Over the weekend there was a lot more talk about Donald Trump and his operatives loving Russia, and about how Vladimir Putin wants Trump to win. “The hand of the Kremlin has been at work in this campaign for some time,” Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager said on ABC. The Russian influence must be true, because it’s all over our media; but you can be sure it’s only half true because they’re saying it so loud. The other half of the truth is that Russia is going to lose, big (because the media are talking about it and because Trump is going down). And the media have a guilty conscience, because they know the US power structure is beholden to Israel, but they can’t talk about that foreign influence. No one talks about the hand of Israel; but Hillary Clinton promises her biggest donor, Haim Saban, whose one issue is Israel, that she’ll work against the boycott campaign and she’ll meet Benjamin Netanyahu in her first month of office: the same Netanyahu who tried to undermine our president’s signature foreign policy achievement by speaking and lobbying Congress under the president’s nose, Netanyahu who said that America could be easily moved, Netanyahu who pushed the Iraq war in 2002 to transform the Middle East, even as Hillary Clinton was voting for that war. When Donald Trump tried to take a “neutral” position on Israel, Hillary Clinton told the leading Israel lobby group AIPAC that he had “no business” being president and she was going to take the relationship with Israel “to the next level.” Both Clinton, this summer, and Obama, four summers ago, squashed the party’s grass roots when they made a move to change the party platform on Israel, because the nominees worried about losing big Jewish Zionist donors– whose influence over the Democratic party is “gigantic” and “shocking,” JJ Goldberg and Stephane Schriock of Emily’s List said this spring. So Clinton made sure that the word “occupation” didn’t appear in the platform, in this the 50th year of the occupation. Just as Neera Tanden, the Clinton aide who heads a Democratic Party thinktank, censored articles that were critical of Israel; and a few months later the authors of those articles were no longer employed by her thinktank; and meantime Tanden kissed up to Benjamin Netanyahu, at the very time that he was undermining President Obama on the Iran deal. It has now been ten years since The Israel Lobby paper was published in London– not here, because it couldn’t be published here. Notwithstanding the article and book’s impact, it’s a shadow impact; everyone in the shadow of the establishment has read it and everyone in the establishment has read it too, but with a plain brown cover on it, as Colin Powell’s former chief of staff joked. Because to be in the establishment you must deny its importance. The Atlantic, which commissioned and killed the original paper, continues to publish Jeffrey Goldberg, who once served in the Israeli military, and who helped give us the Iraq war with bad reports in 2002, and who tried to undermine the Iran deal. The central idea of the Israel lobby is simple and it has been confirmed a hundred times but the media will never report it directly. Here it is: United States support is an existential issue for Israel; but non-Jewish voters and leaders cannot be counted upon to love Israel on their own, and therefore the tiny American Jewish community must speak in one voice and (unified checkbooks) to persuade American leaders that it’s in the U.S.’s best interest to do so. Israel supporters confirm this idea again and again. “What keeps me up at night is the dependence of Israel on the United States” —Abe Foxman. “American Jews had a deferential attitude toward Israel. They saw their job to support Israel, to provide Israel with financial and political support it asked for” — Dov Waxman, scholar. Israel’s influence has distorted our politics for nearly 40 years. Tom Friedman told a British interviewer that George W. Bush abandoned the peace process because he saw his father take on the Israel lobby and lose a second term. Tom Friedman also said that the Congress is “bought and paid for” by the Israel lobby. But Friedman never wrote about the lobby head on, a dereliction of duty if ever there was one. It is just too embarrassing or hurtful to talk about the role of Zionist Jews in US public life. The idea has to be suppressed because a) we all know that there is a dual loyalty element implicit in Zionism and talking about the lobby brings up the whole international-Jew canard; and b) the lobby has been effective by working behind the scenes as a “nightflower,” so its purpose is defeated when people talk about it and everyone gets to weigh in. From the start, empowered Jewish journalists denied that there was a lobby or it was powerful. Jeffrey Goldberg told the Center for Jewish History that it was no different from the ball-bearings lobby. But let’s talk some more about the Kremlin.
