-by Skip Kaltenheuser
A reader posed a question— why so much focus on Israel when there are so many pressing crises around the world, like the Sudan, largely forgotten?
A worthy question, as dire straits expand from deadly political conflicts and authoritarian, corrupt governments to include climate impacts and crop failures.
Attention should be paid.
While US policies and actions have played undeniable roles in some disasters, like Libya and Somalia, Israel’s long occupation and brutal subjugation of Palestinians stands apart.
Here’s why.
No other country enjoys but a fraction of US patronage that Israel does. Yet it repays America by undermining our government and political processes. Could any other country get away with its lobbyists announcing a hundred million dollars and more to defeat critics in Congress— even offering $20 million to primary one and seeking, with alarming success, to nullify Americans’ 1st Amendment freedoms?
The latter is done with compliant federal and state legislators seeking to twist language and devise laws as draconian as they can get away with.
Senator Ben Cardin (D-MD) got that rolling. In 2017 he tried to pass fines up to a million dollars and prison sentences up to twenty years for advocating Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS). Attempting to crush Americans exercising their First Amendment, at the behest of a foreign power, is a stark betrayal. Censure? Expulsion? Senator Chuck Schumer made Cardin chair of Foreign Relations when Senator Bob Menendez, his Israeli lobby largess second only to Biden’s, flamed out.
On July 24th Cardin sat behind Bibi during his address to a joint session of Congress, joining bought and paid for know-nothings who rose and genuflected with each lie. Good God, what kind of moral cretins have we elected?
In lockstep are billionaire bullies, Grand Inquisitors incarnate, threatening to wreck educations and careers of students with strong moral beacons many of them American Jews because their views differ from the Israeli government’s narratives. Privileged people with the influence extreme wealth conveys seeking to hamstring young people starting out. Sociopaths or psychopaths, these bullies? A wavy line.
One marvels as Biden Administration spokespersons freely shred their reputations, speaking out of both sides of their mouths. Likely auditioning for the bullies, or those who service them; credibility need not apply.
It is heartening to march in protest, to see American Jews of all ages getting along famously with Palestinians and protestors of all backgrounds. Do political chumps calling them anti-semitic realize how comical they appear?
Much of the world sees America’s claimed ideals in bizarre refraction, twisted to undermine international law and to continue carte blanche support of a violent eight-decade-long land theft underpinned by supremacist, racist beliefs. Now the world sees us as complicit, not just in slow motion ethnic cleansing, but an undeniable genocide in high gear.
A quick but-for test. Could Israel do this but for the US? The whole world knows that answer.
The British medical journal The Lancet recently estimated the real Palestinian death toll, considering those mashed under rubble and indirect deaths from destruction of medical facilities and public infrastructure, might exceed 186,000, or 8 percent of Gaza’s pre-war population of 2.3 million.
How does one count when two million have been displaced, their homes destroyed, with weaponry including US bombs each packing a ton of powerful explosives? Past conflicts, The Lancet’s study noted, have had indirect deaths ranging from three to fifteen times the number of direct deaths, so the real toll could skyrocket.
UN-backed experts recently estimated over a half-million Palestinians face imminent starvation. Ethnic cleansing is well-underway in the West Bank, from violent settlers backed by IDF and Israeli police, and children again among the targets.
The Fourth Estate is supposed to push back on such mayhem. But one example after another shows much of the mainstream compromised, finding ways to avoid reporting the full horror. Here again, the big money figures in, easily manipulating increasingly skittish journalists as journalism job prospects diminish.
The IDF confirmed there was a “death before capture” Hannibal Directive on October 7. Hear much of that, or of the thousands of Palestinian prisoners, almost all without trial, kept in dire conditions, including torture, before the October 7th attack? Or that Netanyahu earlier addressed the UN while showing a map of greater Israel absent Palestinian Territories? Was Hamas, always cultivated and indirectly supported by Israel to avoid negotiating a two-state solution, baited as Israel sought an excuse to drive out Palestinians?
While the US supplies the vast majority of Israel’s weapons, Israel has itself become a major arms purveyor, its infernal creations demonstrated on unarmed civilians in Gaza.
Israel has also become a major force moving parts of the world into a surveillance state, selling technology to authoritarians around the world seeking to spy on dissidents, political opponents and journalists. One client was Saudi Arabia, using Israeli tech to spy on associates of Saudi critic and Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, before dismembering him. It’s not for nothing Israel cozies up to far right governments. They have common aims.
The more extreme those in the US Congress are, the more Israel seeks them out. AIPAC backed scores of Republican congressmen and candidates who opposed certifying the 2020 Presidential Election. Yet that lobby isn’t required to register as a foreign agent. Why no foreign influence alarms from agencies tasked with government integrity?
As a guest of Israel in 1999, I broke bread with Moshe Katsav, Netanyahu’s outgoing Minister of Tourism. Katsav told me Palestinians are their “N-words,” sneering at the actual word. He later became President of Israel. One top Israeli official after another has expressed supremacist viewpoints, using terms like cancers and cockroaches, denigrating Palestinians, making them “the other,” as relentless as propaganda penned by Goebbels.
Any persons of color in Congress— looking at you Hakeem Jeffries, one of the largest recipients of Israeli lobby largess— taking money while ignoring galloping racism aren’t worth their salt.
If this entire essay were an abbreviated list, it would only scratch the surface. No matter how damped down the full picture is in the mainstream media, no matter how many Palestinian journalists Israel slaughters to stop those bearing witness to atrocities, no matter how many UN employees and their family members are murdered— over 366— the depravities escape Israel’s grasp.
Israel does its damnedest to pull America into the abyss as its protector, one with nothing to lose by staying the hellish course. But the US has everything to lose as it earns pariah status in the eyes of much of the world.
America’s “brand” is in tatters.
In a 1973 meeting that Biden described as “one of the most consequential” of his life, Prime Minister Golda Meir told him the “Palestinian nation” did not exist any more than the “Palestinian people.” Moreover, she could not “forgive the Palestinians for forcing (Israelis) to kill their children.”
Did that give Biden pause, Meir’s telegraphing what was to come, what was already served up? A smorgasbord of horrid indignities. Violent land grabs by lunatics waving real estate deeds from God. Restricting calorie counts so children lived but did not flourish to their potential. Periodic lethal “mowing the lawn” to terrorize civilians. Snipers greeting non-violent protests in Gaza with competitions to blow apart knees, crippling even children and medical personnel rushing to attend them.
Does it give Biden pause now, when Israel’s long-held intentions are laid bare? Children no longer just on minimized calories but starved to death by design? Destruction of water supplies and cultivation of conditions of disease, even the polio specter rising?
Does he consider the karma payback for forcing upon his countrymen complicity with child murderers? With child torturers? What torture is greater than forced starvation and infliction of disease?
Perhaps denying antibiotics and anesthesia to orphaned children having shrapnel removed from shattered eyes, having limbs amputated? Shaken brains from repeated shock waves of massive bombs?
All the while arresting, torturing, and murdering the brave surgeons and medical personnel struggling to alleviate children’s suffering. We know not just from doctors but from IDF soldiers that small children are also targets. As noted, the damnable acts would exceed this space.
Golda gave Biden a glance at the systematic dehumanization of Palestinians early on.
One cannot help but wonder if cognitive dissonance between good Catholic Joe and his alter-ego, a self-proclaimed proud Zionist, hastened the disconnects in his mind. Even after Biden helped waltz the country into the disastrous invasion of Iraq, could he have imagined he’d finish his long public career acquiring the moniker Genocide Joe? That would crumble many of even the most carefully constructed self-images. Take note, Kamala Harris.
And what of damage to Americans’ self-images, as the horror seeps through the blood-brain barrier?
Nothing would delight Netanyahu more than Trump’s return, beholden again to Adelson cash.
NO OTHER COUNTRY HAS ENJOYED ANYWHERE NEAR THE US PATRONAGE THAT ISRAEL HAS. YET IT REPAYS AMERICA BY UNDERMINING OUR GOVERNMENT AND POLITICAL PROCESSES. COULD ANY OTHER COUNTRY GET AWAY WITH ANNOUNCING A HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS AND MORE TO DEFEAT CRITICS IN CONGRESS AND SEEKING, WITH ALARMING SUCCESS, TO NULLIFY AMERICANS’ 1ST AMENDMENT FREEDOMS?”
In his intriguing book SpyFail, James Bamford, long our foremost investigative journalist on intelligence agencies, and a writer for The Nation, credibly revealed that a foreign power conducted espionage to benefit the 2016 Trump campaign. And that the foreign power was Israel. One would expect a thunderclap across Washington. Instead, crickets. Perhaps it roughed up too many pet media and political narratives. Even Hillary kept mum. That’s a fright.
When the International Criminal Court indictments, which included Hamas leaders as well as Netanyahu and Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant, came down, the press releases from a number of members of Congress, both parties, decried the “equivalence” of it and condemned the ICC. Politicians from Adam Schiff to Tim Scott used almost identical phrasing and talking points. AIPAC’s puppet strings are everywhere, as visible as those on the satirical puppets of the 2004 film Team America: World Police.
Institutional memory in Washington, both of Congress and of media, apparently undergoes periodic lobotomies.
In 2002, Netanyahu gave testimony to a Congressional committee that if we didn’t invade Iraq, Saddam Hussein would supply nukes to terrorists around the world. Bibi also predicted an invasion would bring a flowering of democracy throughout the region, including in Iran.
Anyone thinking the invasion of Iraq was a grand idea should look up studies by the Watson Institute at Brown University. They can only shock and awe, and dismay. Four or five million dead from direct and indirect impacts, by any measure a rambling holocaust. Not over. We’re saddled with a federal price tag of, according to the Watson Institute, over $8 trillion for post 9/11 wars, which continues to limit our national priorities.
How many in Congress who clamored for Bibi’s wisdom and counsel are aware of a speech he gave in 2008 to Bar Ilan University? As reported by the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv, Bibi said, “We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq.” According to the newspaper account, Netanyahu then said that these events “swung American public opinion in our favor.”
His speech continued a theme when Bibi, then the former Prime Minister, was asked right after the 9/11 attack what it meant for US-Israeli relations. As reported in The New York Times, Bibi’s first reply was “It’s very good.” A pal, his concern for his American benefactors always paramount.
Washington has become a company town. Our military/industrial complex— Eisenhower had originally added Congressional— is our company. Those profiting, greased by America’s uniquely styled legalized bribery via campaign finance, were certainly capable of engineering the worst foreign policy disaster since Vietnam, without Bibi’s assistance.
But in another but-for, it’s arguable it might not have happened without Bibi and his American cronies in high positions in the George W. Bush Defense Department, particularly Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Douglas Feith.
I recently spoke with Dennis Fritz, a retired Air Force command chief master sergeant and author of a remarkable book fresh off the press, Deadly Betrayal, The Truth About Why the United States Invaded Iraq.
Short and to the point, with Pentagon redactions visible as intriguing puzzles, it’s one of those books one wishes would be assigned reading for Congress. Fritz wrote it for two reasons. First, that military men and women who paid a high price, often a terrible price, for participating in the invasion, and their families, could understand how the tragedy came about, devoid of the lies they were told at the time. And two, to sound an alarm that the same interests that pushed that invasion now want the US to go to war with Iran.
Fritz says that Wolfowitz, Perle and Feith were all both neo-cons and Zionists. A double whammy. They were already planning on going to war before 9/11. Fritz’s past work included reviewing and declassifying relevant documents in the Pentagon, ironically in part for a book by Feith, who is described as the architect of the rationale for going to war, including talking points and making the case to convince George Bush. Fritz believes the primary interest of this trio was always first and foremost Israel’s agenda. In Fritz’s view that was prioritized over the best interests of the US. Fritz says these three were part of a long-range plan to take down Iraq, Syria and Iran, ultimately forcing Palestinians to settle solely on Israel’s terms.
Though more Americans died in Vietnam, medical intervention improved considerably by the Forever Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Consequently, of the over 100,000 who were maimed, many who otherwise would have died survived with terrible and lasting wounds that require ongoing care and staggering expense.
Fritz believes all of that sadness, and the horrific collateral damage to those in other countries, might have been avoided but for the zealots driving the war. Those are among the reasons Israel deserves so much more attention now, with urgency. For most, Forever Wars don’t work out that well. In the shorter term, are Americans really on board with genocide? Can an apartheid foreign power really purchase our government so cheaply?
With permission from Capitol Hill Citizen.
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Skip Kaltenheuser is a Washington, DC-based writer who has written for a wide variety of domestic and foreign publications on a broad range of topics, including politics, law, business, culture and travel. Writings sometimes attempt to explain Washington dysfunction and how the fix is put in.
Aw, poor baby guestcrapper. He still can't figure out why he gets censored even though everyone else that comes here can if they even bother to read his crap. Persecution complex? No, the superiority complex of an extreme narcissist combined with sociopathy is more like it. Notably, his feeling abused was the FIRST thing of 3 he listed. To him, HE will always be most important and as with any narcissist, he will always feel he's a victim and he will do so even if the people he writes about are the TRUE VICTIMS.