The Israel Lobby In The United Kingdom

Dispatchees with Peter Oborne

The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy

With: John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt 

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt discuss their book "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," at Cambridge Forum. They argue that a group of pro-Israel activists are manipulating U.S. foreign policy.

AIPAC: Inside America's Israel lobby

The Death Of American Democracy

By Anthony Lawson

The collapses of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre, on September 11, 2001, were the most frightening images that I have ever seen, up until May 24th, 2011, when Binyamin Netanyahu addressed a joint session of the United States Congress and received 29 standing ovations, along with many other outbursts of sycophantic applause. 

It was the final nail in a coffin, the construction of which began long ago, and in it all remaining vestiges of democracy were joyfully laid to rest—by those sworn to protect it—as it became clear that the United States was now controlled by Enemies Inside its Gates.

The New Thought Police

The Israel Lobby and Traumatic Memory

By LAWRENCE SWAIM

Edward Snowden speaks of an electronic “architecture of oppression,” based on the mania of our national security state to control the communications of humankind at large. But there are other systems of control—emotional and cultural rather than digital—whose mechanisms of control are no less capable of being abused. The most effective of these are the overlapping systems of influence and control set up by the Israel Lobby. This is a generic term referring to disparate people and institutions that believe that Americans should not be allowed to publicly criticize the government of Israel, even when it does bad things; and it is with that intent in mind that they conduct extensive policing of public discussion of anything having to do with Israel.

The Lobby consists mainly of the leadership of three important organizations—the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee and the Simon Wiesenthal Center; the Lobby’s most well-known public figures are Abraham Foxman, Director of the ADL, and Alan Dershowitz, an American attorney, professor lawyer and political commentator. They are backed up by an even larger contingent of rightwing Christian evangelicals, the largest and most active constituency in the Republican Party, many of whom believe that a religious war would bring about the Second Coming of Christ. All of the above-mentioned people have one thing in common: they attack American critics of the Israeli state, usually by calling them anti-Semites or self-hating Jews, often trying to ruin their reputations or drive them from their jobs.

In Congress the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) does pretty much the same thing, with one major difference: they have at their disposal immense amounts of money. Currently an actual majority of elected officials receive money from AIPAC to vote as the current government of Israel wants them to, at least on issues having to do with the Middle East. There’s nothing illegal about it—it’s called ‘bundling,’ and is basically a form of legal bribery. But one must say that it’s rather odd, not to mention unprecedented, that the Prime Minister of a foreign country would participate in the distribution of money through his proxies to the US Congress, so that its members vote as he wants them to. From the point of view of American sovereignty, not to mention political morality, it’s an astonishing situation.

But why do people and organizations in the Israel Lobby behave in this manner, and why do so many supposedly free Americans follow their dictates? Why do they cooperate in suppressing criticism of the Israeli state, when everybody knows that self-criticism and robust debate are necessary to the health of the state, any state? Why do so many people who say they love Israel embrace doctrines that ensure Israel’s eventual destruction?  And why do so many people feel constrained to think, speak and act according to the dictates of a Lobby that is often irrational? They do so because attitudes toward Israel are deeply intertwined with ongoing efforts to suppress traumatic memory of the Nazi Holocaust, and likewise to suppress the gnawing awareness of the systemic evil that drove it.  That is both troubling and dangerous, because you cannot suppress that kind of trauma (by which I mean the traumatic memory associated with the Holocaust), you can only manage it. And you can only manage it by deconstructing the aggression internalized along with the trauma. And that means accepting the ghastly but universal capacity of all human beings for evil.

Some institutions, especially the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, actually encourage and seek to enhance traumatic memory associated with the Holocaust, insisting that identification with Holocaust victims should be the basis of Jewish identity, rather than identifying with those who tried to stop the Holocaust. In my book The Death of Judeo-Christianity: Religious Aggression and Systemic Evil in the Modern World, I call attention to the extreme danger of this approach: “To live in the same world in which the Holocaust occurred, the Wiesenthal Center is saying, you must accept it both as history’s biggest crime and the most important determinant of Jewish identity. But that is a mistaken strategy, because it gives too much power to the Holocaust. You cannot base identity on the Holocaust without internalizing itsaggression, because you cannot take in one without the other.”[i] This creates a trauma bond, which bonds the victim not to the aggressor, but to his aggression. This is why so many victims appear to imitate and act out the kind of aggression with which they were once victimized; the abused child grows up to be an abuser.

It is this internalization of Holocaust aggression that one meets at every point in the Israel Lobby, and in the people who follow its cultural and political dictates, even when those dictates are disastrous for Israel. Managing traumatic memory of the Holocaust also means managing the internalized aggression that inevitably accompanies it. That is not to say that all people who uncritically support the Israeli state are affected by multigenerational trauma, nor are all the Christians and Jews who obediently do its bidding. The trauma associated with the Nazi Holocaust often affects people who have no connection whatsoever to Europe, or the historical period when the Holocaust occurred; and that is, for the most part, because the Holocaust confronts people with the problem of systemic evil in a way they cannot ignore or avoid. Modern people are so unused to confronting the omnipresence of evil that even trying to do so can be traumatizing, because modernity has no philosophy, no theology, and no detailed explanation whatsoever, that can explain why aggression and evil are so powerful in human affairs. And while institutional religion tries to identify evil, it can’t stop it, and often makes it worse.

Acknowledging the existence of evil often leads people to realize—including a great many that are horrified by it—that evil can be more powerful than good, and usually is. This realization is by itself quite disorienting, because it goes against what enlightened people have believed for the last three centuries. It is not based on mere philosophical speculations, but arises as the result of excruciating psychological upheavals in which people discover that the world they knew before, no longer exists. This process creates an anxiety so profound that the only way some people can suppress it is to create an imaginary system in which delusions replace unpredictable realities, and the reactions of other people must be endlessly manipulated through a kind of emotional totalitarianism. (That is, the manipulation of negative emotions—especially fear, guilt, aggression and shame—can be used to make people avoid taboo subjects, and in so doing encourage them to suppress thoughts about them.)

This is a big part of the cultural system that the Israel Lobby has set up, but there is another component to it, one that is hidden. At a very deep level uncritical supporters of the Israeli state suffer from a gnawing fear that Israel is not the perfect place that the Lobby says it is; and to control their suppressed fears, they must strive to control what everybody else thinks and feels about it, often by ritually punishing unrepentant American critics of Israel in conspicuous, public and sometimes surreal ways.

That brings up the phenomenon of ex post facto scapegoating, an expedient widely practiced by visionaries when their shimmering dreams turn into nightmares; consider, for example, the pathologies associated with Stalinism. Why were there show trials, assassinations, people sent by the thousands to the gulag? Because Communism could not deliver on its promises: therefore scapegoats had to be blamed and punished. In the case of Israel, the ideals of generations of liberals, social democrats and socialists toward a Jewish state have been mainly abandoned; so someone, or some group of people, must be blamed and punished for this failure. Thus the suppressed fury at Israel’s moral collapse is seamlessly displaced onto the critics who document that same collapse. This may partially explain the over-the-top, buffoonish nature of the accusations hurled by the Israel Lobby at those who criticize the current government of Israel: that such critics are secret crypto-fascists; that they long for the destruction of Israel; that they are planning another Holocaust; and so forth.

If you’re still wondering why people in the Israel Lobby behave as they do, consider also the following dynamics from the point of view of a Holocaust survivor, or someone who lost family members in the Holocaust. Where was God at the moment of greatest peril to his people, when 10,000 Jews were being murdered every day in the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau? God was not there for his people when they needed him—no, God was nowhere to be found. Likewise the secular faith in liberal, social democratic and progressive ideas embraced by secular Jews since the Enlightenment: all of them made not the slightest difference once the Endloesung, the Final Solution, was in place. The result was a largely unconscious loss of faith in God, in liberal democracy, and in any solution to political problems except military force. Many survivors ended up believing—unconsciously more than consciously—that those who survive in this world do so only by hurting others.

This led to a process in which worship of the Israeli state slowly replaced a Torah-based God, not to mention a secular belief in progressive political solutions. People who increasingly saw God as little more than a ancient metaphor could now worship something far more concrete: the Israeli state’s victorious army, its active diplomatic corps, its vast propaganda initiatives, not to mention its Shin Bet interrogation centers and 200-400 nuclear weapons—all the furnishings of a successful theocratic state! And instead of feeling close to a mainly absent and intangible God, they could now experience tumultuous feelings of religious nationalism, the strongest and most dangerous force on the planet. Indeed, this constitutes the real secular religion of Israel, and many of its uncritical supporters in the US: the worship of religious nationalism in the service of state power, in the form of the Israeli state.

Yet religious nationalism feels like God, because it is so powerful—and considering what Jews have gone through in the past, certainly Jews need power to protect themselves. But what the Israeli Jews have done to the Palestinians, and what they continue to do to them, is the wrongkind of power. They have embraced a form of systemic evil, the addictive nature of which they are only now beginning to comprehend. The Israeli political class has internalized the aggression of the European anti-Semites, aided by the almost daily references to the Holocaust by Israeli media and rightwing politicians, the social outcome being that they now hate the Palestinians in much the same way as the Christians in Europe once hated them.

But if Jews struggle with aggression that they cannot acknowledge, so do Christians wrestle with a shame that dare not speak its name. After all, it was Christians who carried out the Holocaust, which was but the final act in a thousand years of Christian anti-Semitism. If Christians thought too much about this last fact, it might occur to some of them that Christianity has been, and is, by its own standards, a failed religion. Thus the built-in incentive to declare the Israeli project a smashing success: along with enough unacknowledged guilt to cause the Christians to give the Israelis whatever they want—for along with the guilt is a generalized fear of being publicly vilified as anti-Semites, which Zionists quickly learned to do to get what they wanted. Thus anything having to do with Israel/Palestine is hedged about with elaborate taboos, for Christians as well as Jews, to the extent that people dare not talk publicly, or even think privately, about the moral and political implications of impunity for Israel’s crimes and misdemeanors.

All of which should help us understand why Israel must be represented as perfect by the Israel Lobby, and why, according to the Lobby, it must never be criticized. The Nazi Holocaust must be morally repudiated, and its traumatic memory suppressed—but not in a way that would require anybody to make any changes or do anything; so only a Holy State, a perfect state, an exalted and utopian state thousands of miles away (that is to say, an imaginary state) can in that quick and efficient manner redeem the shame of Christians, and help to suppress the anger and internalized aggression of Jews. If the Nazi madness was pure evil, the Israeli state must now be perceived as wholly and perfectly good; only the most transcendent and eternally perfect State could help people repress the traumatic memory of the six million dead in Europe, and in so doing suppress all thought of the human evil in the present moment. (Because if the Holy State is perfect, Christians and Jews that support it are likewise perfect, and need not make any changes or do anything.) The result of this malignant, self-exculpatory fantasy is a wholly dysfunctional system in which legislators are paid to sign off on proclamations they don’t really believe, Christians and Jews are obligated to do obeisance to flagrantly mediocre leaders, and intellectuals are browbeat into pretending that they love Israel when most of them secretly wish that the state of Israel and its power-hungry supporters would go away.

Of course, it isn’t as though Western civilization has not seen fanatical, power-obsessed lobbies before. As George Orwell documented in the 1940s, the intellectual classes of Britain and Europe were obsessed for a time by the Soviet Union, which Orwell understood to be a covert form of power worship. But the Communists in the US were never strong institutionally, being confined mainly to a small following among creative intellectuals and a handful of trade unionists. The Israel Lobby, on the other hand, possesses enormous wealth from its billionaire donors, and its influence is very strong at every level of institutional life in America—furthermore, its evangelical followers constitute the most dynamic constituency in the Republican Party. The conviction that Israel cannot be criticized isn’t just the fancy of a few highly-paid fanatics in the Israel Lobby, although they define fanaticism in our time; they are also supported by what seems to be a majority of the American people.

But the fact that irrational and immoral beliefs and behavior have a great following doesn’t make those beliefs and behaviors right. The traumas of the 20^th century have driven millions of intelligent, capable people into active psychological pathologies, which they experience as ideological realities. The Israeli/Palestinian conflict is not about politics, nor religion, nor even geo-politics. It is about pathology; and ultimately it is about systemic evil. The evil of the Holocaust, like the traumatic memory it generates, is by definition a wound that will never heal; it cannot be suppressed, but only acknowledged and managed. And the only way to really manage it is to deconstruct the trauma bond—the emotional bondage to aggression as the supreme arbiter of history—at its heart.

In the meantime, the real state of Israel (not the fantasy that people are supposed to believe in) keeps moving to the right, the politicians of American and Israel continue to lie about what is really happening, and the use of targeted assassinations, mass internment, torture and collective punishment of Palestinians continues. What the state of Israel really needs is what every state needs, which is educated critics denouncing what is wrong about it and supporting what is right, and working to confront injustices and correct them. But the message of the Israel Lobby, like so much American cultural and political expression, is not about reality, but about an apocalyptic idea of perfection that itsapparatchiki must ram down everybody’s throat in order to suppress their own trauma—in this case, the traumatic memory of humanity’s worst crime, and their own creeping doubts about the real nature of the Holy State begotten by it.

Lawrence Swaim is the Executive Director of the Interfaith Freedom Foundation, a civil rights organization that opposes Islamophobia and advocates religious liberty for all. His latest book, Trauma Bond: An Inquiry into the Nature of Evil, was published in March by Psyche Books, an imprint of John Hunt Publishers, Ltd.

Notes. 

[i] Lawrence Swaim, The Death of Judeo-Christianity: Religious Aggression and Systemic Evil in the Modern World  (Winchester UK and Washington DC: Circle Books, John Hunt Publishing, Ltd., 2013), 169.

The Strange History Of The Anti-Defamation League

By Jeffrey Blankfort

“[T]he Anti-Defamation League for many years has maintained a very important, confidential investigative coverage of Arab activities and propaganda….Our information, in addition to being essential for our own operations, has been of great value and service to both the United States State Department and the Israeli government. All data have been made available to both countries with full knowledge to each that we were the source.” –  Letter from Benjamin R. Epstein, National Director, Anti-Defamation League to Saul Joftes, Executive Secretary, B’nai B’rith, July 7, 1961.

Those were the days when snooping usually meant digging through garbage cans, checking other people’s mailboxes, and primitive phone tapping. How the Anti-Defamation League is doing it today one can only imagine.

Over the last three days of April, the ADL celebrated its 100th anniversary in Washington DC in high style with Vice President Joe Biden the featured speaker at its Centennial Gala dinner on April 30 and Attorney General Eric Holder doing the obligatory genuflecting the day before.

Standing next to the ADL’s ubiquitous current national director, Abe Foxman, Biden told the one thousand paying guests, “You have become the conscience of this country, no matter what the issue. You have been a pillar of the Jewish community, but you reach out and you have reached out your embrace for all communities.”

For hundreds of organizations and thousands of individuals the ADL’s embrace has been too close for comfort and “unconscionable” would be a term more befitting the organization’s activities. What is definitely in order is a reminder that this year also marks the 20th anniversary of the exposure of a nation-wide spying operation run by the ADL that went back at least five decades.

In January, 1993, San Francisco newspapers reported that the city’s police department had raided the ADL’s Northern California office and discovered it was keeping files on more than 600 largely liberal civic organizations and over 10,000 individuals whose interests and activities included but also went far beyond those of the Arab-American community.

After examining the sequestered files, San Francisco police inspector Ron Roth, estimated that 75% of the information had been illegally obtained and by November, District Attorney Arlo Smith appeared to be on the verge of indicting the ADL for numerous violations of state and city codes.

The appearance was deceiving. With an eye on being elected California’s attorney general the following year, Smith realized, too late as it turned out, that he would need the financial and political clout of San Francisco’s influential Jewish community that had helped to propel him to his job as the city’s DA. So he threw in the towel mere hours before ADL officials would be called to testify before a grand jury.

In an agreement reached a week earlier but issued Nov. 15, 1993, just before the filing deadline, Smith’s office released a statement explaining his reasoning: “The SFDA and Defendants agree that litigation concerning Defendant’s activities would involve disputed issues of fact and law and that such litigation would be expensive and time-consuming both to the SFDA and Defendants.”

That all litigation involves “disputed issues of fact and law” apparently did not occur to Smith. His dropping of the case, however, made little impression on his erstwhile Jewish backers.

They made it known that they would not forgive him for not only opening the investigation into the ADL’s spying operations but making available to whoever in the public would pay the copying fees, 704 pages of documents that revealed in considerable detail the extent of the ADL’s nation-wide spying operations. (See the Israel Lobby Archive, www.irmep.org/ila)

In exchange for being let off the hook and while admitting no wrong-doing, the ADL agreed that it would no longer do, at least in California, what it was shown to have been doing, i.e., soliciting and/or obtaining non-public information on individuals and organizations from government sources.

In addition, it would “create a Hate Crimes Reward Fund,” in the amount of $25,000, which would “provide monetary rewards for information leading to the arrest and/or conviction of the perpetrators of hate crimes.” (The latter seems to be a fetish of the ADL which, incredibly, has just been allowed to trademark the statement, “Imagine a world without hate.”)

What was an important concession by the city, from the ADL’s standpoint, was that its files seized by the SFPD would remain closed to the public and would not be opened without the ADL being given an opportunity to voice its objections.

In California, the ADL’s secret spying and file keeping was mainly the provenance of Roy Bullock, a beefy San Francisco weight-lifter, who went by the code name, “Cal,” and reported to the ADL’s chief spymaster in New York, the now deceased Irwin Suall.

To keep the relationship out of public as well as government eyes, Bullock was paid through a cut-out in Beverly Hills, Bruce Hochman, a lawyer and member of the ADL’s board, also now deceased.

As late as July 19, 1992, Suall had described Bullock as “our Number One fact finder” whose assignments included, in addition to his duties in California, attending and monitoring conferences and conventions of Arab-Americans across the country.

He was, in fact, doing the kind of work that former ADL director Ben Epstein described in the quote at the beginning of this article. At the time, Bullock was receiving close to $25,000 a year for monitoring what he and the ADL considered “antidemocratic” organizations and individuals and he had been doing it for 40 years.

It wasn’t Bullock’s only income, to be sure. He was also an “art dealer” and this provided an explanation for his turning up at Arab-American conferences across the country as I later learned. He “just happened” to be in this or that city at the same time, buying art.

A month after the SFPD had confiscated Bullock’s files, the ADL was still trying to avoid being linked with him, even within the organization. On February 25, 1993, a cover letter for “talking points” to its regional directors referred to Bullock as “an individual who is alleged to have a relationship with the ADL.”

To the public, when its ties to Bullock could no longer be denied, he was described simply as a private contractor and that the files he kept were for his own use. When this attempted cover-up quickly fell apart, he was put directly on the ADL payroll and provided with an attorney.

Bullock had divided the organizations and individuals on which he was keeping tabs into two categories to which he assigned the names, Pinko and Right, the latter made up largely of neo-Nazis and skinheads, the groups usually associated by the public as ADL’s main targets. When questioned by Inspector Roth, Bullock defined “Pinko” as “left wing.”

Among the 647 organizations he so designated were the NAACP, ACLU, Asian Law Caucus, Centro Legal de la Raza, Irish Northern Aid, Japanese-American Citizens League, the National Indian Treaty Council, Earth Island Institute and 20 trade union locals plus the San Francisco Labor Council. Jewish organizations that had taken positions critical of Israeli policies also found their way into his “Pinko” section.

On finding its name on the list, the Asian-Law Caucus quickly notified the ADL that it was withdrawing from a joint event previously planned with the Jewish defense organization. Rather than apologizing, the ADL was defiant, responding with a letter that placed the onus on the Asian Law Caucus for the cancellation.

In a letter addressed to the director of the Asian Law Caucus, dated April 29. 1953, the ADL’s regional director, Elliot Bien, wrote that he was “dismayed on a number of levels when I learned that the Asian Law Caucus felt it necessary to pull out of this program on short notice as a protest of some sort against the ADL…. [T]hat the pullout was completely unjustified and unfair….”

The ADL was and remains more sensitive to Black-Jewish relations. Jews have been heavily involved with the NAACP since its inception in 1909. That they have also been the major source of its funding has been viewed by many observers in the post civil rights era as designed to keep the organization from taking political positions that would offend the Jewish establishment, such as expressing sympathy with the Palestinian cause or criticizing Israel’s arms sales to South Africa.

This was typified by the attitude of long-time NAACP Director Roy Wilkins, widely characterized as an “Uncle Tom” by black activists, who withdrew the NAACP from the National Black Political Convention in 1972, taking exception to a resolution that condemned Israel for “expansionist policies and forceful occupation of the sovereign territories of another state.”

On May 5, 1993, the ADL’s New York headquarters sent a letter to its regional offices, noting that “Abe Foxman wrote newly installed NAACP Director Benjamin Chavis, assuring him that the ADL had never targeted the NAACP for investigation” and recommended that if they had not already done so, the directors should reach out to “local branches of the NAACP” and “do so now.”

“You may note,” the letter went on, “that the news story in which the NAACP was named, cited names in Bullock’s files as ours. [T]he ADL has never targeted nor would it ever target for investigation any individual or organization on the basis of race, religion, ethnic origin, or sexual orientation.” The letter ignored the fact that a year earlier, the ADL had issued a 50-page “ADL Research Report, entitled “The Anti-Semitism of Black Demagogues and Extremists.”

Heading the list were Min. Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam, Illinois Congressman Gus Savage, Rev. Al Sharpton, Kwame Ture (the former Stokely Carmichael), poet Amiri Baraka, and rappers Ice Cube and Professor Griff and Public Enemy. Certain black newspapers and radio stations that didn’t feel beholden to the Jewish community also came in for their lumps.

Chavis, with a long history of civil rights activity, was no Roy Wilkins. In an effort to revive what had become a moribund organization and make it more representative of the black community, he sought to involve some of those condemned in the ADL’s booklet, but it was his reaching out to Farrakhan that set off the alarm bells at ADL headquarters and put him at odds with Foxman.

It also caused the NAACP’s major Jewish funders to put away their check books until Chavis, who became caught up in an unrelated personnel matter, tendered his resignation.

Given Foxman and the ADL’s obsession with what it considers to be “black anti-Semitism,” which includes, for example, speaking about the prominent role of Jews in the African slave trade or comparisons of Israel with apartheid South Africa, it was logical that Bullock would an eye on the NAACP and other African-American as well as black African organizations. He was nothing if not thorough, keeping multiple files on the African National Congress and 47 other anti-apartheid organizations.

Bullock also was found to have 77 files on 58 Arab-American organizations besides the thousands of individuals who belonged to those organizations. His modus operandi in infiltrating Arab-American and anti-apartheid organizations, was to pretend he was sympathetic to their respective causes. He succeeded in not only becoming a member of the local chapter of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee but, because of his size and weight, he would be in charge of “security” at all its events.

Bullock was assisted in his endeavors by a San Francisco policeman and former CIA contractor in El Salvador, Tom Gerard, who would take down the license plate numbers of people attending Palestinian and Arab-American events and provide Bullock with their names, addresses, and personal information, all of which was illegal. What made this easy for Gerard was that he was the SFPD’s “official liaison” to the Arab community.

What was particularly embarrassing for the ADL was the release of information that Bullock and Gerard, who had also provided information directly to ADL officials, were also being paid by South African intelligence agents to supply information on the activities of the Bay Area’s anti-Apartheid organizations and South African exiles affiliated with the ANC and other black African organizations.

In one of his depositions, Bullock acknowledged that doing this required no additional work since he was already spying on the anti-apartheid movement for the ADL. Foxman, on his part, had openly condemned the African National Congress as a “terrorist” organization that supported the PLO.

One individual the South African agents were particularly interested in was Chris Hani, the man who was expected to succeed Nelson Mandela as the country’s president. Hani was assassinated in South Africa shortly after a speaking tour in California during which he was trailed by Bullock who prepared a lengthy report on it for the South African government, a copy of which was found in his files.

Foxman, though unapologetic, was anxious to neutralize public discussion of the close ties that existed between Israel and South Africa, particularly the Jewish state’s arms sales to the apartheid regime. Thanks, however, to the willingness of the anti-apartheid movement and the Congressional Black Caucus to bury the issue, he ended up having little to worry about.

While Bullock had, at times, infiltrated neo-Nazi and skinhead groups, none of which posed tangible threats to the American Jews, their images in the organization’s mailings were useful in frightening Jewish donors into contributing to the ADL’s $60 million dollar budget and paying Foxman’s salary which in 2009 amounted to $563,024. The main focus of the ADL was on Palestinians and Arab-Americans and their solidarity groups.

One of the targets Bullock “befriended” was Palestinian-American Alex Odeh, the head of the Orange County chapter of the ADC who would be killed by a terrorist bomb when he opened the door to his Santa Ana office on October 11, 1985.

In Bullock’s files, police found a key to Odeh’s office as well as the floor plan. Although Bullock has not been linked to the unresolved murder, the fact that an ADL spy was in possession of such items is something that Foxman obviously would not want advertised.

There were two law suits filed against the ADL over the 1993 revelations but only one proved to be headache from the ADL’s perspective. This was a class action suit filed on April 14, 1993, by former congressman, Paul “Pete” McCloskey, himself a victim of pro-Israel witch hunters, on behalf of 17 individuals who believed they had been spied upon because of their work on behalf of justice for the Palestinians and/or their active opposition to South African apartheid.

A second suit was filed by a group of targeted organizations, among them the Labor Committee on the Middle East (LCOME) which Labor activist Steve Zeltzer and I co-founded in 1987. That suit, over which the organizations seemed to have little say, was settled by their lawyer in 1999 after the ADL, admitting no wrong doing, agreed to destroy its files, to get out of the spying business, and contribute $50,000 to police departments for racial sensitivity training. Steve and I did not think that an adequate response to the seriousness of the ADL’s transgressions and LCOME refused to be a party to that settlement.

By February, 2002, when the ADL elected to settle McCloskey’s suit out of court, there would be only three individuals remaining in the class: Zeltzer, Anne Poirer, and myself. In addition to our involvement in anti-apartheid activities, Steve and I had launched the Labor Committee on the Middle East in 1987, whose founding meetings at Zeltzer’s home, Bullock had attended. Anne had been a long time anti-apartheid activist.

Our suit charged the ADL with violating a narrow privacy provision of California state law,1798.53, which holds that “Any person, other than an employee of the state or of a local government agency…..who intentionally discloses information, not otherwise public, which they know or should reasonably know was obtained from personal information maintained by a state agency or from ‘records’

… maintained by a federal government agency, shall be subject to a civil action, for invasion of privacy, by the individual to whom the information pertains.”

In this instance, the 9th District Court of California had determined that information on Zeltzer and me had been provided to the governments of Israel and South Africa and that information on Annie Poirier had been given to South Africa.

Over nearly a decade of court appearances and status conferences, what we insisted upon, above all else, and what prevented an earlier settlement, was that under no circumstances would we sign a confidentiality agreement that would forbid us speaking or writing about the suit.

We felt we needed to be free to talk about what we had learned along the way about the ADL’s spying activities, information that the ADL, understandably, preferred to be kept secret.

Until the very last moment, the Friday afternoon before the Monday when the case would have gone to trial, the ADL had balked at making that concession. In the end they gave in. In addition, they agreed to pay a modest cash settlement to the three of us plus McCloskey’s legal expenses. He had taken our case pro bono.

What was, perhaps, the most revealing moment in the legal battle took place in McCloskey’s Redwood City office during the ADL’s questioning of former Mossad agent, Victor Ostrovsky. McCloskey had brought Ostrovsky down from Canada to provide whatever information he might have that would link the ADL to Israel and assist us in our case.

When Ostrovsky left the Mossad, he took with him a number of documents, some of which were the source his “By Way of Deception,” a record of his time with the Israeli spy agency.

As Ostrovsky took his seat next to McCloskey, he faced the usual battery of attorneys representing the ADL and Bullock. The atmosphere, however, was very different. Throughout the many court appearances and the taking of depositions, the ADL’s lawyers had been cordial, if not friendly, to us, even though we were on opposite sides.

This would not be the case with Ostrovsky. It is not an exaggeration to say that their eyes were gleaming with hatred. They made no effort to conceal their hostility to a person they obviously viewed as a traitor to Israel which, at that moment, they clearly viewed as their client as much as was the ADL.

That this was more than conjecture on my part was soon revealed when David Goldstein, the lead attorney, demanded that Ostrovsky turn over to him, in the name of the ADL, all the documents he had taken from the Mossad. Ostrovsky, quite naturally, refused. Later the ADL’s lawyers inveighed upon a judge, without success, to force him to comply with their demand.

Thanks to our refusal to sign the confidentiality agreement, you can read about that on CounterPunch
 

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When the reports of the ADL spying first appeared in the media, there were those who thought the respected Jewish defense organization had simply made a mistake in its zeal to protect Israel and that the spying operation was an anomaly.

Nothing can be further from the truth. But let’s begin at the beginning.

The ADL was formed by B’nai B’rith in 1913 to serve as the leading Jewish defense agency in the wake of the conviction of Leo Frank, an officer of the National Pencil Co. in Atlanta, Georgia for the murder of 13 year old Mary Phagan, a shop floor worker at the pencil factory. It was a verdict that many believed to be a miscarriage of justice, which was compounded by Frank being kidnapped from a prison hospital two years later and lynched. He is the only American Jew known to have suffered that fate.

By 1937, the Anti-Defamation League had embarked on another occupation, keeping files and spying on what it considered to be communist or pro-communist organizations and individuals.

In that year, a 1947 Congressional hearing revealed, it had begun providing information on the recently formed National Lawyers Guild and on individuals applying for federal civil service jobs and some who had not applied for jobs, to the original House Committee on Un-American Activities, chaired by the notorious racist Rep. Martin Dies, which came to be referred to simply as the Dies Committee.

Newly declassified FBI files obtained by IRmep’s Grant Smith reveal that on August 8, 1940, the ADL offered a confidential list of hundreds of undercover ADL investigators to FBI Director J Edgar Hoover. ADL offered the contact list as a resource for FBI informants and additional undercover agents.

Some members of the list, such as Abraham Feinberg, would later be investigated by the FBI as agents of a foreign government and for quashing investigations targeting illegal arms-smuggling from the US to Israel.

Feinberg would become later well known in as the man who delivered an envelope filled with a large amount of cash to Harry Truman–$ 2 million JFK told Gore Vidal– that enabled him to launch the whistle stop campaign that led to his victory in the 1948 presidential elections. Truman had earned Feinberg’s largesse by recognizing Israel minutes after David Ben-Gurion declared the state into existence.

During the anti-communist witch hunts that marked the beginning of the Cold War, the ADL assisted and acted as a go-between for both the Congressional committees and members or former members of the Communist Party who chose to inform on their one-time comrades, friends, and family members.

With the arrival of Israel, the ADL began to redirect its tasks. Arab delegations to the United Nations and Arab-American organizations became its targets. In the letter cited at the beginning of this article, the ADL’s Ben Epstein wrote B’nai B’rith’s Saul Joftes that “we have maintained an information-gathering operation since 1948 relating to activities emanating from the Arab Consular Offices, Arab United Nations Delegations, Arab Information Center, Arab Refugee Office and the Organization of Arab Students.”

In 1969 the ADL infiltrated the 18th annual National Convention the Organization of Arab Students. ADL operatives posed as reporters while strategizing on how to gain control of the OAS’s national headquarters and neutralize its chapters.

After receiving its report, the FBI briefly considered investigating the ADL as an Israeli foreign agent. The ADL effort was ultimately successful to the degree that OAS chapters became less political in the ensuing decades and began serving more as campus clubs with a cultural focus.

In November, 1983, in response to widespread criticism of Israel over its invasion and occupation of Lebanon the previous year, the ADL’s New England office put out a 49 page mimeographed booklet containing the names of individuals and organizations that the league classified as “pro-Arab propagandists.”

It was not intended for the general public, but for Jewish students on college campuses to help them counter these “propagandists” who were trying “to sway Americans from their historically strong support for Israel.” Moreover, the booklet claimed, “many of these propagandists use their anti-Zionism as a guise for their deeply felt anti-Semitism.”

The booklet, with each page stamped “CONFIDENTIAL,” was prepared by Jordan Millstein, the ADL’s local campus coordinator and was sent out with a cover letter from Leonard Zakim, the Executive Director of its New England Office.

“Should you need more information on these individual groups or any others,” wrote Zakim, “please call us. Also, if you have any knowledge of any individuals or groups not listed in the booklet, please pass the information on to us so that we can have a more complete and useful listing.”

One can imagine the outrage had a Palestinian or Arab-American group put out a similar publication containing a list of individuals and organizations that they accused of putting Israel’s interests before those of the United States.

Among the individuals on the ADL list were Professors Edward Said of Columbia, Michael Hudson of Georgetown, Lawrence Michalak of UC Berkeley, Wahlid Khaladi of Harvard, Naseer Aruri of Southeastern U., Israel Shahak of Hebrew University who “contends that Israel practices ‘apartheid’ against Palestinian Arabs,” former Senator James Abourezk of South Dakota, and our lawyer, Pete McCloskey, who served 16 years in Congress, from 1967 to 1983, the year the booklet was published.

The publication came to the attention of the 1400 member Middle East Studies Association the following November which passed a resolution calling on the league to disown the document

When that story was finally reported In the NY Times on Jan.25, two months later, Jeffrey Ross, the ADL’s director of campus affairs, claimed it had been an “unfortunate incident” and would not be repeated.

He said that Millstein, the author, was an “overly zealous student volunteer” who no longer worked for the league. Zakim acknowledged “the document had been careless” as the Times characterized it and that “he would not have written a cover letter for it if he had considered the matter thoroughly.”

In 2002, three years after his death from cancer in 1999, the bridge that serves as the northern entrance and exit from Boston was named the Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Memorial Bridge after Zakim and the American colonists who fought the British in the Battle of Bunker Hill.

Despite the ADL having promised to get out of the business of illegally obtaining information on its enemies in exchange for not being prosecuted back in 1993, there is no evidence, twenty years later that it has.

What it has done is strengthen its ties with police across the country through its LEARN program (Law Enforcement Agency Resource Network) in which it trains police in dealing with “extremist groups” and “hate crimes.”

As for Bullock, I have heard of no recent citing but I have a hunch that somewhere in the country the aging agent is still going through other people’s garbage cans, peeking in their mailboxes and infiltrating a new generation of “Pinko” organizations for the ADL. If you look for his image on Google you will find three of them, all right next to photos of Abe Foxman.

$100 Billion Gift To Israel — $83 Billion Cut To American Families

By Mohamed Khodr

“The Modern Age is the Jewish Age, and the twentieth century, in particular, is the Jewish Century.”

–Yuri Slezkine, in his book “The Jewish Century”, Prof. of History U.C. Berkeley,

“A little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great government of the United States helpless and contemptible….The government, which was designed for the people, has got into the hands of the bosses and their employers, the special interests. An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of democracy.’

—President Woodrow Wilson

U.S. Congressman Steny Hoyer (D-MD) second highest ranking member in the House of Representatives, Minority Whip, while visiting Israel along with 26 other Democratic Representatives as part of AIPAC’s “educational” tour to Israel program went out of his way to comfort the Jewish State that despite America’s current economic crisis, aid to Israel will continue as usual.

He said such the American economic crisis “will not have any adverse effect on America’s determination to meet its promise to Israel.”  (Jerusalem Post, August 11, 2011)

That Israel’s interests are the “Litmus Test” for U.S. domestic and foreign policy was made abundantly clear by the U.S. Ambassador to Israel, Dan Shapiro, in remarks he made to the Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI) on September 6, 2011

“There are two implications that flow from the President (Obama) identifying this
core interest (absolute commitment to Israel) that I would like to discuss.

The first is this—- the test— of every policy the Administration (Obama’s) develops in the Middle East is whether it is consistent with the goal of ensuring Israel’s future as a secure, Jewish, democratic state.  That is a commitment that
runs as a common thread through our entire government, even while
approaching the U.S.-Israel relationship and regional challenges from a
variety of perspectives.”

“The test of our policy – that it advances Israel’s status as a secure,
Jewish, democratic state – also explains our commitment to vigorously battle
against those who would attempt to isolate or delegitimize Israel in the
international community”.

This is an outrageous and incredible admission by an Obama official that America’s foreign policy is dictated by Israel.  Yet this control of U.S. foreign policy especially in the Midle East goes back to Harry Truman’s administration.

In fact John Foster Dulles, Secretary of State in the Eisenhower Administration put it bluntly:  “We cannot have all our policies made in Jerusalem.”

In every government throughout history there have always been clashes among persons, parties, and groups for power and influence in their native countries and empires; but never in history has there been a small group of wealthy and powerful oligarchs and special interests that wield enormous power not for the interest and welfare of their native land but for the interest and welfare of a foreign nation.   In the U.S. it’s the Jewish Cabal that runs America’s foreign policy in the Middle East.

No greater example of such special interest power was more evident than in the Jewish Neocons push for the illegal and devastating war upon Iraq.   Following Israel’s Mossad motto of “By way of deception” you shall make war they brought an imbecilic fool as President then went ahead and filled every foreign and defense policy position in the White House, State Department, and Pentagon with Jewish Neocons who fabricated the lies and fear mongering upon a hapless uninformed populace to push for war, although both in the U.S. and Britain intelligence agencies informed both war criminals, Bush and Blair, that Iraq had no WMD’s.

But in the West Facts don’t dissuade the thirst for oil and blood.

Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defense in the Bush administration, whom Time magazine called “The Architect” of the Iraq war said this in an interview with Vanity Fair on May 9, 2003:

“The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason”

Only in America and only a Jew can have the chutzpah to make such an incredulous statement in the face of the total annihilation of an innocent nation and at enormous cost in American lives and treasure;

Why should he or any other Jewish American care; it’s not like Jews are prominent in the U.S. military.

Jewish Neocons like Paul Wolfowitz know that their job is to push America to fight Israel’s War for only Gentiles will Die. Only 4,515 Jews serve in the U.S.Military comprisong only 0.3%

According to the Wall Street Journal (November 9, 2009, only 4,515 Jews serve in the 1,359,948 strong U.S. military, i.e. 0.3%.  These Jewish Neocons push for wars but it’s Gentiles who die for them and Israel.

Wolfowitz’s barbaric statement is the worst display of pure human evil in mankind’s entire history.  Not even Hitler issued such a justification for his barbarism.

America paid, died, and massacred for Israel, yet the entire world, especially the Muslim world, is silent with no clamor to charge Bush, Blair, Cheney Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and the rest of the Jewish Neocons with war crimes.   They are responsible for a genuine holocaust against the Iraqi people but they will never face a criminal court.    Accountability is saved only for the poor, weak, and dark race.

When governments lie people die.

Read the incredible Lies and Quotes from Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Jewish Neocons about Iraq and the need for War.

Every mass murderer in modern history has used the media to rally the cause and stir blind hysteria amongst his people, from Hitler, Mussolini, Churchill, Franco, Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, Castro, and Netanyahu.

PLEASE WATCH the next two very worthy and important Videos that deal with how a powerful “democratic” government can use its political, economic, military power, but most of all the power of a “Jewish” owned and controlled media in beating the propaganda drum for war on a daily basis until the lie became the truth and Americans again and again as they have done throughout their wars are easily manipulated and lulled to except a lie as truth.   Even today many Americans still believe that Saddam Hussein was linked to Al Qaeda and 9/11.

This is a vital Video entitled “The War Party” made by the BBC on Jewish Neocons and their Lead up to the Iraqi War.

The courageous MSNBC host Rachel Maddow aired a documentary tiled; “Hubris: Selling the Iraq War” that reexamines the lies and events that led up to the Iraq War.

Future students, if allowed, will study the case of the Iraq War and hopefully imbibe the wisdom of how a few men and women with wealth and power can manipulate nations into wars of mass destruction either to serve their interests or as is the case with the “Jewish Lobby” use American power to do the bidding and killing for a foreign nation:  Israel.

To understand how such a small but powerful lobby can dominate, influence, dictate, and intimidate the most powerful President and Congress in the entire world, one only needs to know that in a capitalistic society where political campaigns depend on contributions no lobby is wealthier, more connected to vital institutions such as Wall Street, banking and Financial services, the media which possesses the power to make or break careers, Hollywood wealth, than the Jewish Lobby, primarily AIPAC, the American Israeli Public Action Committee.

NOTICE the word Public in AIPAC’s name rather than the standard Political; a deliberate deception  to avoid registering as a foreign agent serving Israel as required by Federal Law.   The cowardly government will not even apparoach the issue.

Israel and AIPAC are drowning America in a cesspool of corruption,illegal and immoral wars, resulting in America losing whatever dignity, honor, and credibility it still had.  Israel is the greatest threat to America’s national security, peace and economic prosperity.

There would be no Israel without U.S. recognition, political, economic, and political support in 1948. In return Israel has been an albatross around America’s neck drowning it in endless wars that have cost the American people the lives of their children and Trillions in treasure.

Please Watch this Dutch Video: “The Israel Lobby” and its impact on U.S. Foreign Policy.  The Video is Subtitled but all the interviewed persons are Americans.  Would an American TV or Cable Channel dare do such a Video?  No, not when you find out who the bosses are.

To assess any Government’s Priorities look at the Budget.

Every President since Harry Truman has tried to mildly inform Israel of American  displeasure with its policies of ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity toward the Palestinians.   All have “threatened” to withhold foreign aid only to cave in quickly when met with “Jewish” backlash, especially in the Jewish owned and dominated media.

Presidents Bush and Obama are no exception.  Both faced two wars, both faced huge budget deficits and an ever increasing national debt, but both, as usual chose to enrich Israel with money taken out of domestic programs that serve America’s families and children.Under President George W. Bush:

In August 2007 Bush signed a Defense Aid Package with Israel worth $30 Billion over ten years.   Contrary to U.S. law which states that aid funds must be spent in the purchase of American products, Israel as always got an exemption to spend 26% of the funds in Israel, not in the U.S.thus depriving U.S. Companies of $7.8 Billionwhich could have created jobs and more tax revenue for the federal government.

Only Israel among all nations that receive U.S. aid has this privilege of receiving its total package in one lump sum.

BUT, where does Bush get the $30 Billion for Israel during times of economic crisis and huge deficits?  From SCHIP; the Children’s Health Program for America’s needy children.

Less than 2 months later Bush vetoed the same amount, $30 Billion, approved by Congress to fund the SCHIP, the Children’s Health Program.  Why?  It’s too expensive and will increase the budget deficit.     (“Bush Vetoes Children’s Health Bill”, New York Times, October 3, 2007)

Thus American children be damned.  Bush cared more for Israel’s murderous military than feeding impoverished American children and offering them health care..

President George W. Bush’s Priorities:

• Iraq and Afghanistan Wars:   $4 – $6 Trillion

 “The largest portion of that bill is yet to be paid. The legacy of decisions taken during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars will dominate future federal budgets for decades to come.”   (Most of this funding was borrowed adding to the debt)

–Harvard Kennedy School Study, March 2013

• ush Tax Cuts:  >$2 Trillion  (Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation)
  

• Bush FY 2006 Proposed a $2.5 Trillion Cut in about 150 Domestic Programs  (Washington Post, February 7, 2005)

 Bush:  Bankrupts America but Enriches Israel.

Whenever the U.S. Government has a choice to spend monies for American families or give it to Israel, it invariably chooses Israel knowing well that if they don’t there will be hell to pay and an end to their career. Thus both Bush and Obama cut vital and necessary domestic food, health, housing, and education programs to send the money to Israel because of “Jewish Power” in the U.S.A.

Under President Barack Obama: 

The President of “Hope and Change”, the man who promised to fight “special interests’, has turned out to be a huge disappointment and hypocrite, not only breaking all of his promises but adopting Bush’s domestic and foreign “war on terror”, unleashing Drone Massacres, curtailing civil liberties, and implementing the largest most intrusive surveillance in American history of all communications monitored by the NSA.

Not to be outdone Obama proposed an even greater defense aid package to Israel than Bush:   $40 Billion after Bush’s $30 Billion expires thereby continuing this package till 2027 thus locking his successors to the commitment.

Plus, Obama plans to increase the annual aid package from $3.1 Billion to $4 Billion annually beginning 2017; the year after he leaves office, again locking his successor to such a commitment.   (Defense News March 24, 2013)

In addition to Bush and Obama’s $70 Billion , Israel continues to receive its usual aid of between $4 – $5 Billion annually since 2007, plus the U.S. totally funds Israel’s Iron Dome Anti-Missile Defense system which cost the U.S. tax payer an additional $1.5 Billion.

Such enormous aid packages to a foreign nation at a time Obama and Congress cut $83 Billion from health care, education, food stamps, meals on wheels for the elderly, housing subsidies, heating assistance program for the elderly, and so many other life saving programs for American families who are struggling with home foreclosures, high unemployment, debts and bills, and much more.

The $100 Billion Israel receives can more than pay for the budget sequester cuts to domestic program of $83 Billion.  But Israel says; “Let Them Eat Cake”.

It’s like taking government subsidies for infant formula and giving it to Bill Gates.

With Priority Funding going to Israel, the U.S. Government can’t help is own people.

• 46.2 Million Americans below Poverty Level:  15% of U.S. Population
• More than 1, in 5 American children live in Poverty: 16.4 Million
• 16.7 Million American children are Food Insecure
• 50 Million Americans Without Health Insurance:  (17,1% :In 2000 13.1%)
• 1.5 Million Americans are Homeless
• 76,329 Homeless Veterans in January 2010.
• U.S. students ranked 25th out of 34 nations in Math and Science (2009)

Given the cowardice to speak against Israel in this country and our doormat subservient government to the “Jewish Lobby”, it takes a Britisher, Tom Dalyell, a man intimately familiar with the history of colonialism and enslavement, to speak the truth n 2003:

“A Jewish cabal have taken over the government in the United States and formed an unholy alliance with fundamentalist Christians … There is far too much Jewish influence in the United States.”

Yes, America, you have surrendered your democracy and liberty to the Government and special interests, but none more powerful and dominant than AIPAC, a true foreign agent that spies on the U.S. and funnels your tax dollars to a foreign nation, Israel, whose interests have damaged America’s own national interests around the world, none more so than in the 57 Muslim nations with a population of 1.7 Billion people.

How AIPAC Rules

By JEFF KLEIN

Last week the Senate passed Resolution 65, mandating a new round of sanctions against Iran and promising to support Israel if it should choose to launch a unilateral war.  The bill contradicted explicit US policy in a number of areas:  it imposed secondary penalties on US allies; it lowered  the bar for military action to Israel’s preferred language of “nuclear capability” rather than acquisition of a nuclear weapon; and it interferes with the attempt to reach a diplomatic resolution to the nuclear impasse at a delicate time.  No wonder Secretary of State John Kerry implored Congress not to pass the bill when he testified before the Senate Foreign relations committee last month.

Nevertheless, the Senate bill came to a vote on May 22, and the result – in a roll call vote – was 99-0 in favor of the bill.

In the last Congress, another Iran Sanctions measure – an amendment attached to the 2012 Defense Appropriation Bill — was also opposed by the Obama administration. The provision, probably illegal under WTO rules, mandated secondary penalties against foreign banks which did business with Iran’s oil sector (US banks were already banned from doing so).  Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner wrote a letter to the Senate Armed Services Committee “to express the Administration’s strong opposition to this amendment because, in its current form, it threatens to undermine the effective, carefully phased, and sustainable approach we have taken to build strong international pressure against Iran.”  Two State Department officials of the Administration testified against the amendment; Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry also opposed the measure.

However, when the amendment’s sponsors insisted on a roll call vote, it passed 100-0.  Even Senator Kerry voted for the measure he had earlier opposed.

To understand how this can happen, it is useful to look at the Israel Lobby’s legislative MO — as well as the larger dynamic around Israel advocacy within the US Congress, in our political system and in the press.

AIPAC, of course, is the premier Israel Lobby organization.  Every March at its annual Conference the group assembles a huge turnout of moneyed and grassroots lobbyists.  Scores of members of Congress from both parties and political aspirants of all stripes jockey to express their loyalty to the Lobby.  It is at these conferences that AIPAC’s major legislative priorities for the year are unveiled.  This always includes renewed (and increased) military aid for Israel and for the last ten years or so various measures to oppose, sanction and preferably make war on to overthrow the Islamic Republic of Iran — Israel’s last remaining serious military opponent in the Middle East.

Here is the way it works.

–In the days before the yearly AIPAC conference in early March, reliable members of Congress from both parties – preferably non-Jews – are prevailed upon to submit AIPAC-drafted bills with a substantial number of initial bi-partisan sponsors.  This year the highlighted legislation included House Res. 850, The Nuclear Iran Prevention Act of 2013,introduced on February 28 by California Democrat Rep. Edward Royce and 31 co-sponsors (16 Democrats and 15 Republicans); and Senate Res. 65, Strongly Supporting the Full Implementation of United States and International Sanctions On Iran, also introduced on February 28 by the every dependable Senator Lindsey Graham [R-SC] and 22 initial co-sponsors (13 Democrats and 9 Republicans).  Another bill, apparently a late entry from the March 2-4 Conference itself, did not follow the preferred pattern.  House Res. 938, The United States-Israel Strategic Partnership Act of 2013 was introduced hurriedly on March 4 by Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen [R-FL27] with only two Democratic co-sponsors.  These three bills embodied AIPAC’s 2013 declared legislative priorities: Prevent Iranian Nuclear Weapons Capability; Strengthen U.S.-Israel Strategic Cooperation;  Support Security Assistance for Israel.

– Then, before leaving Washington, the AIPAC Conference attendees launch themselves on Capitol Hill to recruit more co-sponsors for the AIPAC bills.  Initially, this is mostly pushing on an open door, as many legislators are eager to join the bandwagon;  some were simply not asked earlier in the interest of bi-partisan balance; some were not quick enough to get listed when the initial bills were introduced.  Within a few weeks of the AIPAC Conference Senate Res. 65 had an additional 55 co-sponsors, House Res. 850 added more than 250 sponsors; and House Res. 983 more than 150.

–The effort continues to line up more cosponsors with the aim of securing an irresistible momentum for the bills.  Many legislators simply take more time to pin down; others (few) might have been reluctant holdouts persuaded not to find themselves isolated against the AIPAC juggernaut.  An AIPAC staffer once famously bragged that “in twenty-four hours, we could have the signatures of seventy senators on a napkin”. It took a little longer this time, but Senate Res. 65 already had 91 co-sponsors before it came up for a vote. House Res. 850, still pending, now has 351 co-sponsors; H. Res. 983 has 271.

–Not all AIPAC-initiated legislation follows this pattern.  Other bills or amendments come up during the year and are pushed as opportunities or needs present themselves.  Some of these bills – and the frequent “Congressional Letters” of support for Israel — have little practical impact on policy but are part of AIPAC’s promotion of discipline among US legislators.  I call it “puppy training,” so that members of Congress are reflexively obedient to AIPAC’s legislative agenda.  The 29 standing ovations for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he addressed Congress in 2011 are a good illustration of the outcome.  Pavlov had nothing on the Israel Lobby.

It might be tempting to conclude – as AIPAC and its allies contend – that Congress acts in response to the overwhelming public support for Israel.  However, it is important to observe that votes on the Lobby’s bills are rarely much publicized in the US – as opposed to Israeli –mainstream media.  Of course, the pro-Israel political machine, the Rightwing and Zionist blogosphere do pay close attention, ever-ready to reward or punish legislative misbehavior. Most of the public remains, by design, completely unaware of these political maneuverings.  Not long ago, House Republican Whip Eric Cantor proposed voting separately on military aid to Israel so as to insulate it from potential cuts to Pentagon spending, but he was quickly persuaded to drop the idea.  The Israel Lobby prefers to have the $3 billion plus in annual aid to Israel discretely hidden within the vast Defense Appropriation Bill.

So the power of AIPAC derives not fundamentally from Israel’s vast popularity.  Although opinion polls do regularly confirm the public supports Israel at a much higher level than the Palestinians (no surprise), substantial pluralities still prefer that the US stay neutral in the conflict.  I have seen no polling about support for the billions in military aid to Israel each year.  It is hard to imagine that the majority response would be anything but negative in the light of cuts to funding other popular government programs. Not surprisingly the Lobby prefers “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” on the question of yearly$billions for Israel.

The apparent dominance of the Israel Lobby in Congress stems from what I would call “asymmetric politics”.  AIPAC represents the power of a well-funded and single-issue political machine.  It is quick to punish recalcitrant legislators – or to reward good behavior with dollars and campaign support from the many PACS and rich donors who take its direction.

On the other side, the advocates for Palestinian rights are scattered, poor and little threat to incumbent legislators. The Arab and Muslim communities cannot match the Israel Lobby’s Jewish financial base or it mobilized grassroots numbers. Many of their communities are relatively new in the US, insecure and targeted by the well-funded complex of anti-Arab, anti-Muslim mobilization since 9/11.  The great mass of the public are simply not involved and not paying much attention to the Israel-Palestine conflict or much aware of pro-Israel political power in Congress.

Seen in this light, members of Congress – ever averse to risk, as are all elected officials – are behaving rationally when they defer to the Israel Lobby.  They pay little or no price for playing ball with AIPAC and risk a backlash with no apparent reward if they don’t.

As for the broader anti-war and progressive movements, even when they have adopted good positions on Palestinian rights or opposing the Lobby-supported drive for war with Iran, these issues usually turn out to be “expendable” in comparison to other agendas.

Two recent examples will illustrate this dynamic.

This Spring, a well-established national peace organization, with a significant branch in Massachusetts, decided to endorse Democratic Rep. Ed Markey prior to the special primary election for John Kerry’s vacated Senate seat.   Markey is on the right side of most issues progressive hold dear, but he was also an initial supporter of the Iraq War.  And he has become a very reliable backer of Israel-Lobby legislative priorities, where in Massachusetts he is something of an outlier on these issues. He was among only three Mass delegation co-sponsors of H. Res. 850 and among only two of H. Res. 983.  He is also a dependable signer of whatever letter AIPAC is collecting signatures for, such as the one supporting the assault on Gaza a few years ago.

Some members of the peace organization argued in favor of no endorsement for Markey – at least in the primary – because of his poor record on Iran and Palestine, but they were outvoted.  The majority argued that an endorsement and fundraising for Markey would give them “access” to promote better positions on these issues after the election.  A cynic may wonder whether Markey, or any other progressive legislator would take this seriously.  A long-serving national board member of the group resigned in protest.

Then there is Massachusetts’ celebrity Senator Elizabeth Warren.  Many of her progressive supporters were uneasy over the boiler-plate pro-Israel language on her campaign web site, however there was little doubt that she was a genuine populist on other issues and would bring a rare progressive voice to the halls of Congress.  This, in large measure, she has done.

However, when push came to shove, Sen. Warren was persuaded to add her name as a sponsor to Senate Res. 65 – late to be sure (not until May 7) – and she joined in the unanimous vote in favor of the bill.  Now Warren, a faculty member of Harvard Law School undoubtedly knows the score on the Israel and Iran issues.  It is hard to imagine she hasn’t had certain conversations in the Faculty Club about Palestine, heard about the many events at her school on issues of Human Rights and International Law in the Middle East or understood the role of the Israel Lobby in war-promotion and military spending.

No doubt Warren rationalized her vote pragmatically.  Why risk becoming an isolated Senate freshman and losing her political credibility?  Why not submit to what was required in order to give her space to battle on other political issues she cared about?  For Senator Warren – as for so many progressives and Liberals — her seat is worth the price of a vote for AIPAC.

This is the way asymmetric politics works for the Israel Lobby.  It is the dynamic that puts our country in opposition to most of the world with respect to International Law and peace in the Middle East.  And it may yet succeed in getting us into a war with Iran.