John Chuckman

COMMENTS POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY DONALD MACINTYRE IN THE INDEPENDENT

 

“Trump declaring Israeli settlements legal is indefensible – Palestinians deserve more than vote-grabbing

“The settlements, which are swallowing more and more land and resources, remain the biggest obstacle to a negotiated end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict”

 

It’s just the latest shameful chapter in the story of Trump’s relationship with Israel.

He has proved the most servile and corrupt President since Lyndon Johnson in all matters touching Israel.

He has ignored international law a number of times to give Israel something that is not his to give – Golan, Jerusalem, West Bank properties – and he has created some ugly international situations on Israel’s behalf.

The unnecessary vicious assault on a law-abiding Iran – his just arbitrarily tearing-up of a valid treaty, extreme war-like sanctions, serious military threats, even using the word “obliteration for 80 million people – is a direct result of trying to please Netanyahu and the important big donors in the United States who want pretty much whatever Netanyahu wants.

So were Trump’s crazed steps against the United Nations – quitting UN Human Rights, quitting UNESCO, cutting UN Palestinian aid funds, threatening voting members in the General Assembly by telling them they are being watched how they vote, and owing the UN around a billion dollars in back dues.

A rather vicious and focused set of acts taken against international law and order.

The basic driving political force for these deeds in the United States is less votes, I think, than money.

America’s campaign finance system is almost totally corrupt, as are its laws governing the activities of political lobbies.

It’s often joked that America gets the best government money can buy, and it really isn’t far from the truth.

The concept, “money is free speech” dominates American politics.

Israel has some of the best organized and financed lobby groups in the United States. It also has a clutch of American multi-billionaires who identify very closely with Israel for all of their huge campaign contributions. Those are Trump’s main targets for such policies.

The lobby groups not only supply cash but also expert professional and technical assistance with campaign work. They are also quite influential in press coverage in America’s “quality” press and broadcasting, all of which is managed with great deference to Israel’s interests.

As far as numbers, American Jews make up about 1.5% of the country’s population. “Fundamentalist” Protestants, depending on your definition, total between 6% and 25% of the population, the world’s largest such group and certainly a large segment of the electorate.

However, American Fundamentalist Christians are seen in polls as not being a particularly well-informed group, as you might expect with a good part of them waiting for the Second Coming of the Lord. Likely, in most cases, they not even aware of many of Trump’s acts, only having a general awareness of his friendliness towards Israel.

But the money and influence people of course follow and analyze and weigh the value of every step.

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Response to another comment:

I think it is more complicated than that.

Israel, de facto, is an American colony in the Middle East, a special one with many extraordinary privileges. Many citizens freely move back and forth, and so does money and influence and technology.

Israel almost always operates on the two levels simultaneously – that of small “independent” country and American imperial colony.

It makes for a bizarre and complicated relationship.

It compares in many ways to France’s old relationship with Algeria, which France considered as an integral part of metropolitan France, although the relationship has dimensions making it still different in nature than that.

The concept of Israel includes the very emotional claim of being refuge for the world’s formerly terribly abused Jews. That claim of course ignores the healthy, prosperous situation of Jews in America and in many other places. It also ignores the fact that the majority of the world’s Jews do not live in Israel. Indeed, America alone has about as many Jews as Israel does.

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Response to another comment:

Sorry, you are confused.

The Jews you speak of in London are European people, not Middle Eastern people. “Judea,” apart from being a long-dead concept like “Troy,” is not their place of origin.

The Ashkenazi and the ancient Hebrews are not the same people, except for the religion they profess.

The Ashkenazi go back on the order of 900-1000 years according to DNA work.

Their native language is Yiddish, a dialect of German.

Most of their customs and dress are derived from central and eastern Europe, as deli food and most of the dishes eaten on holidays.

Even the dress of the ultra-Orthodox does not reflect the Middle East at all, but central and eastern Europe of the 18th and 19th centuries.

It is most likely that the closest we have to direct descendants from the ancient Hebrews are indeed the Palestinians, and what a bitter irony that is. Two thousand years of history have made many changes in them, including religion, but it is a well-established historical fact that the Romans did not expel populations from conquered territories.

The Romans wanted the farmers farming and the taxpayers paying taxes. The whole “wandering Jews following expulsion from the Holy Land” story is just that, a story, one which more closely binds European Jews to the ancient Hebrews, but it just cannot be historical.

The Hebrews, at least some of them, clearly at some point in history became evangelical, having seen the great success of Christianity, which did start as a small Hebrew sect, and they proselytized in many regions, creating what became remote Jewish colonies.

A larger Jewish population gave more opportunity for marriage, too, something that is always problem for small groups. That is why there are varying traces of Semitic characteristics found in the DNA of Ashkenazi people.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN RUSSIA INSIDER

Let’s End the Israeli Tie-That-Binds
” … there is absolutely no national interest that compels Washington to do anything for Israel.
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Response to a long comment which lists major enterprises doing business in Israel and says it is time to boycott:

Your list effectively shows us why the Israel Lobby is so powerful in the United States that it is able to influence policy, even in an irrational direction, irrational when you consider the total interests of the United States.

Owing to native talent and hard work, Jewish Americans have been extremely successful in business and professions, giving them the financial weight and connections to get many things done which other groups would not be able to do.

Good parts of your list also reflect the fact that the American and Israeli governments have worked very actively for many years to integrate Israel into mainline Western business and political affairs.

America constantly pushes for new privileges and advantages with Europe and others for Israel, hoping eventually that it becomes identified and accepted as virtually a European nation.

The Neocons in Washington have always pushed a whole package of American-Israeli ties including Western integration as part of their efforts to closely bind Israel’s interests with America’s, something seen as giving this originally poorly-conceived state a strong foundation for the future.

I say “poorly-conceived” because modern Israel has always been pushed and justified by weak ideas like Judaism being considered an ethnicity, which it certainly is not, and a separate state being an absolutely necessary defense against any repeat of what happened in Germany 75 years ago, that also being a demonstrably incorrect idea.

But even if Judaism were properly considered an ethnicity, it is a long-abandoned concept in the advanced world (one which took force originally in the early Nineteenth Century as states like modern Italy or Germany emerged from old empires) that national states are composed of a single ethnicity, either primarily or exclusively.

All European states are gradually becoming populations based on migration just as America long has been. For many reasons which really cannot be changed – from low birth rates in advanced societies, including Israel, to the movement of populations in a globalized world economy – there is no alternative future for anyone, including Israel.

So, the vast effort to keep Israel somehow pure so far as Jewish identity works completely against some of the most powerful tides in advanced human society. You cannot really order the waves or the wind to cease and whatever barriers you erect can endure only for a time.

Effectively what is happening is that Israel is emerging as America’s Mideast colony, a major colony much like, say, Algeria was for France, and a colony that in many matters verges on being a fifty-first state, again as the Mediterranean part of Algeria was once considered part of Metropolitan France itself.

Although it is always important to keep in mind that Israel can never really become that since its founding principles exclude any possibility of ever being under laws like America’s Bill of Rights.

Also, nothing of this nature endures long-term, just as Algeria and France parted ways and did so in great violence and hostility. The important major interests of the United States and Israel are not at all the same, and they cannot indefinitely artificially be maintained to be the same, as they are being maintained now.

There is a great irony in all of this because modern Israelis, indeed, largely have European origins. The Ashkenazim are a Germanic people whose native language, Yiddish, is derived from German. Even the foods the Ashkenazi eat virtually all originate in Germany and Eastern Europe, all the typical fare of delicatessens.

Despite sharing the religion of the ancient Hebrews, the Ashkenazim are not their descendants. But the re-creation of Israel with a European population and a Western agenda has been a terribly costly and mostly unsuccessful enterprise. Israel, it is simply a fact, remains the most subsidized entity on earth.

The vast subsidy rightly needs to count all the private movements of capital, all the unique privileges granted – everything from special free-trade deals to recognizing dual citizenship which allows constant movement back-and-forth with America.

It needs to account for America’s defense and security establishments sharing all kinds of technologies and proprietary concepts, things it does not share with others. It needs to account for unprecedented access to high American officials of every description with all the shared information that entails.

It also needs to account for the bribes the American government pays to a number of neighboring Arab governments – as Egypt or Jordan – and for the important dedication of a portion of America’s extremely costly military to Israeli matters.

And there is the special selection of Israeli companies in being given some immense American government contracts in everything from communications to security. So, America’s nearly $4 billion a year in direct assistance, by far the greatest amount given any other country, is only the beginning of the subsidies keeping Israel afloat.

It is, in truth, a most unnatural relationship for any ostensibly independent country.

John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE AND VIDEO IN THE INDEPENDENT

Here’s more propaganda from The Independent, so poorly disguised you cannot vouch for the source.

God, don’t you ever get tired of pushing this stuff out?

Even if you could account for the source, this is propaganda precisely because it has absolutely no perspective. The best propaganda always has a tiny bit of truth, and the truth here is that, yes, such weapons are used.

You absolutely cannot fairly take one small part of a huge destructive war and suggest that it explains what is going on. It cannot. It can horrify people though, and that would appear to be its purpose here because The Independent makes no practice of presenting such things in most situations.

I can’t recall any equivalent material being used by The Independent for Israel’s slaughters in Gaza, and such material does exist. Some very brave photographers took images of the rivers of blood and smashed children.

I don’t recall such material for America’s (and of course Britain’s) proud invasion of Iraq in which such ghastly weapons as cluster bombs and white phosphorus were used. Thousands of pictures exist of sliced-up children and smashed women, but you never ran any.

The creepy Saudis, whom Britain implicitly supports and with whom it explicitly does a handsome business, are, right now, killing masses of civilians in Yemen, and they are using America’s dreadful cluster bombs to tear them apart, maiming those not killed. Where are your terrifying images?

The horror in Syria did not start by the government’s barrel-bombing places. The barrel-bombing is a response to the infiltration and entrenchment of tens of thousands of heavily-armed terrorists trying to destroy the country from scattered and hidden positions all over it.

They were infiltrated into Syria by the lunatic now running Turkey. They are financed and supplied by the absolute princes of Saudi Arabia. They were assisted, advised, and even led in some cases by the same government of Israel which holds more than five million unwilling people as prisoners. Yet more money came from the absolute princes of Qatar.

And the United States has also supplied and trained elements. It clearly approves of what has been going on or it would be stopped. We know to a certainty that nothing happens anywhere near its Middle East colony of which it does not approve.

Britain under David Cameron, as one of America’s most groveling allies, has also done its dirty bit to help.

This entire misery could be ended if outside help and support for thugs were ended, but that help and support, by the above-named parties, will not stop. Because those countries want Syria destroyed just the way Iraq was destroyed, reduced to a meaningless set of rump states with a population left to suffer for a generation.

And they want to achieve that in the most cowardly of fashions, giving the bloody work over to hired mercenaries and ideological maniacs while standing off – tsk-tsking at the horrors as Cameron is wont to do – pretending they have nothing to do with it.

I simply do not understand how anyone can think human trash like ISIS and al-Nusra Front should prevail over a reasonable, highly-educated man like Assad, a leader who has always protected a secular and diverse society and who keeps the support of large parts of that society.

It is a totally absurd situation, and it can only be explained in light of American policy. It is the policy that destroyed Iraq and Libya and sparked in large covert operations the whole pointless and wrongly-named Arab Spring. There was nothing spring-like in what happened.

A brief experiment with democratic government in Egypt was smothered following Israel’s complaints about the threat it represented. Egypt was returned to a decades-old dictatorship much to Israel’s liking. In other places, like Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, potential uprisings were violently suppressed by absolute governments.

It was all an effort to re-mold the region to the liking of America and its Middle East colony under a façade of popular revolt and never mind all the inconvenience of death, destruction, and misery. The region’s authoritarian governments were overthrown only where they disagreed with America and/or Israel while in all other cases they were left to flourish, and the authoritarian governments overthrown were only replaced by others. Democracy flourishes nowhere.

Well, Mr. Putin understands that, and if the nations doing the deadly supplying aren’t going to stop, he’ll destroy what they’ve supplied. The Syrian army will do the rest.

NOTE:

Julian Assange has said that the massive influx of refugees into Europe is, in fact, part of the American strategy to de-stabilize Syria, and I don’t doubt that he is right. Emptying Syria of good parts of its professionals and technicians only further weakens it.

This, of course, puts in quite a different light Ms. Merkel’s controversial, open-arms support for unlimited refugees in Germany. She, rather than speaking from a heart larger than we would have credited her from past behaviors, is just once again supporting American policy, a much more familiar stance for her.