United States of Israel

I can’t think long about U.S. policy toward Israel without remembering the political mastermind who destroyed his career by suggesting this photo to a reporter. I’ll get to him soon. When I do, you’ll know why.

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Some facts of the Israel-Hamas war that strike me as key:

(♦) Hamas is a militant, adamantly anti-Israel movement that has governed Gaza since 2006. It is partly Israel’s creation.

(♦) The people of Gaza chose Hamas’ leadership in a 2006 election. Hamas hasn’t permitted a vote since.  I thus regard Hamas as a dictatorial power, and infer a wide gap between Hamas’ actions and the wants of its Gaza subjects. Gazans are stuck with Hamas.

(♦) Last October 7, Hamas launched a terrorist attack against Israel. ‘Brutal’ and ‘inhuman’ hardly go far enough. From page 3 of the U.N. report:

… people were shot, often at close range; burnt alive in their homes as they tried to hide in their safe rooms; gunned down or killed by grenades in bomb shelters where they sought refuge; and hunted down on the Nova music festival site as well as in the fields and roads adjacent to the festival ground. Other violations included sexual violence, abduction of hostages and corpses, the public display of captives, both dead and alive, the mutilation of corpses, including decapitation, and the looting and destruction of civilian property.

(♦) The attacked country does not enjoy a good international reputation. The United Nations Humans Rights Council has resolved nearly as many resolutions condemning Israel as for the rest of the world combined.  Israel’s 2018 ‘nation-state’ law helped institutionalize a long-standing double standard between Jewish Israelis and Israeli’s Palestinian citizens (PCIs), reminiscent to me of the Jim Crow South and apartheid South Africa. PCIs hold different identity documents than Jewish Israelis, generally live in segregated communities and often face organized intimidation efforts when they try to vote.

(♦) The reputation of Israel’s current right-wing government is especially poor. Current national security minister Ben-Gvir long adorned his living room with a photo of Brooklyn-born mass murderer Baruch Goldstein, who gunned down twenty-nine Muslims at prayer, including children. Goldstein’s grave has become a pilgrimage site for Israeli extremists.

(♦) Israel declared war against Hamas, but has incurred widespread civilian casualties while targeting Hamas fighters. Israel accuses Hamas of employing “human shields,” of deliberately placing command centers under hospitals and in close proximity to population centers, in violation of the Geneva convention. Its far right leaders may be unconcerned about Palestinian casualties.

The war thus waged by Israel is widely described as a genocide. Seventy-one percent of Spaniards regard it as such. As of mid-August, the Gaza health ministry counts more than 40,000 Palestinians killed; most of the dead are women and children. “This unimaginable situation,” said Volker Türk, the United Nations’ High Commissioner for Human Rights, “is overwhelmingly due to recurring failures by the Israeli Defense Forces to comply with the rules of war.”

Nearly the entire population of Gaza has been displaced.  Israel has been widely accused of starving Gaza’s population intentionally. The BBC has published heart-rending video stories.  Some samples:

https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-middle-east-67199156
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-middle-east-67211248
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67223273
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-middle-east-67339988
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-67374801
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-middle-east-67952301

(♦) To this country — a now-wealthy country, ranked between 13th and 20th in the world for per capita GDP — the United States provides $3.8 billion of annual aid, most in support of Israel’s military, and has approved billions more in the wake of the October 7 attack. The U.S. is widely regarded as Israel’s strongest supporter, has repeatedly vetoed United Nations resolutions critical of Israel, and has provided Israel with more foreign aid than it gives to any other nation.

(♦) In the past, defenders of U.S. empire could make an amoral, realpolitik argument for supporting Israel as a reliable partner in the oil-rich Middle East and an anti-Soviet chess piece during the Cold War. But the U.S. is now a total petroleum net exporter, and the Cold War ended over thirty years ago.

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Eight years in Spain have taught me greater respect for my own ignorance. I speak and read Spanish, have Spanish friends, and yet still consistently miss Spain political nuances that don’t escape my native-born friends. What hope do I have of understanding a Middle East country that I refuse to visit? I know no Israelis, speak no Hebrew, claim only a sketchy knowledge of Israel history. A couple of years residence undoubtedly would show me that some of what I think now is either off-the-mark or simply wrong. Further, I would regularly meet and talk to ordinary Israelis who seethe with rage at Hamas for killing and kidnapping its innocent citizens at a music festival. Their words would influence me.

But my question isn’t for Israel. It’s for the U.S.

I am still an American citizen, a U.S. taxpayer. A fraction of the billions that the U.S. sends to Israel comes out of my pocket.

Why on earth would the United States continue to bankroll a country so widely accused of genocide? If U.S. support for Israel was a principal reason for the 9/11 terrorist attacks; if the ‘special relationship’ endangers Americans by fomenting anger throughout the Arab world; if the U.S. defames its international reputation by vetoing United Nations sanctions of Israel; if the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court has sought an arrest warrant for Israel’s leader, and the United Nations’ top court has declared Israel’s presence in the occupied Palestinian territories as unlawful; if Israel is more than nine thousand kilometers away, separated by an ocean from American soil, and not really needed by America for anything, except perhaps to help protect the U.S. against ‘endless enemies’ like Iran, which became an enemy partly for past U.S. misdeeds (the CIA-backed 1953 coup, the destruction of Flight 655 ) … and partly because the U.S. supports Israel: why? Wouldn’t the obvious solution be to withdraw, to stop providing guns and cash, to let American taxpayers keep their money and let an independent nation on the other side of the world solve its own problems?

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There isn’t a good reason.

The answer is political. Through decades of hard work, teamwork, and personal and financial sacrifice, and largely owing to the U.S. political system’s Achilles Heel susceptibility to lobbying, Israel’s supporters have completely corrupted the U.S. democratic process as it relates to that country, as the National Rifle Association has corrupted reasonable U.S. debate about arms control.

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The gent in the boater hat in the top-of-the-post photograph is the late lobbyist Artie Samish, portrayed as the ‘secret boss of California’ in late forties articles in the Nation and Collier’s. Samish recklessly suggested the shot to illustrate his puppeteer relationship with California politicians. The related exposé provoked a candid admission by the governor: “On matters that affect his clients,” he said, “Artie unquestionably has more power than the governor.”

(Samish must have known that this photo would spur his ouster, and it did. Don’t look for anyone at AIPAC to pose with a Robert Menendez or Nikki Haley doll.) (At least not publicly.)

U.S. lobbying has changed since the 1940s, but I doubt that Samish’s legal, transparent, defensible strategy of “Select and Elect” has changed much: boost the candidates who support a client’s interests and work against those who don’t. I am reminded of Samish in regards to U.S.-Israel policy by:

(♦) The milestone 2007 book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, available free online:

https://archive.org/details/the-israel-lobby-and-u.-s.-foreign-policy-mearsheimer-walt/

One quote, from page 10:

“… Steven Rosen, the former AIPAC official … illustrated AIPAC’s power for the New Yorker’s Jeffrey Goldberg by putting a napkin in front of him and saying, ‘In twenty-four hours we could have the signatures of seventy senators on this napkin.'”

(♦) Suppression of Al Jazeera‘s four part exposé of the lobby’s influence in the United States.

(♦) Surprisingly candid repeat press references in 2015 to the “Sheldon Adelson primary,” in which Republican candidates vied for the favor of the wealthy late Zionist Sheldon Adelson.

Consider “Select and Elect” while watching Israel-Hamas related portions of the November 8 Republican debates. To this long-term observer of American politics, candidate responses look like naked, brazen auditions for lobby support. Or consider “Select and Elect” in the recent AIPAC-funded deposing of Democrat Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, and the hundreds of thousands spent in an unsuccessful attempt to oust Republican Thomas Massie.

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I haven’t been the same since the Israel-Hamas war started.

As a boy, I knew only that my paternal ancestors were Russian. I didn’t learn until after high school that they were Russian Jews. My father presented different versions of himself to different family members, but the version I knew hardly glowed with pride in his Jewish heritage. I joked through my twenties that one could find his photo by looking up ‘Jew-hating Jew’ in the dictionary.

(To be fair: Dad was an unusually committed atheist, and in several conversations referred emotionally to religious faith as ‘disgusting.’ My mother worked as his secretary before their marriage, and remembered being asked to type wholly-unrelated-to-work notes that expressed Dad’s contempt for religion. His animus thus may have been mostly toward Judaism, rather than to Jewish culture. It’s too late to ask him now. He did believe strongly that Jews should assimilate.)

With age, I came to regard this attitude as unhealthy. I read about Jewish history, visited Jewish museums, sought in my travels in 2014 and 2015 to visit some Jewish landmarks, as can be seen in some past posts and online photo albums.

Eventually, I developed pride in my Jewish heritage. A major turning point was the discovery of Communists and Chicken Ranchers, an anthology that chronicles the travails of early twentieth century Jewish immigrants in California’s Sonoma County. My paternal grandfather Nathan wasn’t in the book, but could have been; he bought an El Verano chicken ranch in 1910 or 1911. Some of the anthology’s oral histories mentioned Israel, but I was eager to embrace the book, and chose at the time to regard the Israel described as young, benign. I told friends that the book was the closest thing I’d ever have to a Torah.

After moving to Madrid in 2016, I was surprised to realize that many Spaniards had few Jewish acquaintances. I, in contrast, had known hundreds. A few times, I found myself in the amusing role of question-answerer at an intercambio table.

Stereotypes about Jews were myths, I told my conversation partners, had nothing to do with the people I’d grown up around. I did remember one wealthy Jew who had lamented that his parents had raised him as a ‘machine to make money,’ and knew that there must be others like him (as portrayed in the excellent 1974 Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz), but I judged this group to be small, an unrepresentative minority. My paternal relatives had shown no special interest in money-making.

As for the other Jews I had known, I suggested a safe, accurate, one word generalization: they had been Americans, like me, usually the first or second generation children of immigrants. The great majority had shown no special attachment to Judaism. Stereotypes about Jews were simply false, unfair, and slandered Jewish doctors, teachers, social workers, and business owners who might be pillars of their communities.

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And now this war.

Critics can accuse me of having paid inadequate attention to Israel. They’d be right. But I’m paying attention now.

Israel and its lobby aren’t giving me much of a hook to hang that fragile sense of ‘Jewish pride’ on, are they? It’s tough to throw out my chest when I read about Gaza surgeons forced to amputate children’s’ limbs without anesthesia, or look at obviously malnourished babies in Gaza hospitals, and remember that a senior State Department veteran walked away from a twenty year career because the U.S. wouldn’t admit that Israel is blocking humanitarian aid to Gaza.

What will I tell Spaniards now, if they ask similar questions?

I could start with an apology for having provided misinformation. There is obviously a significant Jewish faction that I have been lucky not to know, that may be more common on the East Coast, that is so irrationally and self-destructively obsessed with preserving Israel as a ‘Jewish democracy’ that it will overlook the most obscene mutation of that ‘democracy’ — a national security minister who venerated a mass murderer! — and any crime against humanity committed in that so-called democracy’s name. Its members seem to have lost all human feeling. I picture them grimly brandishing their blue-on-white flags at counter-protests, angrily dismissing any news of a bombed hospital, bombed school, any footage of a mother weeping over an infant mutilated by U.S.-supplied-and-Israeli-fired bomb.

And because their lobby is so powerful, it may permanently stain the legacy not only of my Jewish forebearers, but also the reputation of all the decent descendants-of-Jewish-ancestry I have known, loved, befriended, dated, depended on, worked beside. The ‘Jewish homeland’ country that the lobby champions is itself the world’s unrivaled number one source of antisemitism, a veritable 2000 kW global broadcaster of anti-Jewish feeling. Israel may yet do to the Star of David what Adolf Hitler did to the swastika.

The Zionist lobbyists aren’t even satisfied with tarnishing-by-ancestral-proximity the good name of Jews horrified by their actions. No: they want to legally yoke those horrified Jews to the figurative forecastle of their sin-agglomerating ship, so everyone in the tribe can be despised equally.

‘Anti-Zionism is antisemitism’ declared House Resolution 894. The House of Representatives of the United States of America decreed that to oppose Israel is to oppose Jews! Would the mischievous Samish have dared such gall on behalf of the liquor industry, if only to see how slavishly his puppets would toe the line? How about a House Resolution equating temperance with communism?

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I believe that Israel in its present form eventually will go the way of the Jim Crow South and apartheid South Africa. I might have championed a Jewish homeland, too, had I come of age after World War II, and shared Jews’ rage in learning of the holocaust. But I don’t see how a two-tiered ‘Jewish democracy’ can be other than a racist democracy. It can’t be defended with honest arguments.

What can I do, as a horrified onlooker?

(♦) I can support the BDS — Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions — movement, and keep track of the listed products and companies.

(Incidentally, I just banned myself from Israel by publicly expressing BDS support. Imagine my grief.)

(♦) I can remember that credulous Green Party voters as much as rolled out a red carpet for the election of G.W. Bush and the subsequent Iraq War by supporting Ralph Nader in 2000, and cast my resigned, sober and genuinely principled vote for Harris-Walz in 2024.

I can’t change the flaws in the American political system that make a vote for a third party candidate equivalent to a vote for the opposition. I presume that Harris and Walz wouldn’t have made the U.S. political big leagues in 2024 without being thoroughly compromised, but also see real hope on the Democratic side, given the ever-growing indignation felt by Americans like me. I believe that Donald Trump would permit absolutely any depravity in Gaza. Absolutely any.

(♦) I can avoid getting Israel-Gaza news from the mainstream U.S. media, although this media sometimes has offered excellent coverage.

I never worked as a staff reporter, but presume that a U.S. journalist suggesting some stories will deal with more criticism and pushback than she would from a news outlet elsewhere, and that the story may be neutered by late revisions. An editor may point to the surviving story as an example of unbiased coverage — (“Who says we didn’t cover controversy XYZ?!”) — but the reader who relies on that outlet for weeks, months or years will wind up with a skewed world view.

The best example: I am confident that most Americans don’t know the reasons for 9/11. I lived in the U.S. in 2001, and remember the preposterous “They hate us for our freedoms” line in the mainstream press.  I wonder if recent renewed calls to ban TikTok were inspired by the millions of page views for ‘Letter to America.’

(♦) I can support groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, even if I see some as significantly to my political left. Ironically, the Israel Lobby finally got me to join a specifically Jewish group.

(♦) I can continue to tell Spaniards that the Americans-of-Jewish-heritage I have known did not resemble the genocide champions of the Israel lobby, that I had no experience with whatever depraved subculture would produce a Baruch Goldstein, and that it is criminally wrong for latter day ‘sons of Samish’ pols to try to yoke them together with a H.R. 894. I can point out that at least two of the U.S. government officials who have given up their careers to protest Gaza policy are Jewish: Lily Greenberg Call and Harrison Mann. They remind me of the Jewish-heritage Americans I have known a lot more than anyone at AIPAC.

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And lastly, of less relevance:

In 2004, PSOE prime minister Zapatero withdrew Spanish troops from Iraq, and made Spain the first country to leave the U.S.-led coalition on the Iraq war.

Today, current PSOE prime minister Sánchez has spoken out strongly and consistently against the mass slaughter in Gaza. With his support, Spain joined South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.

The same Zapatero has been unconscionably silent about the recent rigged election in Venezuela.  I know many angry Sánchez critics in Madrid. I don’t discount those critics, have sometimes leaned toward support of the opposition PP. I don’t want to present Spain as an international bastion of ethical government.

Still, for the record:

This is the second time in my life that the PSOE Prime Minister of Spain has taken a strong public stand against indefensibly immoral behavior by the United States.