taxpayers
millions more annually and also gets special FMS funding
arrangements costing US taxpayers well over $1 billion since
1991.
-- Other privileged benefits include financial aid to develop
Israel's defense industry, transfer of state-of-the-art
technology and the latest US weapons, US guarantee for Israel's
access to oil, and the likely massive aid still to come to
defray the country's "special costs" for its Gaza "disengagement
plan" morphing into the colonization of whatever parts of the
OPT Israel wishes to annex for new settlements US taxpayers pay
for.
-- Add to this some $22 billion Israel got over the past 50
years through the sale of its below-market interest paying bonds
that have financed half of its development - meaning the
colonization of annexed Palestinian lands and military funding
for its predatory imperial wars.
Petras explains the Zionist power structure in the US makes it
all possible, but its reach extends well beyond the so-called
"Jewish Lobby." He identifies a "Zionist power configuration (ZPC)
that includes AIPAC as one part of a "complex network of
interrelated formal and informal groupings, operating at the
international, national, regional, and local levels"
unconditionally supporting the state of Israel and all its
policies including its wars, colonization and oppression. It's
power is like a cancer infecting the highest levels of
government and all the other centers of power and influence as
already explained. It controls the selection of political
candidates and can defeat incumbents or aspirants daring to
criticize Israel. It also shapes the reporting on Israel in the
mass media suppressing any of it that's unsupportive or
critical. And it's powerful enough to get "uncooperative"
journalists, and even some academics, fired and banished from
the mainstream for daring to step out of line.
Petras reports the power of the ZPC was evident in the run-up to
the Iraq war and the Gulf war before it in
1991. Going back to the GHW Bush administration, the US wanted
regime change in Iraq, but that decision was heavily influenced
by the ZPC that considered Saddam a mortal enemy of Israel who
had to be removed. He managed to survive through the 1990s
despite our efforts to destabilize the country and bring it to
its knees. But once the GW Bush administration neocons took over
in 2001, the ugly business of war planning and occupation took
hold to complete what the Gulf war left unfinished, and powerful
Zionists (like Paul Wolfowitz and Connecticut Senator Joe
Lieberman - the senator from AIPAC) in key policy-making
positions invented the threat to bring it about in March, 2003 -
all based on lies, deceit and subservience to Israel's imperial
agenda.
The US military finally removed Saddam and conducted a
scorched-earth campaign to destroy Iraqi society, its
infrastructure and historical treasures to "dismantle the
secular state (and) turn the country in a desert kingdom - a
loose collection of at least three 'tribal' client mini-states
based on ethnicities, religious-tribal loyalties (and no viable
threat against) Israeli expansionism, particularly in Northern
Iraq." The effort to do this is now underway after the Iraq
puppet parliament's passage of its federalism bill to take
effect in 18 months that will effectively divide the country
into the three US-ordered, designed and supposedly more easily
governed parts it wants.
It's unlikely this can work, but it's clearer than ever now what
the human cost of the war has been for Iraqis. It caused the
violent deaths of about 655,000 of them attributable to the war
according to a shocking new study published by the noted Lancet
British medical journal which updated their two earlier ones
done after March, 2003. The study used the statistically
reliable technique known as random households "cluster sampling"
with personal interviews conducted across the country that used
death certificate verification in the great majority of cases to
come up with the total. It's likely the true number of deaths is
even much higher than this appalling number as the interviewers
were unable to include in their count the most dangerous and
violent parts of the country like Fallujah, Ramadi and other
areas of al Anbar province where mass killing still goes on
daily as well as families (likely in the thousands) in which all
the members were killed.
This new information, just out and covering a period since
March, 2003, compares to Human Rights Watch's estimate of
250,000 - 290,000 people killed by Saddam Hussein's Baathist
regime over its 20 year existence. It amplifies the outrageous
crime of this barbarous adventure to achieve a "Greater Middle
East US-Israel Co-Prosperity Sphere" and to give Israel access
to the extra water, oil, capital and markets it lacks. It was
also part of Israel's greater agenda under the Sharon Likud, and
now Olmert Kadima, governments to have free reign to pursue
their stated policy of "annexation and separation" in the OPT.
The Zionist influence in the Bush administration is so
entrenched, it assured there'd be no opposition to it then or
now.
It's all gone on in spite of mass anti-imperial resistance to
what's seen as an arrogant disregard for the standards and norms
of international behavior and laws in the pursuit of an
expansionist agenda. Israel and the US today willfully violate
the UN Charter, the Hague Regulations and Geneva Conventions
relative to the conduct of war and when it may be legally waged,
the treatment of prisoners, the use of torture, destruction of
infrastructure and historical sites, and plunder of natural
resources to establish client puppet-run regimes exploiting
their people in service to the dominant capital and political
interests of their imperial conquerors.
Then to quell resistance and tighten security, the US and Israel
resort to the most extreme methods including mass arrests and
detentions and the free use of torture and targeted
assassinations as state policy. Amnesty International reports
since the passage of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, the
US and Israel are the only two countries in the world to have
legalized the use of torture. Petras and others report the top
leaders in the Pentagon up to Donald Rumsfeld specifically
ordered its use "while the Justice and Defense Departments
insisted that the President could override any laws -
international or national as well as the US Constitution - in
defending the empire." These top officials in key areas of
government have audaciously given the President "de facto and de
jure dictatorial powers" to do whatever he chooses to establish
"Imperial Security." It makes our citizens at home no safer than
the victims of US and Israeli imperial aggression in Iraq,
Lebanon, Palestine or anywhere else in the world.
But Petras reports it's even worse than that as the expose of
torture in Iraq revealed a highly organized network of US and
Israeli assassins worldwide. They operate as international death
squads engaged in "killing, kidnapping and torturing 'suspects'
and sympathizers of resistance movements." Petras calls this a
US-sponsored "Murder Incorporated" that's composed of Army
Special Forces, Navy Seals and a DELTA force operating in a
Special Agency Program
(SAP). It follows the same practices long engaged in by Israel's
Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations known as the
Mossad, and its aim is to remove all opposition by whatever
extralegal methods it chooses while ignoring international law.
It then justifies this activity at the highest levels of
government as a matter of policy.
Petras further points to the UN's International Leadership
report on the destruction of civilian and military
infrastructure in Iraq (much like what Israel did in the OPT
discussed below). It showed "84% of Iraq's higher learning
institutions have been burnt, looted or destroyed."
Archeological museums and historic sites, libraries and archives
have also been plundered, and targeted assassinations have been
carried out against academics, other teachers, senior military
personnel, journalists and other professionals including
doctors. In addition, there are random or targeted daily terror
killings by US-directed "Salvador option" death squads as well
as thousands of kidnappings and other systematic horrors making
life intolerable for most everyone in the country outside the
four square kilometer fortress-like Green Zone HQ in central
Baghdad for "coalition" officials and the puppet "Iraq interim
government."
It's all part of Washington's design to destroy the country's
cultural identity as an Arab state, separate its oil resources
from any large population base, and divide the nation into more
easily governed parts just the way it was done in the breakup of
Yugoslavia in the 1990s. It's now been reported that longtime
Bush family consigliere James Baker, co-chairing an Iraq Study
Group, will formerly propose the kind of plan the Iraq puppet
government just passed putting a quasi-official US imprimatur on
it as part of a US - Israeli divide and conquer strategy that
may not be as easy to pull off as as the one in the former
Yugoslavia or in the simple north - south divisions of Korea and
Vietnam after WW II.
What's happening today in Iraq and Palestine is so outrageous
and chaotic, Petras refers to a "House of Horrors" in both
countries with the Zionist militarists at the Pentagon and their
Israeli counterparts in charge of their respective "Horror
Shows....under the big tent of a 'Mid-East Democratic Reform
Initiative.' " This is the modus operandi of empire building and
colonization - blast and tear a nation to shreds so it can never
again exist as it once did. Then terrorize the people into
submission and kill off all the ones who resist. It's a barbaric
thumb in the eye to humanity, but this is the way rogue empires
do things, especially when they're too powerful to challenge.
The US-led killing machine is in full operation in Iraq, and so
is the Israeli one in the OPT. Petras calls the one there
"Israel's Final Solution" or the "Palestinian Holocaust," and
it's focal point is in Gaza which even unoccupied is the world's
largest open-air prison for its 1.45 million people in the most
densely populated space of its size in the world. Today the
Strip and the West Bank are Israeli-directed killing fields
targeting Palestinian civilians helpless to stop it beyond their
courageous acts of desperation with crude weapons and their
bodies against tanks, F-16s, helicopter gunships, and illegal
and immoral terror weapons like white phosphorus bombs and
shells, cluster bombs that never stop killing and maiming, and
experimental new weapons that don't have publicly-known names
yet.
Israel's war on Palestine has gone on for nearly six decades,
and September 28 marked the sixth anniversary of the al-Aqsa
Mosque Intifada resistance against it that began with Ariel
Sharon's provocative visit to the holy site in 2000. Israel
dramatically escalated the conflict after the minor June 25,
2006 incident at an Israeli military post near Kerem Shalom
crossing killing two IDF soldiers, injuring several others and
capturing a third still held whose name the corporate media made
sure everyone knows but won't ever reveal any of over-10,000
names of Palestinian prisoners held
(the fate of "unworthy victims"). The June clash followed a
series of bloody earlier in the month Israeli attacks on Gaza
including the widely reported beach shelling that killed eight
Palestinians and injured 32 others including 13 children. Much
as it did in Lebanon (discussed below), Israel's response was
swift, deadly, disproportionate to what happened and planned
months in advance as revealed by General Yoav Galant, in charge
of Gaza, in a candid interview he gave in Israel's Maariv daily.
The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) documented it all
including the devastation of the past six years. Overall it
created a state of mass-immiseration for the Palestinian people
in Gaza and the West Bank:
-- essential infrastructure affecting power, clean water and
sanitation destroyed
-- mobility restricted or denied
-- imposition of an embargo threatening the collapse of an
already weak economy creating unemployment up to
80% of the population
-- hostile incursions into the OPT, daily killings, and frequent
extra-judicial assassinations
-- home and property demolitions
-- mass arbitrary arrests, administrative detentions of
thousands of Palestinians without charge, and the systematic use
of torture on those held including against women and children
-- the destruction of a viable Hamas-led Palestinian Authority
(PA) through imprisonments of its democratically elected members
held without charge or on contrived ones against them as well as
the destruction of its civil and security facilities
All this and much more has been done (as in Iraq) to destroy the
cultural identity and very existence of the Palestinian people
to prevent them from ever having a viable independent state of
their own as well as force a mass-Palestinian exodus to other
Arab states willing to help them escape their intolerable
situation in the OPT.
The plan to crush these defenseless people now includes credible
evidence that the Bush and Olmert administrations have been
arming, training and plotting with Palestinian President Mahmoud
Abbas and his Fatah followers to lead a civil uprising against
the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority (PA) and destroy it by
force. It follows the Palestinians failed efforts to form a
national unity government because Hamas refused Fatah's demand
to govern as Israel's enforcer and abandon its own pledge to
serve the welfare of its people. Now in an interview on October
8 in the London Sunday Times, Fatah militia leader Tawfig Tirawi,
inflamed matters by accusing Hamas of "accumulating weapons" and
that "a full-scale civil war can break out at any moment." He
earlier said "civil war is inevitable." The paper also reported
President Abbas "notified the US, Jordan and Egypt that he is
preparing to take action against Hamas." These statements defy
Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh who firmly said he'll never
allow a civil war to happen, and it's unimaginable the
Palestinian people want one. But Haniyeh and his people may have
no choice as this seems to be the current joint US-Israeli
strategy to destroy Palestinian resistance and do it with help
from Fatah President Abbas. This is the same man who pledged his
fealty to Israel as a participant in crafting the Oslo Accords
sellout of his people and being a principle in the Arafat-led
corrupted and mismanaged Palestinian Authority until Hamas won a
majority of the seats in the January, 2006 Palestinian
Legislative Council (PLC) elections. The Bush and Olmert
governments wouldn't tolerate that outcome, and the New York
Times reported right after the election US and Israeli officials
met at the "highest level" to plan the destruction of Hamas by
"starving" the PA and making the people in the OPT pay the
greatest price.
For Israel, this is part of its state policy of ethnic cleansing
by slow-motion genocide and out-migration all leading to the
destruction of the Palestinian identity. It wants to co-opt a
corrupted PA leadership of its choice to act as Israel's
enforcer and partner in the destruction of its own people. It's
to fulfill the intent of what former Israeli Prime Minister
Golda Meier meant by her racist comment that "There are no
Palestinians" and what Prime Minister David Ben Gurion earlier
said after Israel brutally expelled the Palestinians from their
homes and land in the 1948 war establishing the state of Israel:
"We have come and we have stolen their country....We must do
everything to insure they (the Palestinians) never do
return....(and 10 years earlier had written his son) We will
expel the Arabs and take their places....with the force at our
disposal." He and his successors planned to include all the land
of biblical Eretz Israel (the land of Israel) within the final
fixed borders of a greater Israeli state whenever they're
finally declared. The US unconditionally supports Israel's plan
to do this as well as its policies of plunder and exploitation,
but as Petras explains: "No one in their right mind can claim
that the Israeli assault on Gaza advances US policies, interests
or US imperial power." It doesn't matter because the power of
the Jewish Lobby got the full support of the Bush administration
for it anyway as well as the near unanimity for it in the
Congress.
The Rape of Lebanon
What Israel did to the Palestinians in the OPT over decades, it
did to Lebanon in 1978, 1982 and in about a five week blitzkrieg
beginning July 12, ending formally but fragilely with a
UN-brokered ceasefire on August 14. Petras compares the assault
to the Nazi's November 9 and 10, 1938 infamous Kristallnacht
pogrom in the German Reich against the Jews calling that event a
"garden party" compared to the rape of Lebanon and vast
devastation from it. It began with Hezbollah's cross-border
incursion on July 12, killing eight IDF soldiers in the exchange
that followed and capturing two others. There's still a dispute
over which side of the Lebanese border the incident took place
as for years Israel routinely makes hostile incursions into
Lebanon by land and air, and still illegally occupies the 25
square kilometer Shebaa Farms area of South Lebanon it never
relinquished after seizing it in the 1967 war.
As against Gaza, Israel again responded swiftly and
disproportionately in a reign of terror against the Lebanese
people by land, air and sea. It killed and wounded thousands and
displaced a million or more Lebanese civilians. It also
systematically destroyed the country's essential to life and
other vital infrastructure and created an amount of physical
devastation that could take a generation to recover from if
Israel even allows it to happen. It was done in part to destroy
Hezbollah as a political entity and as an effective resistance
force against Israel's imperial designs on the country. But
Israel's plans are much more far-reaching than that as explained
below.
Petras reported Middle East expert Juan Cole claims Israel
wanted the war and planned it at least a year in advance.
Matthew Kallman of the San Francisco Chronicle Foreign Service
also found and reported evidence that preparations for it began
in May, 2000, immediately after Israel ended its occupation of
the country that began with its invasion and brutal assault in
1982 that killed about 18,000 Lebanese. Kallman also reported
that over a year before the conflict began a senior IDF official
gave "PowerPoint presentations" off the record to US and other
officials and unnamed journalists and think tanks explaining how
the attack would unfold "in revealing detail."
Again, Israel got the full backing, funding and arming as needed
from the Bush administration to carry it out, effectively making
this gruesome adventure a joint US-Israeli operation. Besides
wanting to neutralize Hezbollah's resistance, the goal was to
destroy Lebanon as a functioning country and ethnically cleanse
the southern part of it up to the Litani River Israel wants to
control and eventually annex and keep as it did the Golan after
the 1967 war. Israel claims this area (like the Golan) is
important for security reasons, but its greatest value (again
like the Golan) is as a source of fresh water from the Litani
and from the Wazzani springs that feed into the Hasbani River
that's a tributary of the Jordan River. The Hisbani flows into
Israel two miles downstream from the Wazzani and runs into the
Sea of Galilee that's Israel's largest source of fresh water.
Israel has had designs on Lebanon for 40 years or more and has
kept the country in a state of instability, partial occupation
and conflict over most of that time. Now the state of the
country is a devastated near-wasteland monitored by so-called
(Israel-approved and friendly) UN Blue Helmets and Lebanese
Armed Forces replacing the IDF on the ground under a fragile UN
brokered ceasefire arrangement that could end any time Israel
wishes again to unleash its war machine and on any pretext.
There's nothing to deter Israel from doing it as it has the
unconditional support of the Jewish Lobby and whatever US
administration is in power. Unless this changes, the people of
Lebanon, like those in Iraq and Palestine, can only look ahead
to more conflict and the pain and suffering from it.
That's because there's still unfinished business for both
empires, and it's not likely either one will soon give up on
what they're determined to achieve. So even though Iraq is a
hopeless quagmire, the Bush administration says it will "stay
the course." And as long as Israel has full US backing, it will
continue pursuing its imperial agenda even though Hezbollah
humiliated the IDF in Lebanon and the Palestinians show no signs
of ending their determined resistance short of mass-annihilation
or forced expulsion. But it's not all smooth sailing as the
unholy US-Israeli alliance faces a threat it can't ignore that
could derail it. It's a growing broad-based worldwide
anti-imperialist movement against these two partnered pariah
states. It remains to be seen how far it will go, whether it can
achieve critical mass in the US and in Israel, and if it can
succeed in changing the direction of these two belligerents so
far unstoppable and determined to go on unchecked by what passes
for the civilized western world.
Part II - Israel and Middle East Warfare
It now looks like the only lesson the US and Israel learned from
past failure is to press on with a new adventure. It appears the
likely prime target is the Islamic Republic of Iran, as
ill-advised as it will be to attack it. Petras explains that
"Israel's political and military leadership have repeatedly and
openly declared (their intention) to attack Iran in the
immediate future." And once again it looks like the power of the
Jewish Lobby in the US has the Bush administration thinking the
same way to help its Israeli partner free itself from another
"irritant" in the region that stands in the way of both
countries' imperial aims. Petras calls Israel's Iran-directed
war preparations "the greatest immediate threat to world peace
and political stability (today)." It's hard to disagree.
That threat was heightened following North Korea's nuclear test
which Israeli officials were quick to jump on suggesting it will
benefit Iran. It came from an inflammatory statement by Miri
Eisin, Prime Minister Olmert's spokeswoman, who told the AP: "We
should remind ourselves that the North Koreans have already been
suppliers of launching platforms which could reach Europe and
certainly Israel. As such, they have already shown their
willingness to be suppliers to Iran." Then Israel's UN
Ambassador Dan Gillerman went further on Israel's Channel 2 TV
referencing North Korea's nuclear activity and adding: "what
Iran is about to do could be much worse, much more frightening
and much more dangerous." This language practically demands an
attack on Iran to destroy its presumed "nuclear threat" even
though Iran is no threat to any country and the real threat is a
growing likelihood of an Israeli and/or US attack on Iran or any
other country in the region targeted as an enemy.
The US and Israel are allowed to get away with these kinds of
outrageously stark and provocative statements even though the
only pretext either country can fabricate is the baseless claim
that Iran's legitimate right to enrich uranium for commercial
use means the country has embarked on a nuclear weapons program
that will threaten Israel. In fact, Iran is a signatory to the
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and, from all the
evidence uncovered from years of monitoring by the UN
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), is in full compliance
with it. It has every legal right to pursue its commercial
nuclear program and nuclear enrichment for it. Israel, on the
other hand, never signed the treaty, is known to have two to
three hundred or more sophisticated nuclear weapons and
launching systems for them, has stated its intention to use them
if it chooses to, and is a nuclear outlaw - but one with an
important ally the Iranians lack.
Today the debate in Israel is only over the method and timing of
attacking Iran. Petras explains the Israelis have been pushing
the US to do it for over a decade with the power of the Jewish
Lobby in full support claiming the Islamic Republic threatens
Israel's security and its dominance in the region. It doesn't
matter that Iran never attacked its neighbors and isn't likely
to undertake a military action except in self-defense as it did
against Iraq in the 1980s. Further, it's an Israeli and
made-in-America agitprop fabrication that Iranian President
Ahmadinejad threatened "to wipe Israel off the map." The
president said a number of things including...."this regime that
is occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time"
meaning an illegal racist colonial one, but he didn't say or
mean it should be removed by force or that Jews should be
expelled from Israel.
Further proof of Iran's intentions came from Grand Ayatollah
Khamenei's public pledge never to attack another country. He
also condemned the development and use of nuclear weapons as
being against Islam. The Western media was careful to suppress
Khamenei's pledge and instead published false reports that he
threatened the US to heighten the tension between the two
countries. It's all part of the scheme to get full US support
for Israel's intended war plans and the long held desire of both
countries for regime change in Iran.
Petras lays out a dire scenario if a US, Israeli or joint attack
is launched. It will be especially bad if the US does it using
so-called "mini-nuke robust earth penetrator bunker-buster"
munitions which are weapons that can be made to any desired
potency and are likely to be from one-third to two-thirds as
powerful as the Hiroshima bomb. In other words, there's nothing
"mini" about them. Aside from the catastrophic level of
immediate and long-term casualties from nuclear annihilation and
radiation in Iran and beyond, Petras explains such an attack
will only be a "pyrrhic victory." If Israel does it alone, it
may set off a chain "political conflagration (to) unseat the
rulers of Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia." If the US
attacks, it "would be even worse: major oil wells burning, US
troops in Iraq surrounded
(with the catastrophic consequences of far greater loss of life
on both sides), long-term relations with Arab regimes undermined
and increased oil prices
(possibly high enough to cause a worldwide economic calamity)
and supplies disrupted." It's almost certain this would inflame
or enrage public opinion in the US and Israel that could lead to
the ouster of the ruling parties in both countries.
It would also likely undermine Big Oil's existing and desired
major oil exploration projects and cause the Israelis to crack
down harder on the Palestinians and make them face forced
massive ethnic cleansing expulsion from their homeland. Further,
it would almost certainly get a response from Hezbollah or other
resistance in South Lebanon, reignite the conflict there,
unleash the Israeli killing machine all over again and cause
more mass displacement and reoccupation by the IDF as the UN
Blue Helmets and Lebanese forces evacuate the conflict zone. And
it would lead to a growing threat of retaliatory terror attacks
in the US, other Western countries and in Israel and would
likely strengthen the resolve of other nations feeling
potentially threatened by a hostile US, Israel and the West to
seek defensive economic and military alliances in a structure
like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) that was formed
in 2001 for political, diplomatic, economic and security reasons
to act as a counterweight to NATO which the US dominates.
Still, with all the hazards of attacking Iran clearly in the
minds of US policy makers, the momentum for it is moving ahead.
It's happening in spite of serious high-level dispute in
Washington about undertaking it. The Pentagon has war plans for
it to include NATO, Israel and Canada, and it currently has a
major US naval strike group deployment in the Persian Gulf and
Eastern Mediterranean. Part of it is permanently stationed in
the region, and in early October, The powerful Eisenhower
Carrier Strike Group got "prepare to deploy" orders, headed
there on October 3 and is now in place for whatever action may
be intended. It joins the Enterprise and Iwo Jima Expeditionary
Strike Groups making a total of three US naval task forces in
position opposite Iran for whatever purpose may be planned and
will shortly be joined by a fourth Boxer Expeditionary Strike
Group that left Singapore on October 16 for the region. Naval
forces already there have been engaged in what the Iranian
foreign ministry calls "dangerous and suspicious" exercises in
the Gulf practicing intercepting and searching ships for
potential WMDs and missiles.
This all may be just a saber-ratling bluff, but if it's more
than that it could unfold as a late October or early November
"surprise" ahead of the November 7 congressional elections now
only days away and be initiated in response to a manufactured
incident on the order of the August, 1964 Gulf of Tonkin one or
the blowing up of the USS Maine in February, 1898 in Havana
Harbor. It's never hard for an aggressor to find reasons for war
if it wants one and just needs a convenient excuse to start it.
The Bush administration and Israelis may get their wish if the
Navy goes ahead with its reported plans to blockade Iranian oil
ports. This action will be an act of war if it's done that Iran
will have a legal right to respond to in self-defense under
Article 51 of the UN Charter but will surely be met with a
"shock and awe" counterattack against about 400 Iranian target
sites already designated as ones to destroy in the event of
hostilities. None of this guarantees an attack is imminent, but
it shows a real possibility one may be coming. It also shows the
power of the Jewish Lobby in the US that supports Israel's
long-term aim to attack Iran no matter how grim the fallout from
it may be. There's so much open speculation about this, it's
gotten saner military, political and economic analysts here to
believe this would be an act of insanity with the kind of
potentially catastrophic consequences Petras outlined above.
Will it happen? We can only hold our breathe waiting to find
out, but it may not be long before we do.
Part III - Experts on Terror or Terrorist Experts
In this part of his book, Petras goes head-to-head with the
so-called self-styled "terrorist experts"
(TE) and clearly comes out ahead with his incisive dissection of
them explaining why they're prominently featured in the major
media. He calls them the "set-up" people - there to play a role
to "motivate the colonial and imperial conquerors and reinforce
their idea that the terrorists are not worthy of ruling or being
ruled," so we have to get rid of them. It doesn't matter that
the so-called "war on terrorism" is a shameless overused but
very effective ruse scare tactic. It's always used because the
public never catches on no matter how many times before supposed
threats turned out to be another scam to get them to go along
with whatever schemes our government had in mind to undertake.
It never ceases to amaze how short an attention span the public
has, but it's clear the power of the corporate-run media has a
lot to do with it. It led author Studs Terkel to refer to a
national Altzeimer's disease and author and political critic
Gore Vidal to subtitle his 2004 book Imperial America -
Reflections on the United States of Amnesia.
It gives the whole propaganda apparatus and the TE an open field
to manipulate the public mind and get it to believe most
anything. Petras calls these people "verbal assassins" who can't
or won't understand that people pummelled by "shock and awe"
attacks, their countries plundered in the name of "liberation,"
their people mass-murdered, raped, arrested and tortured might
be desperate and motivated enough to strike back in retaliatory
self-defense. It follows logically from Newton's law that for
every action there's a corresponding reaction. In 1954, the CIA
understood this and invented a term for it (no self-respecting
TE will touch). The agency called it "blowback" referring to the
unintended consequences from US hostile acts abroad like
overthrowing legitimate or otherwise constituted governments as
it did against Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran in 1953 ushering in
the 25 year terror reign of the Shah. It finally led to the
"blowback" 1979 revolution, and it causes other instances of
retaliation now ongoing in Iraq and Afghanistan and for nearly
six decades in Palestine.
But prominent TE featured in the major media have a different
diagnosis of resistance fighters. They call them "incurable
psychopaths (who are) extremely dangerous when at large (so we
must flush them out to) capture, confine, torture or kill
(them)." A convenient division of labor is then arranged to do
it and the TE play their assigned role along with the military,
recruited satraps, prison commandants, interrogators, guards and
assorted other functionaries. They're team member hegemon-devil's
disciples turning "victims into executioners and the
executioners into victims." They do it by dehumanizing the
legitimate resistance they label Islamo-fascists, Islamic
fundamentalists, terrorists or other invented designations of
inferiority or implied threat that must be destroyed.
It's incomprehensible to the TE that almost any act of
retaliatory self-defense might be justifiable resistance given
the level of state-directed violence used against them
mercilessly. In Israel, and now in Iraq and Afghanistan it led
to the phenomenon of suicide bombings which Petras calls "a form
of individual sacrifice, of individual resistance taken in the
name of the collective." He explains further that in the West
individual sacrifice is rewarded with medals, but in the Middle
East and specifically in the case of suicide bombers the reward
is martyrdom for giving their lives in the cause of national
liberation against a superior hostile force. This is a
phenomenon common throughout history when a people face an
overpowering conquerer and occupier. Petras explains "there have
always been and always will be self-sacrificing individuals or
(whole populations)....prepared to defend nation and home....and
to use (their) body as a missile or weapon
(to do it)."
Petras also explains there are different forms of imperial
conquest and subjugation, and the one the US uses in Iraq and
Afghanistan and that Israel uses against the Palestinians is a
cruel and dehumanizing "process of destruction, degradation, and
exploitation followed by efforts to 'reconstruct' a colonized
military, police, and political structure willing and able to
repress and contain anti-colonial resistance." It's a doctrine
of "total war" against target nations too weak to fight back
except by asymmetrical guerilla warfare means that include
tactics like car and suicide bombings. Petras calls this
practice "one of the ultimate forms of rejection of tryanny"
that will only end when "total war" does. And that will only
happen when the "colonial revivalist strand of imperialism
in....its US, European and Israel variants" are
defeated....Peace and reconciliation is only possible if justice
is meted to the architects and practitioners of total war and
human degradation." A long and painful struggle for liberation
may be ahead before that goal is ever achieved.
Part IV - Noam Chomsky and the Pro-Israel Lobby
In the book's final part, Petras challenges a man who may best
be described as an iconic figure on the Left, an anti-war
activist, and much more but not one unused to being challenged
and sometimes harshly. Petras points out that Chomsky has been a
sharp critic of Israeli policies through the years and has been
strongly attacked for his views by pro-Israeli organizations and
the major media on the rare times his name is even allowed in
it. Still he defends the existence of the Zionist state and has
a different view than Petras on the power and influence of the
Jewish Lobby in shaping US policy toward Israel. Petras lists
what he calls Chomsky's fifteen erroneous theses reflecting his
long-held belief that the Lobby isn't as potent as the strong
case Petras makes in this book that it is. Not wishing to take
sides with two distinguished men this writer holds in high
esteem, the points of disagreement will only be listed so the
reader can decide who makes the better case.
Petras begins by listing what he calls Chomsky's eight "dubious
propositions:"
1. The pro-Israel Lobby is like any other one.
2. The Lobby's backers have no more power than other pressure
groups.
3. The Lobby succeeds because its interests coincide with those
of the US.
4. Israel is a tool of the US empire and used as needed.
5. "Big Oil" and the "military-industrial complex" are the major
forces shaping Middle East policy.
6. US and Israeli interests usually coincide.
7. The Iraq war and threats to Iran and Syria stem from the "oil
interests" and "military-industrial complex."
8. US behavior in the Middle East is the same as what it
practices worldwide.
Petras then uses the above list to discuss what he calls
Chomsky's 15 theses and uses the persuasive evidence presented
in his book to take issue with them, one by one. He sums up his
case stating he's done this because of Chomsky's enormous
stature making whatever his views are stand out prominently.
It's a matter of consequence when a man like Noam Chomsky
believes the Jewish Lobby is like all others which in Petras'
view gives a "free ride to the principal authors, architects and
lobbyists in favor of the
(Iraq) war (and is an) obstacle to achieving clarity about whom
we are fighting and why. To ignore the pro-Israel Lobby is
(also) to allow it a free hand in pushing for the invasion of
Iran and Syria (and any other regime in the region Israel may
wish to remove)." Petras sums up saying that "the peace and
justice movements, at home and abroad, are bigger than any
individual or intellectual - no matter what their past
credentials." In this battle of noted titans on the Left, it's
for the reader to decide who's right.
Summation - Confronting Zionism and Reclaiming American Middle
East Policy
Petras has written a powerful and important new book that needs
broad exposure and resonance. But he'll never get its content
past the corporate gatekeepers controlling the major media
because of his courage to reveal what others fear to do -
confront Zionism, its agenda of aggressive wars and
colonization, and the power of the Jewish Lobby to assure Israel
gets the full and unconditional support of every US
administration regardless of whether what it does serves the
interests of this country. That Lobby power reached its apogee
and full fruition with the ascent of the Bush administration
neocons that effectively pledge their fealty to the rulers of
the Israeli state and prove Ariel Sharon may have been right
when he once arrogantly boasted about his relationship with
George Bush saying: "We have the US under our control."
The result has been disastrous for this country and the sacred
principles on which it was founded. In partnership with Israel,
the US began tearing apart the Middle East and Central Asia by
attacking and occupying Iraq and Afghanistan. It now threatens
to inflame the whole region enough to make it explode if we go
ahead with plans to attack Iran, do it with nuclear weapons, and
then move on to Syria and even Saudi Arabia while continuing to
hold Lebanon hostage and under siege in a state of interregnum
awaiting the next inevitable trigger igniting the whole ugly
business there all over again. The Bush administration "long
war" against Islam enraged 1.8 billion Muslims worldwide growing
in unity against us. It's also destroying our freedom and
democracy at home in the process threatening everyone with the
emerging power of a national security police state that spells
tyranny with an out-of-control president usurping the
dictatorial power of a "unitary executive" claiming the right to
go around the law of the land and its international obligations
to govern as he pleases.
Petras sounds the alarm and asks how did we get into this
debacle, and who's responsible for it. He stresses the need for
a full-scale Congressional investigation to find out, but
laments it's not likely to happen as long as the Bush neocons
have their way. The central thesis of his book is that the
Jewish Lobby serves the interests of Zionism and acts as agents
for the state of Israel. It co-opted the Bush administration,
all others preceding it, and the key centers of power and
influence in the country leading us to the disaster we now face
because of our misguided Middle East adventurism. He equates our
actions in league with Israel to the Nazi war crimes committed
in WW II, saying "These are the highest crimes against
humanity." Referring to the crime of aggression, the Nuremberg
Tribunal called it the "supreme international crime," and those
Nazis found guilty of it were hanged. Petras explains that the
"worst crimes are committed by those who claim to be a divinely
chosen people, a people with 'righteous' claims of supreme
victimhood." He goes on to say: "Righteous victimology, linked
to ethno-religious loyalties and directed by fanatical civilian
militarists with advanced weaponry, is the greatest threat to
world peace and humanity."
Petras makes an impassioned plea for progressives
(really all people of conscience) to reject the imperial agenda
of all nations, and in the case of Israel, to stand firm against
inevitably being labelled anti-semitic. Scurrilous name-calling
is another refuge of scoundrels that shouldn't be tolerated or
allowed to deter our committed assault against the forces of
darkness that will destroy us unless we stand firmly against
them. Petras tells us it won't be easy, and we can expect
forceful ideological attacks against us premised on the notion
that Israel is the embodiment of "democracy, liberty and
justice" and those daring to criticize the Jewish state will be
called supporters of "Arab dictatorships, repression, injustice
and terrorism."
The stakes are much too high to let them get away with it using
scurrilous name-calling in defense of it. In Petras' words:
"Israel and its overseas network in the US....(threatens) not
only the oppressed people of Palestine (and Iraq, Iran, Lebanon,
Syria and any other state Israel takes aim at) but the rights of
people throughout the world." He stresses we have mass public
opinion on our side nearly everywhere outside the US, and it's
gaining resonance here as well. It sees Israel and our actions
in support of the Jewish state as the greatest of all threats to
world peace and stability. Petras ends his book with one final
impassioned call to arms: "Let's move ahead and de-colonize our
country, our minds and politics as a first step in
reconstituting a democratic republic, free of entangling
colonial and neo-imperial alliances." Wise thoughts from a wise
and courageous man. We can't ignore them lest we pay the supreme
price of the loss of our freedom (and maybe our lives) because
we didn't know it was being taken from us until it was too late
to act to save it.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at
lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at
sjlendman.blogspot.com.
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