From Yahweh to Zion
Page 38
Crypto-Zionism is a phenomenon that goes far beyond neoconservatism, and can even be compared to the crypto-Judaism of the sixteenth century. If, after June 1967, as Norman Podhoretz recalls, Israel became “the religion of the American Jews,”536 it goes without saying that this religion should remain discreet, if possible even secret, since it was incompatible with American patriotism, at least as conceived by those who, in a similar way, consecrate an almost religious worship to America. The loyalty of American Jews to Israel, of course, naturally engendered the fear of being accused of allegiance to a foreign state, and thus aroused in them, as protective camouflage, increased patriotism in their public proclamations. The more American Jews became Israelis, the more they felt the need to be American in the public square. It was not just about being a Jew in the tent and a man in the street, according to the saying of the Haskalah, but of being “an Israeli within the Jewish community, and an American on the public goy stage.”
For most of today’s American Jews, this dual identity has become almost an unconscious reflex, as the interests of Israel and the United States seem to coincide in their mind. But to get there, it was necessary that this habit of thought be inculcated into them by their ruling elites. The neoconservatives were the spearhead of this ideological struggle, gradually dragging along with them almost all the Jewish representative elites of America. They highlighted a new form of US patriotism profitable to Israel, just as the sixteenth-century crypto-Jews had encouraged a new pro-Judaism form of Christianity (Calvinism).
The Hijacking of the Republican Party
The neoconservatives initially operated in the Democratic camp because, until the 1980s, interventionism was a Democratic tradition, linked to a “progressive” utopian discourse. It was Woodrow Wilson who had declared in 1912, “We are chosen and prominently chosen to show the way to the nations of the world how they shall walk in the path of liberty.”537 Richard Perle, one of the most influential and most Machiavellian neocons, was from 1969 to 1980 parliamentary assistant to Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, who succeeded Johnson as the leader of the militarist and pro-Israel wing of the Democratic Party. In 1970, Perle was caught red-handed by the FBI while transmitting to the Israeli embassy classified information obtained from Hal Sonnenfeldt, a member of the National Security Council.538
Perle skillfully took advantage of the Watergate hurricane to bring his two associates, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, into the Republican camp. The two would remain the main mercenaries or “Sabbath goys” of the neoconservatives, placed in strategic posts to open the doors of the kingdom. After succeeding Nixon, Gerald Ford (who had been a member of the Warren Commission) appointed Donald Rumsfeld as his chief of staff; Rumsfeld then chose Dick Cheney as his deputy. Having inspired Ford in the cabinet reshuffle that became known journalistically as the “Halloween Massacre,” Rumsfeld then seized the position of secretary of defense, while Cheney replaced him as chief of staff. Thus there appeared for the first time the explosive combination of Rumsfeld at Defense, Cheney in the White House.
After America evacuated its troops from Vietnam in 1973, the Cold War calmed down, partly thanks to the diplomatic initiatives of Nixon and Kissinger. The CIA produced reassuring analyses of the USSR’s military capabilities and ambitions. It was then that, with the help of a powerful lobby financed by weapons manufacturers—the Committee on the Present Danger—Rumsfeld and Cheney persuaded Ford to appoint an independent committee, known as Team B. Its mandate was to revise upward the CIA estimates of the Soviet threat, and reactivate a war atmosphere in public opinion, Congress, and the administration. Team B was composed of twelve experts chosen from among the most fanatical cold warriors. It was chaired by Richard Pipes and cochaired by Paul Wolfowitz, two protégés of Perle. The committee produced a terrifying report claiming Moscow possessed not only a large and sophisticated arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, but also the will to dominate all of Europe and the Middle East—and the readiness to start a nuclear confrontation. Pointing to a “window of vulnerability” in the US defense system, Team B’s report advocated a broad and urgent increase in the defense budget, which began under Carter and then accelerated under Reagan.
Thus those who were later called the neoconservatives entered the state apparatus for the first time—in the baggage of Rumsfeld and Cheney—and bound their fate to the Republican party. Those previously called “conservatives,” who were non-interventionists, were gradually pushed to the margins and described as paleo-conservatives, while the neoconservatives took over the reins of the Republican Party. During the parenthesis of Democratic president Jimmy Carter (1976–80), the neoconservatives reinforced their influence within the Republican Party. In order to unify the largest number of Jews around their policies, they founded the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), which became the second-most powerful pro-Israel lobby after AIPAC. One of its stated aims was: “To inform the American defense and foreign affairs community about the important role Israel can and does play in bolstering democratic interests in the Mediterranean and the Middle East.”539
Mimicking true conservatives, neoconservatives built their reputations for defending American traditional values. The best-known example is that of Allan Bloom, a disciple of Leo Strauss, who published The Closing of the American Mind in 1988. This moralistic posture, along with their warlike anti-communism, allowed the neocons to rally the Christian right. In 1980 evangelical Christians became for the first time a major electoral force mobilized to support Israel in the name of the struggle against communism. They had the advantage of being extremely manipulable, quaffing as “gospel truth” the inflamed sermons of the stars of their mega-churches, who assumed ever-more-assertive pro-Israel positions. Exemplifying this trend, televangelist Jerry Falwell received the Jabotinsky Centennial Medal from Menachem Begin in 1980 for services rendered to Israel, declaring “he who stands against Israel stands against God.”540
Pastors such as Falwell help influence US foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction. But even more importantly, they serve as camouflage for the neoconservatives. The obtrusive presence of Christians makes Jewish influence less visible. In reality, evangelical Christians do represent an electoral force, but have no coherent political agenda and therefore no direct political power. When, in 1980, the evangelical Christians voted overwhelmingly for Ronald Reagan, none of their representatives acceded to any position of responsibility.
On the other hand, the neoconservatives were paid with a dozen posts in national security and foreign policy: Richard Perle and Douglas Feith to the Department of Defense, Richard Pipes at the National Security Council, and Paul Wolfowitz, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, and Michael Ledeen in the State Department. They helped Reagan escalate the Cold War, showering billions of dollars on the military-industrial complex. Thanks in particular to the Strategic Defense Initiative, a space shield better known as “Star Wars,” the defense budget exploded, reaching for the first time the landmark of a trillion dollars. Reagan created CENTCOM, the US military command center in the Middle East, and consolidated the American alliance with Israel, declaring: “Israel has the democratic will, national cohesion, technological capacity and military fiber to stand forth as America’s trusted ally.”541 In 1981, the two countries signed their first military pact, then embarked on several shared operations, some legal and others not, as evidenced by the network of arms trafficking and paramilitary operations embedded within the Iran-Contra affair. Militarism and Zionism had become so linked in their common cause that in his 1982 book The Real Anti-Semitism in America, the director of the Anti-Defamation League, Nathan Perlmutter, could portray the pacifism of the “peacemakers of Vietnam vintage, transmuters of swords into plowshares,” as a new form of anti-Semitism.542
It was in this context that Israeli strategists planned the next stage of the project for a Greater Israel extending “from the Nile to the Euphrates” according to the promise of Yahweh to Abraham (Gene
sis 15:18), and to the vision of the founding fathers of Zionism, including Theodor Herzl.543 One of the most explicit documents on this project, known through its translation from Hebrew into English by Israel Shahak, is a text entitled “A Strategy for Israel in the Eighties,” written for the World Zionist Organization in February 1982 by Oded Yinon, a former senior official in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and contributor to The Jerusalem Post. The author presents the pluri-ethnic character of Middle Eastern states as offering “far-reaching opportunities for the first time since 1967” for opening “a new epoch in human history.” He advocates a strategy of control of the Middle East by fragmenting all of Israel’s neighbors on the model of what was partially accomplished in Lebanon by a “civil war” which, from 1975 to 1990, ravaged that nation of seventeen religious communities plus Palestinian refugees—a country, in other words, that formed an inverted reflection of the mono-confessional and endogamic nation that is Israel: “The total disintegration of Lebanon into five regional localized governments is the precedent for the entire Arab world including Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and the Arab peninsula, in a similar fashion. The dissolution of Egypt and later Iraq into districts of ethnic and religious minorities following the example of Lebanon is the main long-range objective of Israel on the Eastern Front. The present military weakening of these states is the short-term objective. Syria will disintegrate into several states along the lines of its ethnic and sectarian structure, as is happening in Lebanon today.” In this process, “Every kind of inter-Arab confrontation will assist us in the short run.”544
But it wasn’t happening fast enough. The fate of Lebanon, home of the Palestinian resistance since the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, had not yet been sealed. In June 1982, Minister of Defense Ariel Sharon launched the invasion of Lebanon (Operation “Peace in Galilee”) and pulverized the prestigious capital, Beirut, under a carpet of bombs that had been graciously furnished by the United States, killing 10,000 civilians and creating half a million refugees. The massacre of more than 1,500 women, children, and old people in the two Palestinian refugee camps of Beirut gave Sharon the nickname “the Butcher of Sabra and Shatila.” Israel’s aggression brought new chaos to Lebanon, but after the retreat of Israeli troops, Syrian and Iranian influence in the region grew stronger. Though the PLO was militarily weakened, another resistance group was born: Hezbollah, a Shi’ite movement financed by Iran and calling for the destruction of the State of Israel.
Under the Israel-friendly presidency of Reagan, America could only respond with feeble gestures. What is euphemistically called the “Israeli lobby”—actually a gargantuan power machine using corruption and blackmail against the US elite—kept the number one global power on a tight leash. The 1988 election of George Bush Sr., Reagan’s vice president, changed things slightly. Bush was less a friend to Israel than to Saudi Arabia, where he had business ties since the 1970s. James Baker, his campaign manager appointed secretary of state, used economic pressure to force Israeli Prime Minister Yitshak Shamir to participate in the Madrid Conference in November 1991, and appeared receptive to Arab proposals during the Conference.545
Bush mostly purged neoconservatives from his government, but nonetheless accorded the secretary of defense post to Dick Cheney, who brought along Scooter Libby and Paul Wolfowitz. The latter was then able to strengthen his position at the Pentagon, where he had already served as deputy assistant secretary of defense under Carter before migrating to the State Department under Reagan. When Bush unleashed Operation Desert Storm in January 1991, he did it to liberate Kuwait, protect Saudi Arabia, and annihilate the Iraqi army. He held to his UN Security Council mandate, resisting demands from the neoconservatives—he called them “the crazies”—to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein’s regime. On March 6, 1991, he stood before Congress and declared the war had ended. When he mentioned in his speech “the very real prospect of a new world order,” it was for the purpose of underlining his trust in the mission of the United Nations organization. What he called for was “a world where the United Nations, freed from the Cold War stalemate, is poised to fulfil the historic vision of its founders.”
This was when a competing doctrine, the so-called “Wolfowitz doctrine,” was formulated in a secret report dated February 1992 and fortuitously “leaked” to The New York Times, which published extracts on March 7. Under the title Defense Planning Guidance, the report, written by Wolfowitz and Libby, vaunted American hegemony: “Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival,” and to enforce “the sense that the world order is ultimately backed by the U.S.” In opposition to Bush’s public discourses, the Wolfowitz report advocated unilateralism, denigrating the role of the United Nations and stating the US cannot “allow our critical interests to depend solely on international mechanisms that can be blocked by countries whose interests may be very different from our own.” Therefore, “we should expect future coalitions to be ad hoc assemblies.” Finally the report, which would become official policy under Bush Jr. in 2001, promotes the need for preemptive war “for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.” The document also makes a specific commitment to the security of Israel.546
Bush’s opposition to the neoconservative agenda probably caused his defeat in the 1992 elections, just as the Democrat Jimmy Carter paid for his dovish policies and his critiques of Israel in 1980. It is a disconcerting fact that, since the end of World War II, the only American presidents deprived of a second term in office (including the partially deprived Nixon) were those who resisted Israel the most. The only exception is Johnson, whose unpopularity was irreversible.
Setting the Stage for the Clash of Civilizations
The Clinton Administration (1993–2000) was itself “full of warm Jews,” in the words of an influential rabbi quoted by the Israeli newspaper Maariv. He deemed that the United States no longer possessed “a government of goyim.” In the National Security Council, for example, “7 out of 11 top staffers are Jews.”547
The clan of the neoconservatives, for their part, entrenched themselves in the opposition. They reinforced their influence on the Republican party and on public opinion, thanks to a press more and more subservient to their crypto-imperial version of American patriotism. They indirectly influenced foreign policy in the Middle East by creating or taking control of a large number of think tanks: the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), where Richard Perle has served since 1985; the Middle East Forum (MEF) founded in 1990 by Daniel Pipes (son of Richard); and the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), founded by Meyrav Wurmser in 1998. William Kristol, son of Irving, founded in 1995 a new magazine, The Weekly Standard, which immediately became the dominant voice of the neoconservatives thanks to funding from the pro-Israel Rupert Murdoch. In 1997 it would be the first publication to call for a new war against Saddam Hussein. The neocons also flooded the book market with propaganda portraying Saddam Hussein as a threat to America. Besides Tyranny’s Ally: America’s Failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein by David Wurmser (1999), let us mention Laurie Mylroie’s Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein’s Unfinished War Against America (2000), which is about “an undercover war of terrorism, waged by Saddam Hussein,” that is nothing more than “a phase in a conflict that began in August 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait, and that has not ended.” Richard Perle has described this book as “splendid and wholly convincing.”548
In Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu succeeded Shimon Perez as Prime Minister in 1996. Netanyahu is the grandson of a Lithuanian rabbi who immigrated to Palestine in 1920. His father, like many settlers in Eastern Europe, traded his original name for a local one: Benzion Mileikowsky became Benzion Netanyahu. Benzion, whom we have already quoted in earlier chapters, was from 1940 onward the assistant to Zeev Jabotinsky, whose heroic portrait he painted in his book The Founding Fathers of Zionism (alongside Leo Pinsker, Theodor Herzl, Max Nordau, and Israel Zangwill). Jabotinsky, creator of the
first Israeli armed forces and inspirer of the Irgun, is also the founder of “revisionist Zionism,” a current that broke with Weizmann’s World Zionist Organization in 1925. Convinced that the Zionist project could never be achieved by diplomacy alone, he wrote in 1923, in an article entitled “the Iron Wall”: “All colonization, even the most restricted, must continue in defiance of the will of the native population. Therefore, it can continue and develop only under the shield of force, comprising an Iron Wall that the local population can never break through. This is our Arab policy. To formulate it any other way would be hypocrisy. […] Zionism is a colonizing adventure and therefore it stands or it falls by the question of armed force.”
Hypocrisy was the strategic choice of Weizmann as well as Ben-Gurion. The latter was reserved in his public statements, but privately expressed his desire to expel the Arabs from Palestine; whereas revisionist Zionism, an unrepressed movement that wears its violence on its sleeve, is more honest. The coming to power of Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996 thus marked the hardening of Israeli policy toward the Palestinians. In 2009, Netanyahu appointed as minister of foreign affairs and deputy prime minister Avigdor Lieberman, the founder of the Yisrael Beiteinu party, which presents itself as “a national movement with the clear vision to follow in the brave path of Zev Jabotinsky.”549 During the assault on Gaza in January 2009, Lieberman advocated “fighting Hamas just as the United States fought the Japanese during the Second World War.”550