John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY PHILIP GIRALDI IN THE UNZ REVIEW

 

“It poisons everything it touches”

 

“A recent article by Philip Weiss on the Mondoweiss website… details how the vast sums of money raised by both Democratic and Republican Jews has distorted American politics since the time of President Harry S. Truman. He describes how president after president has backed down versus Israel when confronted by Jewish power and observes that ‘This is not just a domestic political question, it’s a foreign policy problem.’”

 

In any discussion of the influence of money in politics, it is important to remember that we have no democracies in the Western world, despite constant references to them. We have nothing even seriously approaching democracy anywhere in the West. Of course, the very word “democracy” implies certain kinds of equality among citizens, something we simply do not see.

We have governments wrapped in various representative democratic theatrical costumes, from parliamentary to congressional, all of which, in fact, are highly responsive to wealth and plutocratic interests, both corporate and personal. Those with more money have more influence in all our societies, always, except in times of extraordinary stress, as during revolutions.

I hardly think the case even needs to be made that wealthy corporations and individuals are especially well served by Western governments.

Their favorable treatment stems both from a belief that it is good for the country’s economy and its international competitiveness, but also from the certainty that it is good for the campaign war chests of the political parties and individual politicians involved.

This is very apparent in the United States where the Congress has often been sarcastically described as “the best that money can buy” and where the Supreme Court has ruled that “money is free speech” when it comes to politics.

Now, it seems also unnecessary to argue the fact of Jewish success in our economies. The number of successful businessmen, large and small, and professionals, of every description, is quite remarkable, their numbers well out of proportion to the numbers of Jewish people versus other groups. A source of pride and achievement, surely.

I believe that easily observable fact is explained by higher-than-average native intelligence plus a group cultural dedication to education and willingness to work hard with strong natural drives for success. All fine qualities.

So, in societies where politics are heavily influenced by money – and I really cannot think of any where that is not the case – why would it be a surprise, or in any way controversial, to say that Jewish people, out of proportion to their number, are influential?

It would seem to me to follow just as sunset follows sunrise.

After all, is anyone in any way surprised, or insulted, by the obvious fact that people of no means have no influence, none at all, their only political role being fleetingly to be appealed to for a vote every few years, and that appeal generally not even in person but by means of advertising?

And please note, even the advertising needed to do that, with all its ancillary research and marketing functions, costs serious money on a national scale.

In large countries, just sheer brief access to people holding high office is mainly determined by influence and wealth, and given the political system that we have, I don’t see how it could be otherwise. It is a form of social/political triage.

The fact shouldn’t be a point of envy or hatred either, because it is meaningless to have such feelings about natural outcomes of a given set of circumstances.

However, the unique reality of Israel, an organized state which claims to represent only one group of people, Jewish people, and employs many avenues of influence, does considerably alter the naturally occurring political situation.

It is a state with all the tools of intrusive intelligence services and with immense diplomatic privileges and access. It is also very heavily armed, giving it weight in international affairs it would not possess otherwise. And it tends to be supported, naturally enough, by most Jewish citizens in any country.

Having all the powers of an organized state behind one group of citizens in many different countries considerably distorts things, both realities and perceptions. It also becomes a source of common distress and frustration when that state is seen to be so patently unfair to millions of non-Jews who fall under its rule, as is very much the case for Israel.

To be fair and to be perceived as fair, Israel would actually have to go out of its way, maintaining a strictly hands-off, proper diplomatic behavior, to avoid trying to influence affairs in other countries, but we can all see that it does not do that.

It literally does the opposite frequently, actively trying to influence what laws and policies are adopted, as well as sometimes entering directly into partisan political matters, as it has done both in the United States and in Britain.

Just a few notable examples include efforts to see legislation equating criticism of the state of Israel with the prejudice of anti-Semitism, something that is patently unfair and untrue. We also see heavy efforts for legislation to curtail the rights of citizens to protest the state of Israel’s behavior with peaceful boycotts, activity that was key to ending apartheid in South Africa decades ago.

And we see various direct meddling by Israeli officials in politics abroad, as recently by Israel’s Prime Minister libelling the leader of Britain’s Labour Party. He was joined by some other Israeli officials, too.  And Israel directly interferes in foreign policy at times, as in the recent launching of all-out American economic war with serious military threats against Iran, a country which has broken no laws and started no wars.

Indeed, the source of many accusations around “anti-Semitism” isn’t actual prejudice – although that is often blurred by lobbyists and special-interest leaders. It is the natural human emotional disturbance millions feel over the glaring injustice of a national state and its efforts to evade all responsibility for that injustice.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

WHAT DOES IT REALLY MEAN TO GIVE UNQUALIFIED SUPPORT TO ISRAEL?

 

It means supporting a man who has never once been directly elected by people. A man with a perpetual minority who rules through deals with other smaller minority parties, most of which are about as prejudiced and anti-democratic as you will find anywhere on the planet.

Only recently, there were reports of Netanyahu’s trying to strike a deal for some restrictions on women being on streets in return for the support of an ultra-orthodox party whose enlightenment values are zero. He didn’t succeed, but not for lack of trying, so he has called another election.

This is also a man whose entire record is fanatical, stained many times over with the blood of thousands and thousands of people, people in Gaza, on the Mediterranean Sea, in the West Bank, in Southern Lebanon, and it is overwhelmingly the case that his victims have been civilians, a great many of them women and children.

A man not interested in peace as most people understand it but with the “peace” that comes in dominating others. He also has always shown an inclination to steal yet more of the property of others than he already has. His desire to dominate is why he has such a shared spirit with Donald Trump, why they admire each other. Of course, It would not be so if these two political scorpions had to share the same political arena.

Netanyahu’s years-long aggressive struggles for dominance and expansion may not have been anything on a scale with the world wars in Europe, but they have been unceasing, persistent, and bloody. And they all have been concerned with similar goals as the brutal wars in Europe, suppressing people you don’t like and taking their property. In philosophical and ethical terms, Netanyahu represents the same values as the jackboot crowd.

But you cannot look at this man’s drives and efforts only inside the geography of Israel and Palestine.

Here is a keen supporter of the bloodiest tyrant we have seen in a while, the new Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. A man who slaughters women and children in Yemen, who slaughters women and children in Syria, a man who openly has opponents brutally murdered, who oppresses the Shia Muslim minority in his own country, and a man supporting record numbers of bloody executions, including the executions of some teen-agers.

Netanyahu is also a keen supporter of President (Generalissimo) el-Sisi in Egypt, a man who holds Egypt’s only former elected president, Mohammed Morsi, in prison under death sentence. A man who regularly imprisons and tortures opponents by the hundreds and sometimes shoots people in the streets. Countless people rot in jails, forgotten. He is a man who was secretly sponsored to become leader of Egypt by Netanyahu. Indeed, it is known that a good deal of pressure was applied to Obama to help topple Egypt’s only democratically-elected government, that of Morsi, because Netanyahu simply loathed it.

Netanyahu is a man who has supported America’s long series of bloody, offensive wars in the Middle East, the so-called Neo-con Wars, whose purpose, through massive amounts of killing, has been to create “a rebirth of the Middle East,” one along lines acceptable to Israel and its imperial protector, the United States. He has been deeply involved in supporting such terrorists as al-Nusra and ISIS in Syria, both directly and through support of the efforts of Saudi Arabia, a country which has secretly paid much of the costs of the dirty work of these terrorists.

Over the years, many caches of Israeli-made weapons have been uncovered by Syria’s army. And Netanyahu openly has served wounded terrorists in Northern Israeli hospitals as well as at times having hundreds of them shifted around from one location to another by helicopter. His objectives in Syria have always been to make permanent Israel’s theft of the Golan Heights, to expand that holding even further, with, if possible, another slice of Syria, and to see the reasonable leader of the religiously-pluralistic society, Syria, eliminated and replaced by someone more along the lines of the Arab leaders he so fervently embraces.

Now, he has underway one of his biggest projects, either the toppling of Iran or the start of a war against it, a war led by the United States with Israel just enjoying the show from the sidelines. He has, inside Israel, vociferously taken credit for guiding Donald Trump on the destructive course he has taken.

This is an extremely dangerous project, a threat to all the people of the region, but Netanyahu is able, as is so often the case with various dirty projects, to keep his head down and let others assume center stage. The United States endorses such behavior because it knows how much antipathetic feeling there would be against Israel were it obvious to everyone who really leads the charge. And a Donald Trump is just the kind of warped personality only too happy to take credit for anything, no matter how destructive, which casts him in the light of someone who gets things done.

 

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

FURTHER POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY YOSSI KLEIN HELEVI IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

It truly is time for Israel to come to its senses and live as a friendly state with its neighbors.

It very much does appear that the privileged, coddled world Israel has assumed and taken great advantage of – all at the vast expense of tens of millions of other people – is coming to an end.

Israel has demonstrated its tendency to take everything it can get away with, always asking for more, and giving nothing to anyone.

In so-called peace negotiations, it has played the world’s longest-running game of double-dealing. Most readers likely will not know that it has never been an official policy, and it still is not today, to accept a two-state solution.

It allows the naive in the world to believe otherwise, while doing everything in its power to work against the idea, whether its killing the Oslo Accords, trying to starve out the people of Gaza, or carrying on countless black operations to disrupt and destroy the lives of those it treats as enemies.

You simply cannot go on like that forever. Moreover, the situation violates the fundamental sense of fairness so many Americans have.

Up until now, that basic sense of justice has been kept quiescent by sentimental memories of Biblical Sunday School stories, constant reminders of the Holocaust of nearly three-quarters of a century ago, and pin-point work in campaign contributions by the huge Israel Lobby.

But visions of killing thousands of refugees (Gaza), the violation of property rights in Jerusalem and the West Bank, endless scenes of abuse, and the arrogant tone of Israel’s governments are awakening Americans and others to the reality of contemporary Israel.

Israel has had its own way for a ridiculously long time, never once sincerely trying to make a proper peace, yet always keeping its hand out for more American assistance ( more than $500 per year per Israeli), more American loan guarantees, more American privileges (like free trade), and more access to American weapons.

Under Bush, Israel went on an arrogant spree of murder and abuse, always hoping to drive the remaining Palestinians from their homes.

It has threatened virtually every neighbor in the Middle East, attacking most of them at one time or another.

But it has for the most part been the same from the beginning. Whatever original documents you examine which are generally credited with legitimizing Israel (Sykes-Picot Agreement, Balfour Declaration, and U.N. Resolutions) – regardless of the question of whether such authorities had any legal right to dispose of other people’s property – we find the idea of a Palestine Territory roughly equally divided between two states and Jerusalem shared.

But we do not see that today. Israel controls most of what was Palestine and works tirelessly to drive out the millions in Gaza and in the West Bank.

Mubarak has always cooperated in matters like keeping the border with Gaza closed so that his cheques from Langley, Virginia, continue flowing. He was even in the process of building a hideous steel wall that goes deep underground to prevent the tunnels which a desperate people use sometimes to relieve their misery.

He has been no friend to his own people, eighty million longing for responsible modern government, and he has been no friend to the poor Palestinians under seemingly endless oppression from Israel.

When you base international solutions on truth and honest dealing with real problems, you often get real, long-term solutions.

But Israel has lived in a fantasy world in which truths are never faced, dishonesty about democracy and human rights is the mantra, while gigantic subsidies and streams of weapons pour in from the United States to keep this Crusader garrison state going.

Israel is the most subsidized nation on earth. It receives about $500 per year in aid from the United States per citizen – more than hundreds of millions of people in this world must live on as their entire earnings.

It receives unparalleled access to the American President and its military and intelligence establishment. It has a free-trade treaty that would be the envy of scores of small countries. It receives billions in payments from Jews abroad and it has received billions in assistance from Germany in reparations for the Holocaust. It enjoys technology-sharing with the United States worth billions a year and it is given privileged access to contracts in the United States.

So subsidized is Israel that few people understand that when they pick up an Israeli tomato or Clementine or other produce, they are buying the most expensive produce in the world, all of it subsidized with “cheap” water from a very arid region, and a great deal of the precious water used hostilely diverted from Israel’s neighbors. To supply new water Israel uses desalination plants which produce some of world’s most costly water, not the kind of stuff a realistic economy uses to grow and export tomatoes.

With all its immense privileges and huge subsidies, why must Israel also demand that its neighbors live in governments of Israel’s choice, that eighty million Egyptians must live under oppression to make the 6 million Jews in Israel happy (population of 7 million is roughly 20% Arab). This is insanely unreasonable. It more than anyone is entitled to ask. It is beyond chutzpah. It is hubris, and if you know the Greek myths, you know the price of hubris.