Joachim Martillo has written an important paper called Judonia Rising: The Israel Lobby and American Society, purporting to explain, "What the Israel Lobby Really Is". He spoke with Stephen Walt, of Walt and Mearsheimer fame, he followed the discussions of Philip Weiss, he corresponded with Noam Chomsky and Joseph Massad, he had read Israel Shamir's Pardes[2] as well as James Petras' The Power of Israel in the United States,[3] and he has had email exchanges with Kevin MacDonald. An American scholar, Martlllo has some Polish background, and he reads German, Yiddish, Hebrew, and Polish as well as some Arabic. In his view, understanding the Israel Lobby can be based only on a thorough hard-nosed ("non-exceptionalist") analysis of Eastern European Jewish history. This is a heretical view, very close to ours.

It is heretical, because the very far away border of permitted anti-Zionist discourse still remains short of discussion: whether Jews did similar things before Zionism, or do we have a temporary aberration connected with the State of Israel. The moment one integrates modern Jewish behavior with the pre-modern Jewish behavior, the moment one notices continuity of pre-Zionist and Zionist Jewish politics, the moment one leaves the safe ground of condemning occupation, - one crosses into totally forbidden "anti-Semite" territory. Martillo dared and ventured there, and came with strong and startling conclusions: the real issue is not Palestine. Unless they are neutralized, Israel lobbying groups, Israel advocates, Zionists, Neoconservatives, and Friedmanites will steal America and effectively abolish the Constitution in all but name to create a society of servitude for all Americans except for those belonging to the hyper-wealthy transnational Zionist political elite.

This is exactly our view: Palestine is a symbol, a quintessence of the trouble, but the real issue is our enemy's attempt to enslave the world. Martillo begins where Walt and Mearsheimer end their journey. In his view, in order to understand Jews, it is not necessary to venture into days of Jesus Christ; history of Poland will do. He goes to the days of Rzeczpospolita, the Polish Commonwealth (from 1505 until 1795), then ethnic Ashkenazim constituted economic elite of the realm. They lost this status in the partitions of Poland. This is the destroyed Temple; in Martillo's view, these are good old days the Jews miss. They want to be the elite as they were in the days of Rzeczpospolita. Jews did well after the collapse of the Polish Commonwealth, notes Martillo, but not the level as they would have liked.

"Despite supposedly onerous Czarist oppression, Russian Jews had higher incomes, more education, and longer life spans than the non-Jewish populations among whom they lived. They were highly disaffected because of exclusion from the status and access to which they believed they were entitled, but they were not obviously more oppressed than the majority of the Czar's subjects and less oppressed than others. Yuri Slezkine belies the myth of Jewish powerless during the lead-up to WW2 in The Jewish Century.[4]"

In the US, the Jews (or Ashkenazim, in Martillo's terminology) resurrected their social structure and rebuilt it, like ants, who rebuild anthill after being removed to a new ground. This structure is ostensibly "Israel advocacy" or "Israel Lobby" but actually advocating Israel's cause ("Israel Lobby proper") is a small part of its effort. He soberly states that a USA, whose dominant elite is Jewish, is not necessarily bending to the Israel Lobby proper when it pursues of pro-Israel foreign policy. The State of Israel may be a client state of America, but America is a client state of the American Jewish Zionist elite, which is probably in the process of establishing itself as the permanent national "meritocratic" elite.

This program has proven so successful because historically Eastern European Jewish culture strongly controlled social and intellectual deviation. Many of the social control mechanisms continue to exist, have evolved in the American environment, and may help explain why liberal Jews have so empowered the Neocons to the detriment of US foreign policy interests as James Petras [5] has described.

It is not necessary to look for Freemasonry, the Elders of Zion, the Illuminati, dark Talmudists, malicious Cabbalists, or some other group of secret puppeteers: Israel lobbying activities constitute a natural evolution of Jewish, especially ethnic Ashkenazi, communal organizations. The structure of Israel lobbying is a response to historical developments generally unrelated to Zionism. Because there has been a sort of Darwinian selection in both the official and unofficial organizations as well as in their techniques, all of which go back often as much two centuries in European environments, Israel lobbying is naturally far more effective than a lobby that was put together over the last few decades or so in response to a specific issue or to serve a specific corporate interest.

Does the so-called "Israel Lobby" merely act to secure the interests of the State of Israel or is the real goal enhancement of the wealth, status, and power of those who pay for it? Not only does Israel not pay the "Israel Lobby," but The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy [6] does not give a hint who really does, and in any case large sections of the "Israel Lobby" like the Hollywood Crowd do not appear in the book even though scholars like Melani McAlister have investigated the Hollywood-foreign-policy connection in books likes Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East, 1945-2000.[7] With such gaps in the analysis of the "Israel Lobby," no one should be surprised with the weakness of the proposals that Professors Mearsheimer and Walt make for responding to the "Israel Lobby."

Because Friedmanites have been so prominent in the economic regime that the occupation has attempted to impose on Iraq, the common identification of Milton Friedman's economic thinking merely with Cato Institute libertarianism looks incorrect. In today's political intellectual environment Friedmanism (or Neoliberalism) looks more like an adjunct of Neoconservatism (in the sense of Jabotinskian or American Revisionist Zionism) than like an independent political movement.

Israel Lobbying in Comparison with Ordinary Lobbies

Martillo notices that the Jewish lobby has many interests quite unconnected with Israel but equally nefarious.

In Boston the Jewish Alliance for Law and Social Justice (JALSA), which is a spin-off of the American Jewish Congress, has an ongoing project in regendering American society according to feminist and gay liberation principles. (See Jewish, Zionist War Against Salvation.[8])

Israel lobbying efforts benefit from organizational memory that does not exist in other lobbying situations. The longevity of Jewish Federation organizations can give Israel Lobbying efforts a generational aspect not seen elsewhere. For example, Israel Advocacy organizations worked for fifty years to delegitimize Arabist points of view in the Foreign Service and State Department, to drive out Arabist officers or bureaucrats, and to replace them with Israel sympathetic personnel. (See The Marginalization of U.S. Mideast Experts.[9])

While the American public has not fully comprehended the nature of power relations, Israeli leaders do, and the American Zionist elite calls all shots on issues of importance to the American elite from "Who is a Jew" to whether the USA should attack Iraq or Iran first.

The political relational hierarchy and the domination of an American Zionist elite over all validate the Finkelstein and Massad critiques of The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy.[10]

The alliance between Israel and the USA is in the process of creating an internal American caste system that will be dominated by a small class of hyper-wealthy Zionists. With the sort of permanent war that has been envisioned since the beginning of the twentieth century by a segment of the Zionist elite under the influence of Sorel and with the application of the Friedmanite Shock Doctrine as described by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,[11] this caste system will spread globally.

Because Zionist Sorelianism has clear affinity with Friedman's ideas, the absence of the any discussion of the connections and interrelations between Friedmanism and Jabotinskianism by Naomi Klein is a glaring omission. While Jabotinskian Neoconservatism is for the most part a Jewish sect or special interest, Friedmanist Neoliberalism actively proselytizes itself to non-Jews as the true economic religion, whose high priesthood tends for the most part to consist of Jews. Non-Jews like Cheney, Rumsfeld, or Woolsey often come to accept Jabotinskian Neoconservative foreign policy ideas after indoctrination with Friedmanite Neolibeal market theory.

Not only is Klein completely misleading when she implies that Israel's love affair with disaster capitalism only begins after the expections of the Oslo Process proved illusory, but she failed to mention that the erasing of the native population from areas under Zionist control in 1947-8 (Holoexaleipsis [12] or Nakba) with concomitant seizure of practically all movable and immovable assets from Palestinian refugees is probably the earliest and purest example of massive Friedman-style transfer of wealth from the poor of the developing world to a Western elite (the Zionist political leadership) backed by a Western economic elite (mostly New York Jewish investment bankers and the Cousinhood of the wealthiest British Jews). The creation of the State of Israel on the shards of Arab Palestine is the Zionist version of the Shock Doctrine.

Klein neglects to mention that the hyper-wealthy US Zionist elite and Israeli government have been heavily involved directly and indirectly in manipulating the US economy in criminal violation of SEC regulations by stoking, financing, and picking winners in the homeland security investment bubble that she describes in Chapter 14 of her book.

The Israeli economy or more properly a small segment of hyper-wealthy Israeli Jews linked by family and business relations to the dominant US Zionist elite is thriving as the US economy is tanking and Iraq is being ground down. It is the outcome of which leading Zionists dreamed in the twenties, and it has a high probability of spreading from the ME throughout the Muslim world to South America, and to parts of the former Eastern block.

The Kremlin, which has never had much tolerance for internal competing power centers or external powers mucking in its backyard, saw danger in the extension of a transnational hyper-wealthy Zionist political elite to Russia and has taken preventive action against Jewish oligarchs within the territories of the former Soviet Union. It was stunning how quickly Jewish and Friedmanite groups rushed to support Mikhail Khodorkovski in his power struggle with the Russian government.

Among religious, leftist, and right wing ethnic Ashkenazim there has long been a current of thought that Jews are safest in alliance (or better in dominating) an undemocratic government. Thanks to the Patriot act and other actions of the Bush administration, the undemocratic Zionist future is coming into being right before our eyes, and McCain looks like the most likely of current present candidates to bring about the fulfillment of the ultimate globalized Zionist dystopia, but Zionists throughout the political system are poised to influence any other possible victor except Ron Paul, whom Zionist facilitators and gate-keepers in the US media are trying to starve of media attention.

Abolishing Israel and eradicating Zionism would not eliminate the exploitive tendencies of globalization but would destroy the focal point of the forces that are aiming for the worst of all globalized futures.

The Zionist movement assumed from its earliest phases that it would be dependent on wealthy and influential Jews in the Diaspora. Members of the Counsinhood of Britain's wealthiest Jews probably paid for the Balfour Declaration. After the propaganda reverses of the first Intifada, the need for an even wealthier and more influential class of Jewish Zionists in the USA became obvious.

[In this strategic framework, the Zionist movement also depends on Jews, who are not necessarily wealthy but are in critical positions to serve the Zionist movement especially in intelligence or logistics matters. Such individuals are today called saya`nim. The spy Jonathan Pollard is a particularly egregious saya`an, who was caught. I have expanded the meaning of the term in this document to include Jewish stealth helpers in Israel Lobbying efforts.]

In addition to saya`nim, Zionists have often used Shabbesgoyim like Orde Wingate during the pre-State period or more recently John McCain III and his father Admiral John McCain, Jr., who absolved Israel of blame in the attack on the USS Liberty. (See Money Jews, Brain Jews, Politics.[13]) The Zionist movement has tended to recruit and reward Shabbesgoyim in families. New York Zionist campaign contributions have rewarded John McCain throughout his political career. Today McCain represents the combined Neoconservative Friedmanite position in Republican politics without — until recently — a lot of the social conservative baggage to which many American Jews and Friedmanites object.]

Zionist connections in the investment banking industry led to earlier IPOs in the 90s with little or no evidence of profitability. Subprime mortgages were a similar class of dubious investments, whose true nature was obscured in CDOs (collateralized debt obligations), and the valuation of Google and similar companies like Facebook has similar dubious characteristic. Some serious forensic financial analysis is needed to understand these economic developments, but the end result has been very clear in the development of a powerful new American hyper-wealthy political-economic class that is mostly Jewish and willing to put a lot of money into Israel advocacy and into influencing the US government.

While many members of this New Jewish Elite would reflexively put money into Israel because of long Zionist indoctrination, they also need Israel as a means to hide their wealth because Israel has a level of economic transparency and corruption comparable to Italy or Egypt. The Bar-Lev line in Tel Aviv is an early indicator of the degree of embezzlement and sweetheart deals in Israeli economics and politics. Israelis have long made a lot of money in providing money laundering and other transaction hiding services both to Jews and non-Jews. Obviously, all parties in this sort of business have an interest in preserving the State of Israel to make sure that this sort business continues.

Post-9/11 Islamophobic scare-mongering as well as the Iraqi occupation has created a growth industry in hardware and software for security, control, and checkpoints. This industry understands that its profitability depends on international policies that maintain conflict through unconditional support of Zionism.

A Web of Influence, Conditioned Thinking and Reflexive Behavior

Ongoing Zionist indoctrination of the American public has produced a Zionist web of influence, conditioned thinking and reflexive behavior that is breath-taking in its pervasiveness.

Even without the presence of media gatekeepers and facilitators, journalists in print, broadcast and cable media almost invariably misrepresent relevant Middle Eastern or Eastern European current events or history. There is little reluctance to turn Zionist or IDF press releases into news reports with no qualifications.

American news organizations almost invariably misquote and mistranslate Iranian President Ahmedinejad, and America media use tendentious Zionist language like the "right to self-defense," "Muslim extremism," and "Arab intransigence" while almost never conceding a similar right of Palestinian or Arab self-defense or addressing issues of Jewish racism, extremism or fanaticism. During the recent Lebanon war, the American media with rare exceptions took the Israeli point of view.

Only recently have American media begun to concede the role of Russian Jews in the Russian Revolution and the murder of the Czar's family. While scholarly journals discuss the Jewish role in the Soviet security apparatus before the end of WW2, no inkling of the Soviet Jewish role in mass murder, ethnic cleansing and genocide is allowed to reach the general public. Such facts would interfere with the Zionist legitimization narrative which requires European Jews to be innocent powerless victims of the German Nazis, and reasonable people would drawn the obvious analogy between Soviet Ashkenazi and Zionist Ashkenazi ethnic cleansing or genocidalism.

Only occasionally does accurate depiction of Zionist ethnic cleansing in 1947-8 ever reach the American public, and descriptions of the start of the 1967 war — even on NPR — still include descriptions of the movement ("barreling") of Egyptian tanks through Sinai to attack Israel.

Roman Catholics according to statistical analysis are less sympathetic to Zionism than other Americans. It is intriguing that practically every time the Boston Globe runs a story that features a Catholic cleric expressing a criticism of Israel, within approximately a week, it also runs a story about a Catholic cleric sex scandal sometimes featuring events from as much as 25 years ago as if to provide some crude sort of "balance" that even CAMERA and HonestReporting do not advocate. It is an often-unconscious behavior more often associated with an angry ethnic press, and it may be significant

that the Boston Globe Editorial Board includes Lawrence Harmon, who was editor at the Boston Jewish Advocate and
that paid entry level newspaper jobs in the USA nowadays seem to be found mostly at the ethnic Jewish press.

The hyper-wealthy Zionist elite is trying to provide American colleges and universities with Israel Studies programs in which only Zionistically correct scholars will teach while stealth and overt Israel advocacy groups and individuals attempt to drive any scholars critical of Zionism from American education. (See Jacob Lassner and Nadia Abu el Haj.[14])

Nadia Abu el Haj, Finkelstein, Arun Gandhi, Massad, Dabashi, Saliba, Debby Almontaser (Khalil Gibran International Academy, New York City) and many others have been subjected to such attacks. (See Zionism, Penisism, and Joseph Massad,[15] Arun Gandhi and Sholem Aleichem,[16] and Conspiracy Against Rights in NYC.[17])

Altogether Israel Lobbying efforts are grinding down American Constitutional rights and Israelizing society to the point where the American political system is under attack by a wide-ranging seditious conspiracy, and the side-effect of Islamophobic and Arabophobic incitement against Arab or Muslim investments or university contributions or charitable donations, is discouraging the flow of capital from Saudia and the Gulf when the US economy most desperately needs such liquidity.

Even if American gets over the current economic crisis, the alliance with Israel at this point has probably cost every current US taxpayer at least $10,000.00, and the costs at this point are rising at least geometrically thanks to Neocon-orchestrated policies.

Fighting Back to Save America

Pointing out the cost of Israel to each and every American is a good starting point to counteract Israel lobbying and advocacy.

The Zionism of Christian evangelical fundamentalists is part of a generational program of Jabotinskians (see Backgrounder [18]) but is not particularly deep. Obviously, Rapturists do not care much about the cost of Israel to America, but Christian Zionism can be fought by scriptural disputation, by questioning the patriotism of its leaders and by exposing surreptitious Jewish funding and organizing.

In other areas Israel advocates have had so much success because in today's America Jews play by a set of rules completely different from all other Americans, and even not particularly Zionist Jews have no real incentive to challenge the system, which

confers upon them the status of Moral Arbiters,
makes them Major Players in a dramatic narrative of national rebirth,
renders them Deserving Beneficiaries of programs like Taglit (Birthright Israel) as well as of Jewish networks in academia, the professions or politics, and
gives them Total Certainty of their own righteousness as Wielders of the Sword of the all-powerful accusation of anti-Semitism.

At the college level, the International Hillel Society acts like a junior auxiliary to the KKK by running racist programs like Taglit/Birthright Israel [19] and by hosting extremist speakers that incite murder and genocide against Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims or simply deny that they are human.

Jewish organizations, no matter how much they campaign against laws and candidates, get a completely pass of the rules and regulations of 501(c)(3) organizations. The tax fraud probably reaches tens of billions of dollars at this point.

Neutralizing Israel lobbying and advocacy groups will be extremely difficult without a push for the US government to enforce laws equally for Jews and non-Jews. Then once a good part of the American public realizes that Israel is a terror state, the USA will be forced to apply anti-terror laws apply and seize assets of organized Jewish community along with those of Zionist billionaires as terrorism supporters just as Islamic charities have been stripped of their funds.

Until the US government begins to enforce laws equitably, activists will have to research real estate transactions and investigate who is paying for Israel advocacy programs. They will have to put together a who's who of Zionist subversion in the USA.

To change the consciousness of Americans, activists must fight American Holocaust religion and work for recognition

that the mass murders of Jews during WW2 were not exceptional or unique,
that Palestinians, Armenians, Balkan Muslims, and Circassians have all been genocided from the nineteenth through the twentieth century and
that Soviet Jews were up to the eyeballs in mass murder, ethnic cleansing and genocide long before German Nazis, Eastern Europeans, and liberated Soviet nationalities began to kill Jews systematically out of fear and hatred resulting from the Jewish role in the Soviet Union.

Activists will have to challenge American Jews socially at interfaith activities, community events and elsewhere. They must demand clarification of Jewish loyalties and force Jewish leaders to acknowledge

that Americans are not obligated to support Israel and
that hating Jews for what they do (unlike hating Jews for being Jews) is not anti-Semitism.

Activists need to make effort to counter Israel advocacy and Holocaust studies at the high school and even grammar school levels. They need to work for coordination among groups consisting of anti-Zionist Arab Americans, Muslim Americans, genuinely anti-Israel Jewish Americans, conservatives, liberals, and religious people (especially Roman Catholics).

Bottom line: Joachim Martillo came to the same conclusion as Israel Shamir and James Petras, namely, it is not only about Palestine. And we have to deal with it, if we want to liberate Palestine, or stay free wherever we are.

Israel Shamir is a regular columnist for Novakeo.com

A native of Novosibirsk, Siberia, a grandson of a professor of mathematics and a descendant of a Rabbi from Tiberias, Palestine, he studied at the prestigious School of the Academy of Sciences, and read Math and Law at Novosibirsk University. In 1969, he moved to Israel, served as paratrooper in the army and fought in the 1973 war. After his military service he resumed his study of Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, but abandoned the legal profession in pursuit of a career as a journalist and writer. He got his first taste of journalism with Israel Radio, and later went freelance. His varied assignments included covering Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in the last stages of the war in South East Asia. In 1975, Shamir joined the BBC and moved to London. In 1977-79 he wrote for the Israeli daily Maariv and other papers from Japan. While in Tokyo, he wrote Travels with My Son, his first book, and translated a number of Japanese classics.

Email at: info@israelshamir.net

Judonia Rising: The Israel Lobby and American Society

What the Israel Lobby Really Is
How It Hurts the USA

What to Do About It

A Working Paper

Part I: The State of the Lobby

Forward, Part I

In Fall 2006 Lady Kishwer Baroness Falkner of Magravine, who is a liberal member of the House of Lords led a study group at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. It was entitled Democracy for the Islamic World?, US & British Foreign Policy After Iraq.[20] Harvard Professor Stephen Walt, who co-wrote The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy [21] with University of Chicago Professor John Mearsheimer, was the last guest speaker.

Because the sessions were off the record, I cannot report Professor Walt's discussion of US democratization policy, but I did talk with him about the difficulty of understanding the Israel Lobby without a thorough understanding of Eastern European Jewish social and political culture. He told me that he was not going to learn Yiddish at this point in his career. The response is not unreasonable. Realist foreign policy analysis does not delve much into historical backgrounds, and most historiography available about Jews to English-speaking readers is dreadful and verges on hagiography.

Not only had Norman Finkelstein, Joseph Massad, and Noam Chomsky already expressed significant disagreement with the Mearsheimer and Walt analysis as it had appeared in the London Review of Books and in a Harvard Kennedy School working paper by this time period, but Philip Weiss had begun discussing the Israel Lobby on his Mondoweiss New York Observer blog in a way that simultaneously agreed and disagreed with the two authors because Weiss did not maintain a clear distinction between the Israel Lobby, the organized Jewish community and the New Jewish Elite, which Weiss argues has supplanted the old WASP elite.

Whereas Professor Chomsky criticizes Walt and Mearsheimer because of the lack of clarity in their definition of the Israel Lobby, in a sense Weiss builds on the diffuseness of the Lobby. In any case, a USA, whose dominant elite is Jewish, is not necessarily bending to the Israel Lobby when it pursues of pro-Israel foreign policy.

Mearsheimer, Walt, Finkelstein,[i] Massad, Chomsky and Weiss are all correct. Their disagreements result from problems of framework, language and lack of historical context. Because a complete reworking of the Mearsheimer and Walt thesis would require a text at least twice as long as The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy,[22] the following paper should only be considered a brief introduction to a rigorous unified analysis based in a non-exceptionalist understanding of Eastern European Jewish history.

Introduction: The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy

Professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have done a service for American public political discussion by arguing their opinion as foreign policy realists

that Israel protects no important US interests,
that it is a foreign policy liability,
that it arguably never has been a strategic asset despite the claims of Organick in The
$36 Billionr Bargain[23], and
that the disappearance of the Zionist state from the Middle East would at worst harm the USA in no significant way whatsoever.

MIT Professor Noam Chomsky would correctly point out that one could make a good case for the opposite of the above assertions, but debating the above claims misses the main issue. The real problem is the lack of a genuinely open debate in Washington or in the media about the US alliance with Israel.

The two scholars underscore this issue and provide some good comic relief when they claim that there is a strong moral case for supporting Israel even though a good part of the book clarifies just how vacuous a belief in the justice of Zionism and in the morality of Israeli practices really is.

Yet, the book is flawed by acceptance of too many Zionist and Jewish claims at face value.

When the professors write, "There is no question that Jews suffered greatly from the despicable legacy of anti-Semitism and that Israel's creation was an appropriate response to a long record of crimes," they are repeating both ethnic Ashkenazi primordialist essentialism and also the basic creed of the so-called "pogrom and persecution" version of Jewish history. Neither assumption holds up under scrutiny.

The second century Roman Historian Dio Cassius wrote "all who observe Judaic law may be called Judeans, despite the ethnic group from which they originate."

The vast majority of Roman Imperial Jews (more properly Judeans) had no ancestral connection to the populations that lived in the Hasmonean or Herodian Kingdoms of Judea. Modern ethnic Ashkenazim (Jews of Eastern European Yiddish-speaking origins) have less connection and no obviously legitimate claim on Palestine whatsoever. (See How to talk about Zionism, a new improved guide [24] and For Tony Blair: The Real Extremism.[25])

Paul Kriwaczek writes the following in Yiddish Civilization, The Rise and Fall of a Forgotten Nation,[26] pp 5-6.

We have forgotten that Yiddish-speaking Jews were no mere religious or linguistic minority but formed one of Europe's nations, ultimately more populous than many others — eventually to outnumber Bosnians, Croats, Danes, Estonians, Latvians, Slovaks, Slovenians and Swiss, not to mention the Irish, the Scots and the Welsh. What is more, their contribution to central and eastern Europe's economic, social and intellectual development was utterly disproportionate to their numbers. The Yiddish people must be counted among the founder nations of Europe. (Please take note Ireland, Spain, Italy and Poland, who have pressed for "the Christian roots of the continent" to be proclaimed in the constitution of the European Union.)

In the Polish Commonwealth ethnic Ashkenazim constituted an economic elite. They lost this status in the partitions of Poland.

Yet, despite supposedly onerously Czarist oppression, Russian Jews had higher incomes, more education, and longer life spans than the non-Jewish populations among whom they lived. They were highly disaffected because of exclusion from the status and access to which they believed they were entitled, but they were not obviously more oppressed than the majority of the Czar's subjects and less oppressed than others.

Yuri Slezkine belies the myth of Jewish powerless during the lead-up to WW2 in The Jewish Century. (See The Pattern of Ethnic Ashkenazi Genocidalism: The Jewish Century by Yuri Slezkine.[27])

Mearsheimer and Walt's casual misconceptions about Jewish history accompany a similar lack of interest in the sociology of the Jewish community.

Even though How Jews Became White Folks & What that Says About Race in America[28] by Karen Brodkin asserts on p. 147 that

Italian culture is not prefiguratively white, in the way Jewish culture — which Glazer described as like Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture in valuing individuality and ambition — is,

historically Eastern European Jewish culture strongly controlled social and intellectual deviation.

Many of the social control mechanisms continue to exist, have evolved in the American environment, and may help explain why liberal Jews have so empowered the Neocons to the detriment of US foreign policy interests as James Petras has described. (See http://www.philipweiss.org/mondoweiss/2007/12/james-petras-ha.html.)

The Professors do not even ask whether stated reasons for supporting Israel are the real or the same reasons for all Israel advocates throughout the "Israel Lobby." Do the leaders and followers even share the same overall goals?

In contrast, when Columbia Professor Michael Stanislawski investigates the 1848 killing of Reform Rabbi Abraham Kohn in Lemberg in his book entitled A Murder in Lemberg: Politics, Religion, and Violence in Modern Jewish History,[29] he asks whether the crime resulted from religious conflict or from the threat that Kohn represented to the incomes of members of the wealthy Jewish elite.

The same question applies today. Does the so-called "Israel Lobby" merely act to secure the interests of the State of Israel or is the real goal enhancement of the wealth, status, and power of those who pay for it? After all Saudi Arabia pays its professional lobbyists, who consequently serve the Saudi state.

Not only does Israel not pay the "Israel Lobby," but The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy [30] does not give a hint who really does, and in any case large sections of the "Israel Lobby" like the Hollywood Crowd do not even appear in the book even though scholars like Melani McAlister have investigated the Hollywood foreign policy connection in books likes Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East, 1945-2000.[31] With such gaps in the analysis of the "Israel Lobby," no one should be surprised with the weakness of the proposals that Professors Mearsheimer and Walt make for responding to the "Israel Lobby."

Not Just Another Lobby

Their book assumes that "the Israel Lobby" is simply another lobby except for greater effectiveness.

Tony Karon, who is the senior editor of Time.com, recently commented on Philip Weiss's blog

"that a lot of the general AIPAC lines have been internalized in the U.S. political mainstream. And in the process, AIPAC has established itself as synonymous not just with Israel, but with philo-Semitism. What you see at that annual AIPAC conference where Democrats and Republicans line up to kiss ass is a graphic demonstration of the fact that AIPAC no longer even needs to go after the politicians, they come to AIPAC cap in hand." [See Making YIVO a Zionist Organization.[32]]

Thus the primary Israel advocacy organization has effectively become an American political institution that Americans accept without reservation for fear of the accusation of anti-Semitism.

But Purposeful Misdirection with Saya`nim (Sleeper or Helper Agents)

As Walt and Mearsheimer point out, the achievement of Israel advocacy is impressive by any standard. The success results from collaboration of an extremely diverse web of organizations and individuals that specialize in different aspects of the lobbying project and that work together on an “as needed” basis.

A member of the web can be classified in one dimension by message transparency and in another dimension by individual or organizational transparency.

Karon’s comment above indicates that AIPAC has no need for a lot of opaqueness, but in many situations concealment of aspects of the Israel Advocate may increase effectiveness of a message. John Hagee’s Christians United for Israel, albeit secretly funded and run by Jews, is almost excessively public about its lobbying efforts because it probably exists to prove that Israel advocacy is not a Jews-only production. (Jewish-dominated film and music industries routinely create stars. It apparently costs a good deal less money and effort to put someone on the A-list of Christian Israel lobbying.)

Following the lead of AIPAC some think tanks like JINSA (Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs) and WINEP (Washington Institute for Near East Policy) make no effort to conceal their Israel focus, but others like the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy try to conceal Neocon Zionist agendas behind a message of patriotism and anti-terrorism often combined with scare-mongering and anti-Arab or anti-Muslim incitement.

HonestReporting is a media watch dog like CAMERA but obscures its organizational structure and especially its connection to Aish Hatorah, which encourages Jews to become observant and then enmeshes such Jewish returnees in an occult mystical nationalist Zionist agenda.

The David Project pretends to be a Jewish communal organization that teaches Jewish educators how to talk about Israel while StandWithUs claims to raise the Israel consciousness of students on campus, but both act as attack dogs that apparently raise money in proportion to the level of their nastiness.

The David Project orchestrated an attack on the Roxbury Mosque as part of an ongoing program of “diminishing the impact of Israel’s detractors” by normalizing Islamophobia so that American Muslim criticism of Israel will be dismissed out of hand. (See Battle waged in Boston over new mosque.[33])

StandWithUs makes a special effort to counteract Jewish critics of Israel in the university environment. The organization was so upset with Overcoming Zionism by Joel Kovel that it has been trying to deny distribution to all books from Pluto Press that reach the American Public via the University of Michigan Press. (See Zionist attack on Pluto Press [34] and The Boston Globe's Problem with Muslims.[35])

Academia and Israel Lobbying

Both the David Project and StandWithUs work fairly closely with Israeli consulates in the context of the Israel on Campus Coalition. Rashid Khalidi discusses the nature of Israeli academia on p. 75 of The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood.[36]

Perhaps the most eminent of the four, Reuven Zaslani, eventually became the founder of Israel’s external espionage agency, the Mossad. Zaslani later changed his name to Shiloach, and the Middle East Center at Tel Aviv University (now the Moshe Dayan Center) was named for him for a time. The two names that this center has borne illustrate the intimate (and thoroughly unselfconscious) relationship within Israel institutions between academic study of the region on the one hand, and both intelligence work and warfare directed against the Arabs on the other.

Zionist groups would like to use America academia in the same way, and the Israeli mission to the US plays a large role in the battle for the control of academic discourse about the Middle East.

Some high profile academic Israel individual advocates like Alan Dershowitz are fairly transparent in message and affiliation, others like Elie Wiesel, who tries to act as high priest of Holocaust religion, work through other causes. Ruth Wisse, whose husband is Chairman of the Board of Directors of CAMERA uses her academic podium to street-fight for Zionism. (See "Jews and Power" versus "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy"[37] and Poisoning the atmosphere at Harvard.[38])

Lately Ruth Wisse has been faculty advisor to New Society: The Harvard College Student Middle East Journal. Here is the description.[39]

New Society will be a forward-looking biannual journal of scholarship and opinion on the history, politics and culture of the Middle East. It will encourage students and faculty members to debate positive visions for the future of the region. Drawing its ideas from a wide range of contributors, the journal will feature a combination of long, scholarly essays, shorter op-ed style articles, reviews of books, movies and concerts, photographs and artwork, write-ups of events on campus, and interviews. It will publish students, faculty members, and associated scholars based on the quality of their scholarship and writing, but the journal will focus on nurturing and promoting undergraduate writers and editors in particular.

The journal’s content is predictably Zionistically correct. (See New Society.[40])

Mixing Israel Lobbying with Other Activities

Like Wisse, Steven Spielberg has Jewish interests beyond Israel, but the ending of Schindler’s List was simply Zionist propaganda that implicitly justified the theft of Palestine from the native population. (See Married to Another Man, Married to Another Woman.[41])

Like Wisse and Spielberg, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations is not exclusively focused on Israel advocacy, but today its most public role consists of representing the concerns of the organized Jewish community to the President of the United States.

Like the Conference practically every other group within the organized Jewish community provides some degree of overt Israel advocacy no matter how small a role Israel plays in the organization’s official mission statement. Examples run from

running million dollar campaigns against Somerville Divestment from Israel as the Boston Jewish Community Relations Council did to
providing Jewish self-indoctrination seminars and lectures at local synagogues.

Below is a typical instance in the Boston area.

Monday, October 15, 2007

7:15 PM Town Hall Meeting with Former Israeli Ambassador Itamar Rabinovich

Itamar Rabinovich was the former Ambassador of Israel to the U.S., past President of Tel Aviv University, and Camp David Syrian Negotiator, and currently is a lecturer at Harvard. After the briefing, you will be given the opportunity to share your thoughts and concerns about Israel in an open community discussion. A dessert reception will follow (dietary laws observed). At Temple Ohabei Shalom in Brookline. RSVP required. To register or for more information, please call or email.

1187 Beacon Street Brookline MA
617-457-8650
israelevents@jcrcboston.org

There is a whole class of well-defined entities

that are outside the organized Jewish community,
that are theoretically non-Zionist and
that covertly spread Zionist propaganda.

Martin Peretz appears to have used his position as a director of YIVO to transform that institution into an overt Israel advocacy organization. (See Making YIVO a Zionist Organization.[42])

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Boston Public school system through Zionized history textbooks [43] put our various sorts of subliminal Zionist messages.

Many media organizations like those owned by Rupert Murdoch mix genuine news reporting with overt and indirect Zionist propaganda.

MEMRI has been particularly successful in masking its true nature as an Israel advocacy organization associated with Israeli intelligence services. Because far too many trust its selective and misleading translations, MEMRI is one of most effective Israel advocates. (See What Sanabel said.[44])

The movie Exodus was overt Zionist propaganda but unlike Obsession, Radical Islam's War against the West, was not produced by an officially Zionist organization even if the Israeli government directly or indirectly provided some of the investment. (See Zionist Film: Exodus - Terrorism is Good.[45])

Former Harvard President Lawrence Summers took a covert Israel advocacy position and effectively put himself out of a job when he accused the Harvard Divestment movement of anti-Semitism in effect if not in intent. (See Fighting Hegemonic Blocking on Campus -- Ousting Summers at Harvard.[46])

Israel Advocates as Thought Police

Then there are all sorts of groups and individuals that covertly and informally act as Israel advocates. Jewish cliques within Interfaith discussion groups[ii] often engage in subtle Israel advocacy or enmeshment while the often-transnational Jewish networks in academia, across various professions and in the finance industry often serve Zionist purposes of exclusion of Arabs, Muslims and anti-Zionists or of control of discourse. The David Project, which works with informal networks of Jewish doctors, has inserted Zionist propaganda into the Harvard Medical School through its subsidiary X-Ray Project.[iii]

The members of the Jewish finance networks trade insider information and protect each other. Membership generally requires politically correct attitudes towards Israel. Expressions of sympathy toward Palestinians can end careers — at least until Gulf and Saudi Arabs buy enough of the NY investment banks, but the networks might manage to persist with greater secrecy.

As the work of researchers like Alison Weir [47] and Laurel Leff (Buried by the Times, The Holocaust and America’s Most Important Newspaper [48]) clearly indicates, the media industry is full of all sorts of facilitators and gatekeepers, who have a clear effect on the coverage of the conflict over Palestine even in cases where the media owners are themselves unbiased.

Even though Spielberg himself is an Israel advocate, he strayed from Zionist political correctness in Munich and was subjected to a concerted media attack. The Hollywood Crowd got the message, and the marketing of Munich ran into all sorts of “unforeseen” problems. As a result, the movie probably only made one third of reasonable expectations in gross ticket receipts, and it will probably be a long time before Spielberg deviates from the Zionist narrative to give Palestinians another 20 seconds of sympathy.

Beyond the facilitators and gatekeepers there are thousands to tens of thousands — often students or retirees — who will make faxes, letters, calls, emails or come to gatherings on behalf of organizations connected with Israel advocacy.

Israel Advocacy, the US Government, and the Occupation of Iraq

The Neocon Movement, which is the current incarnation of the American Revisionist or Jabotinskian movement, is not an Israel advocacy group or organization, but its members distribute themselves either

throughout the matrix of organizations that take part in lobbying the US government on behalf of Israel or
throughout the government itself, where according to J. Brady Kiesling [49] they so embody the Zionist or Israeli viewpoint that they act as if infected by Israel clientitis.

Friedmanites have been so prominent in the economic regime that the occupation has attempted to impose on Iraq that the common identification of Milton Friedman's economic thinking merely with Cato Institute libertarianism looks incorrect. In today's political intellectual environment Friedmanism looks more like an adjunct of Neoconservatism.

Israel Lobbying in Comparison with Ordinary Lobbies

The complex composite structure of Israel advocacy is unusual among lobbying efforts but not unknown.

Environmental and other public interest group advocacy, unlike corporate and foreign government lobbying, tends to divide tasks among a set of organizations that each have their own sources of funding.

For a given lobbying project, lobbies with a complex organizational structure generally assign a temporary coordination center. The Jewish Federation has a long history of coordinating resources within the Jewish community and seems to provide a permanent coordination center for Israel lobbying from the national level of opposing an AWACS sale down to pressuring a Barnes and Noble store for hosting a Palestinian author like Susan Abulhawa. (See Lobby activities: It's just a fr*ggin' novel!.[50])

The Jewish Federation also works through its educational, media updating, propaganda and indoctrination efforts to make sure that a large number of Jewish and a lesser number non-Jewish volunteers are available to act as foot soldiers (saya`nim and non-Jewish volunteers) in Israel advocacy. Such foot soldiers like the enlisted men in a regular army rarely understand the big picture or have insight into the strategies of the leadership (as Israel Shamir has pointed out).

Israel advocacy is probably unique in the degree that the unofficial lobbying organizations have their own day-to-day programs that have little or no direct connection to the State of Israel even if on occasion the quotidian activities can serve in pro-Israel efforts. Such projects probably constitute an aspect of the diffuseness to which Chomsky has referred.

An Israel Lobbying effort coordinated by the JCRC might use concepts from the JALSA regendering activity, to wit, the argument that Americans should have no sympathy for Palestinians, Arabs or Muslims because they tend to be anti-feminist and anti-gay. In any case, the distinction between ongoing local projects and Israel advocacy is not always distinct even in the case of AIPAC, which was established — as Professor Kovel recently pointed out to me — shortly after the Rosenberg espionage case became public.

AIPAC had to make sure

that Americans distinguished bad Jewish communists from good Jewish Zionists and
that Congress did not take an interest in the Israel's nuclear ambitions, which according to Seymour Hersh wealthy American Jews were funding.

Because Jewish Federation organizations have been coordinating projects for a long time Israel Lobbying efforts benefit from organizational memory that does not exist in other lobbying situations. The longevity of Jewish Federation organizations can give Israel Lobbying efforts a generational aspect not seen elsewhere. For example, Israel Advocacy organizations worked for fifty years to delegitimize Arabist points of view in the foreign service and state department, drive out Arabist officers or bureaucrats and replace them with Israel sympathetic personnel. (See The Marginalization of U.S. Mideast Experts.[51])

Possibly because of long-standing relationships with government officials, because of the fear of the accusations of anti-Semitism, or simply because Jews are disproportionately represented among government officials especially in the legal and regulation enforcement divisions (another class of saya`nim), Israel advocacy is unique among lobbying efforts in that participating groups and individuals for the most part get a pass on tax code, constitutional, and criminal — especially SEC — issues as happened recently when the existence of an AJC memorandum was revealed that questioned the congruence of Obama's thinking with Jewish interests or goals. (See Internal Memo Takes On Obama’s Mideast Approach - Forward.com.[52]) The IRS would have immediately announced an investigation to determine whether any other 501(c)(3) organization in a similar situation was violating the rules with regard to its tax deductible status.

In other words, not only are Americans subjected to often very well camouflaged pro-Israel indoctrination in practically any situation often from completely unexpected sources, but Israel advocates also do not even bother to obey those few rules that the government has established for such activities.

Not the Ordinary Conspiracy

The activities associated with Israel advocacy have the appearance of vast conspiracies especially when a financier like Marc Rich uses all sorts of strings of influence within the Jewish community to obtain an eleventh hour pardon from Clinton or when Jewish academics, Jewish alumni and Israel advocacy organizations mobilize in an attempt to prevent a Palestinian-origin academic like Nadia Abu el-Haj, who has an interest in Jewish studies, from obtaining tenure. The signers of the Deny Nadia Abu El-Haj Tenure Petition [53] are breath taking in their almost uniform indication of German Jewish and ethnic Ashkenazi origin.

Nevertheless as much as conspiracy theorists find evidence of freemasonry, the elders of Zion, the illuminati, dark Talmudists, malicious Cabbalists, or some other group of secret puppeteers, Israel lobbying activities constitute a natural evolution of Jewish, especially ethnic Ashkenazi, communal organizations.

The structure of Israel lobbying is a response to historical developments generally unrelated to Zionism.

Because there has been a sort of Darwinian selection in both the official and unofficial organizations as well as in their techniques, all of which go back often as much two centuries in European environments, Israel lobbying is naturally far more effective than a lobby that was put together over the last few decades or so in response to a specific issue or to serve a specific corporate interest.

Struggle for America and the World

Israel lobbying has for the most part totally manipulated the US government into subordinating US interests to Israeli interests to the detriment or harm of the nation, but Mearsheimer and Walt fail to describe the full magnitude of the problem.

Bat-Ami Zucker points out in Ha-Mesoret Ha-Mishpatit ve-Ha-Zionit shel Louis D. Brandeis [The Legal and Zionist Tradition of Louis D. Brandeis, in Hebrew ] that Brandeis aimed to demonstrate that Zionists were complete and better Americans. In other words Zionism at least for Brandeis and people like him was part of the German Jewish Americanization project (and provided an alternative to Jewish radicalism or communism here in the USA).

Eighty years American Jews have moved beyond mere assimilation. The New Jewish Elite that supplanted the older New York German Jewish elite has been assimilating US society and culture to Jewish standards for the last generation,[iv] and Jewish groups are now at the centers of American power.

Mort Zuckerman recently made an important observation in a JTA news report.[54]

Zuckerman: Israel a 'client state' of U.S.

Published: 02/03/2008

Mort Zuckerman, the editor of U.S. News & World Report, called Israel a "client state" of the United States.

"Israel has to understand — like it or not — it is not a great power. It is a client state. And therefore, it must be dependent upon a great power," Zuckerman said during an interview on Shalom TV's "World Jewish News" show last week. "There is no question that the United States has been and is the most reliable long-term friend and ally that Israel has, and it must do what it has to do in order to maintain that relationship. And if [cooperating with Bush's Annapolis peace initiative] is part of that price, Israel has to do it for the United States."

Zuckerman, a recent past chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, said he is pessimistic about the chances for peace between Israel and the Palestinians but that Israel must make the effort because "it is the only way to maintain whatever political support it has, especially in the United States — but really, in the Western world."

He compared Israel and her quest for peace to Sisyphus, the figure in Greek mythology who repeatedly rolled a huge rock up a hill only to have it roll from his grasp near the summit.

Zuckerman says U.S. policy toward Israel likely will change when a new president takes office next year.

"It never does stay the same — and it is often a surprise," he said. "But it is my judgment that there are a whole variety of views of Israel."

If Israel is a client state and the New Jewish elite is dominating American culture and politics, American Zionists or more correctly those American Zionists manipulating or dominating US ME policy call the shots in Israel and not local Israeli politicians.

There is another critical aspect to the flow of power. A segment of the American Jewish community seems to increase its status, wealth and power through its Israel connection, which at the very least gives this small but important well-connected group of American Jews a place on the gravy train of unaccounted cash aid to Israel.

These American Jews then use their increasing wealth to make sure that national politicians, who support continuing and increasing aid to Israel, are well funded during election campaigns. By careful working the Israel lobby and media connections, this group of Zionists keeps American politicians in a state of dependency on Jewish contributions and in a state of fear of campaign swift-boating.

In effect American national politicians with the exception of Ron Paul are clients of powerful Jewish Zionist elite. In other words, the State of Israel may be a client state of America, but America is a client state of the American Jewish Zionist elite, which is probably in the process of establishing itself as the permanent national "meritocratic" elite.

[Is it surprising that a vocal Zionist like Kondracke and Commentary, which until recently was the flagship national publication of the American Jewish Committee have systematically attacked affirmative action?]

The political relational hierarchy and the domination of an American Zionist elite over all validate the Finkelstein and Massad critiques of The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy.[55]

The alliance between Israel and the US states is in the process of creating an internal American caste system that will be dominated by a small class of hyper-wealthy Zionists. With the sort of permanent war that has been envisioned since the beginning of the twentieth century by a segment of the Zionist elite under the influence of Sorel and with the application of the Friedmanite Shock Doctrine as described by Naomi Klein, this caste system will spread globally. (See The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,[56] by Naomi Klein.)

Among religious, leftist, and right wing ethnic Ashkenazim there has long been a current of thought that Jews are safest in alliance (or better in dominating) an undemocratic government.[v] Thanks to the Patriot act and other actions of the Bush administration, the undemocratic Zionist future is coming into being right before our eyes, and McCain looks like the most likely of current present candidates to bring about the fulfillment of the ultimate globalized Zionist dystopia, but Zionists throughout the political system are poised to influence any other possible victor except Ron Paul, whom Zionist facilitators and gate-keepers in the US media are trying to starve of media attention.

Economics is Key

Even though Professors Mearsheimer and Walt barely discussed economics and cash flow issues in their book, no other aspect of Zionist movement in the US is more important in understanding how it wins politically or how it can lose.

Today, individual contributions is far less important to day to day Israel lobbying and advocacy, which often piggyback on funded, endowed, or profitable groups generally within or associated with the organized Jewish community. As has already mentioned, Martin Peretz, as a director of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research [57] has managed to transform this non-Zionist institution into an organ of Israel advocacy and Zionist defense. The latest YIVO bulletin includes a full-page denunciation The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy.[58] (See Making YIVO a Zionist Organization.[59]) Peretz has managed to leverage a rather small contribution to YIVO to get the benefits of both YIVO resources and prestige.

Nowadays, many official Zionist institutions themselves have endowments while Israel Advocacy includes its own independent profit centers in film-making and conference production, which is an industry in which Sheldon Adelson, who is an important Zionist donor has made billions of dollars. The big Zionist donors tend to start and fund new projects. These donors often do their own R&D or marketing analysis. Many such projects are openly publicized like The Big Ideas Series: Introducing 10 Proposals for Jewish Communal Innovation « The New Jew: Blogging Jewish Philanthropy [60] from Charles Bronfman. The New Jewish Elite has no need for secrecy in its plans to manipulate the American mainstream.

Zionist institutions and corporations often receive direct funding from the United States government. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is an example. It serves a major role in justifying the theft of Palestine from the native population and has recently become a major part of the Zionist and Neocon Darfur project (If you liked Iraq, you will love Sudan [61] and [S1474] Why is Darfur so Important to the Jewish Community?[62]), which distracts from Zionist crimes in Palestine and from the Neocon-inspired disaster in Iraq and which is part of the ongoing Zionist project to incinerate Arab and Muslim countries in order to make the Middle East safe for Israel. (See Killing Muslims Under Humanitarian Cover.[63])

Zionist scare-mongering has also landed lucrative government and private contracts for Zionist terror-study groups like the Investigative Project and the SITE Institute while government grants to increase security seem to go disproportionately to Jewish groups.

While Jewish organizations may be somewhat more effective at grant writing, government approving officials are often Jewish officials, who are constantly receiving literature and indoctrination that comes from the organized Jewish community and that identifies numerous individuals and groups threatening Jews.

The Aliyah Scam, which has often been funded by the US government in many ways, has brought a tremendous amount of money into the Jewish community, and a good portion of such money is then put into Israel advocacy. (See Scamming Americans Robbing Palestinians.[64])

Israel itself is a profit center for Israel advocacy, which receives a tremendous amount of funding from real-estate dealing and from the tourist industry. Conquering the Occupied Territories in the 1967 war proved a boon to tourism because of the important holy sites that they contain and whose control the Israeli government would never concede to any sort of Palestinian authority no matter how servile.

Not only does American aid to Israel come back to the US via a web of family and business connections, but US aid also goes to subsidize Israeli corporations, which compete with American firms and even create American subsidiaries or even relocate to the USA. The portion of US aid that must be spent in the USA can then be spent in corporations that are for all intents and purposes Israeli and whose personnel are fully aware that they must contribute to political candidates that will support increasing funding of Israel.

The State of Israel has consequentially become involved in startup funding and in picking winners among new American corporations through American and Israeli venture capital funds that are directly or indirectly connected to the Israeli government.

This activity is not new for the Israeli government. The Israeli government has been involved assuring the success of the right people in the American entertainment and news industry since the 1950s. Golan Globus is a prominent example, and Haim Saban is at least in part an Israeli government creation.

[In this strategic framework, the Zionist movement also depends on Jews, who are not necessarily wealthy but are in critical positions to serve the Zionist movement especially in intelligence or logistics matters. Such individuals are today called saya`nim. The spy Jonathan Pollard is a particularly egregious saya`an, who was caught. [I have expanded the meaning of the term in this document to include Jewish stealth helpers in Israel Lobbying efforts.]

In addition to saya`nim, Zionists have often used Shabbesgoyim like Orde Wingate during the pre-State period or more recently John McCain III and his father Admiral John McCain, Jr., who absolved Israel of blame in the attack on the USS Liberty. (See Money Jews, Brain Jews, Politics.[65]) The Zionist movement has tended to recruit and reward Shabbesgoyim in families. New York Zionist campaign contributions have rewarded John McCain throughout his political career. Today McCain represents the Neoconservative Friedmanite position in Republican politics without — until recently — a lot of the social conservative baggage to which many American Jews and Friedmanites object.]

Zionist connections in the investment banking industry led to earlier IPOs in the 90s with little or no evidence of profitability. Subprime mortgages were a similar class of dubious investments, whose true nature was obscured in CDOs (collateralized debt obligations), and the valuation of Google and similar companies like Facebook has similar dubious characteristic. Some serious forensic analysis and financial analysis is needed to understand these economic developments, but the end result has been very clear in the development of a new class of superwealthy that is mostly Jewish and willing to put a lot of money into Israel advocacy and into influencing the US government.

Sophisticated Composite Marketing

Awash with money, Israel Lobbying and Advocacy uses the most effective combination of targeted, multi-level, viral, guerrilla, and product drag marketing techniques.

The Functional Groups

The American public constitutes a complex market than can be segmented in many ways, the most obvious division being Jewish versus non-Jewish. A functional organization specializing in memorializing (generally exaggerated) non-Jewish barbarism towards Jews may not be particularly useful in inspiring non-Jewish support for Israel except perhaps in guilt-based projects.

Israel Lobbying can count on a wide range of functional organizations including:

JCCs/Jewish Federations
RAC, UAHC (clerical organizations)
JCRC/JCPA (local community relations organizations)
AJCongress, AJCommittee, ADL (Jewish defense organizations) — the AJCongress historically was closer to the Jewish labor movement than the other two groups.
Jewish Labor Organizations — probably not as important as in the past, but the UFT and AFT are still very Jewish while the NEA has large Jewish membership.
Jewish PACs
Civil Rights Groups
local synagogues and temples
MEF and similar groups or organizations
USHMM (holocaust studies departments, genocide studies, Harvard Carr Center & Samantha Power)
US Commission on Civil Rights (Abigail Thernstrom, Civil Rights for Some Americans [66])
Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations
AIPAC, Israel Project, New Israel Project, overt and covert Zionist Think Tanks
MEMRI
ICC/international Hillel society
American Friends of Peace Now
David Project/StandWithUS/American Anti-Slavery Group (Outlets for Jewish student activism, in the case of the third — for outreach to African Americans)
Interfaith discussion and activism groups
Groups that do outreach to part Jews, e.g., Jewish Outreach Institute or InterfaithFamily.com
Fake Christian Zionist groups (maybe Hagee) and some Zionist churches
CAMERA (mobilizing the retirees)/HonestReporting/Aish HaTorah
Baalei Tshuvah (Returnee to Orthodox or Hassidic Judaism) Organizations: Lubovitchers, Ohr Someach, Pardes, Netivot
Fuel for Truth (markets to club scene, Marketing Islamophobia to Club Scene [67])
Israeli Folkdance Groups
Genetics research groups (Zionazi Racial Science [68])
Numerous Islamophobic organizations funded covertly by Jewish groups and individuals (e.g. the exceptionally secretive USAWAKEUP.org website [69]) and
numerous Jewish identity organizations endowed by people like the Bronfmans, Krafts, Adelsons, or Wexners.

The Basic Projects

Ongoing and past projects associated with Israel Lobbying and Advocacy efforts:

Self-indoctrination (nostalgia, Jewish guilt, positive ethnic consciousness, anti-Zionist Zionism as a means to enmesh religious Jews in pro-Israel behaviors – important in the Lubovitcher approach to the Israeli state)
Anti-anti-Semitism (guilt) with the concomitant identification of anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism
Russian Refuseniks, in which Daniel Pipes and Neocon colleagues learned how to manipulate the US government (see The Real Origins of Neocons [70])
Holocaust and genocide (non-Jewish guilt), of which

Anne Frank (Meyer Levin) is a subproject, which appears in the process of being replaced by
Danny Pearl (Anne Frank of the War on Terror with Judea Pearl as the high priest, Daniel Pearl Foundation Honors Sandel [71])

[This project is only partly Zionist, for it serves to prevent rational discussion of the Holoexaleipsis (the Nakba) and of Jewish involvement in Soviet mass murder, ethnic cleansing and genocide. (See Holoexaleipsis, Holocaust, Holosphage and Holodomor.[72]) The establishment of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum became a priority when American researchers began to obtain access to Soviet and Eastern European archival records.]

Ongoing cooperation with official Israeli attempts to influence or to manipulate American local and national politics
Indoctrinating Christians and part-Jews to support Israel
Manipulating Europeans (bringing Merkel and Sarkozy to power and extending influence in the UK)

Keeping Germans feeling Guilty
Taking control of French or Euro-right
Marginalizing Muslim Europeans (Tariq Ramadan)

Rewriting E. European and Jewish history (see Attack Shohat, Falsifying Jewish History [73])
Controlling Jewish dissent and manipulating non-Jewish opinion via media updates (see Updating "The AJC Attacks"[74])
Zionist Genetics (in order to create a sort of Gramscian blocking on discussing Jewish domination in politics, academia and the media — Jewish superiority and "Israel Lobby" omnipotence cannot be challenged, Zionazi Racial Science [75])
Manipulating African Americans — usually via civil rights organizing and creating Jewishly correct African American leaders like Gloria White-Hammond. (See African Americans, Jews, and Islamophobia.[76])

[Originally civil rights was a project of Jewish radicalism although Jabotinskians used support for civil rights as the means to district from their racism against Palestinians. (See Militant Zionism in American: The Rise and Impact of the Jabotinsky Movement in the United States, 1926-1948 [77] by Rafael Medoff.)

Terror in the Night: The Klan's Campaign Against the Jews,[78] by Jack Nelson suggests that the organized Jewish community opportunistically used Jewish radicals to create conditions to scare up money from wealthy Jews and to manipulate the US government and law enforcement to do its bidding and eventually possibly to commit extra-judicial murder in response to a 1966 synagogue bombing. The skill set that the organized Jewish community developed in such efforts later proved extremely helpful in shutting down Arab and Muslim charities and think tanks.]
Ethiopian “Jews”
Sudan (a very pure example of Zionist multi-level and viral marketing)

Poisoning human rights discourse (AASG in south Sudan, Poisoning Human Rights Discourse [79])
JCPA/Ken Sweder: using boycotts, genocide, Darfur (The Fifth Question [80])
AJWS/Ruth Messinger: humanitarianism and social welfare as political tool, rewrites history (Profiteering from Humanitarianism [81])

Arabophobia & Islamophobia with the Islamofascism smear — the Islamofascist menace of the War on Terror is very important because justifying the alliance with Israel is much more difficult without the Cold War
Bribing US government officials via trips to Israel and other favors — (BRA Official Asked Help from Mosque Backer [82])
Creating non-Jewish front organizations and shills like CUFI and John Hagee, who seems to be funded and managed by Jewish groups — the similarity to star creation in the music industry is striking
Glorifying Abraham Joshua Heschel, who did some minor work with Martin Luther King, Jr. and who was also a Zionist propagandists and extremist racist according to his book Israel, An Echo of Eternity[83] (Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Service[84])
Keeping labor unions pro-Israel or at the very least making sure that they not only keep their pension funds invested in Israel Bonds but also continue to invest union money in them.

The Islamophobia and Arabophobia project is striking in its apparently conscious use of models from classic anti-Semitism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

From Updating "The AJC Attacks":[85]

Robert Spencer, who is author of Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions about the World’s Fastest Growing Religion [86] as well as a frequent speaker at meetings and lectures to incite Islamophobia (see Report on Robert Spencer and the Boston Anti-Islamic Controversy [87]), and his ilk, who are generally well-funded by fanatic Zionist and Jewish Neocon organizations like the Center for the Study of Popular culture (recently renamed the David Horowitz Freedom Center), are scribbling these ridiculous books that are poor imitations of Eisenmenger's Entdecktes Judentum (Judaism Unmasked) or Rohling's Der Talmudjude (the Talmud Jew).
Too many (often Jewish) pseudo-scholars are babbling ignorantly about taqiyya (prudence), which is a permissible form of dissimulation in certain life threatening situations according to certain Shiite jurists. The concept has an exact counterpart in the thinking of the Rambam (Moses Maimonides or Musa bin Maimun, see his letter on martyrdom/forced apostasy, whose original Arabic uses the word taqiyya to describe exactly the same form of deception permitted to Jews subjected to certain forms of mortal danger).
The concept of taqiyya also has a very close analogue in Roman Catholic ethics. The accusation that Muslims practice taqiyya to justify lying to non-Muslims is essentially equivalent to the common anti-Semitic slander that asserts that Jews never keep their contracts with non-Jews because the Kol Nidrei prayer, which is part of the ceremony of Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement), nullifies all such agreements.
Articles like Alain Besançon's "What kind of religion is Islam?," Which appeared in the May 2004 issue of Commentary, argue for a fundamental opposition between Islam and Judeochristianity. Such scholarly and non-scholarly literature represents a phenomenon essentially identical to the extensive 19th and 20th century literature that claims an unbridgeable gulf exists between Judaism and Christianity (Judentum und Christentum or sometimes Judentum und Deutschtum) in order to assert that Muslims today or Jews then are/were fundamentally alien to mainstream western culture and must be removed. (See Linguistics, Islam and the Beatitudes [88] for a much less sinister hypothesis of the relationships among Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.)

There are many more similarities between Islamophobic and anti-Semitic politics. Stab in the back accusations toward progressive Americans, Arab Americans, and Muslim Americans will not be far behind.

The International Hillel Society, the American Jewish Committee, AIPAC and JINSA (a think tank) frequently mail Islamophobic and Arabophobic literature to scare-monger against targeted Arab and Muslim individuals and groups. Because the mailing lists of Jewish organizations typically include important people in government, the news media and legal professions, continuous low-level defamation tends to create conditions for the effectively disenfranchisement of Arab and Muslim Americans in ways strongly reminiscent of the treatment that African Americans suffered post-Reconstruction until some civil rights activism began to produce results.

A Web of Influence, Conditioned Thinking and Reflexive Behavior

Ongoing Zionist indoctrination of the American public has produced a Zionist web of influence, conditioned thinking and reflexive behavior that is breath-taking in its pervasiveness.

Roman Catholics according to statistical analysis are less sympathetic. It is intriguing that practically every time the Boston Globe runs a story that features a Catholic cleric expressing a criticism of Israel, within approximately a week, it also runs a story about a Catholic cleric sex scandal sometimes featuring events from as much as 25 years ago as if to provide some crude sort of "balance" that even CAMERA and HonestReporting do not advocate. It is an often-unconscious behavior more often associated with an angry ethnic press, and it may be significant

that the Boston Globe Editorial Board includes Lawrence Harmon, who was editor at the Boston Jewish Advocate, and
that paid entry level newspaper jobs in the USA nowadays seem to be found mostly at the ethnic Jewish press.

The Boston Globe does not seem particularly different from other important newspapers.

Other content in the US shows similar tendencies. One expects the film or novel Exodus to demonize Palestinians, but movies [89] like Bright Lights, Big City, Time After Time, and Oh God, You Devil! do as well.

Vincent Brook discusses Jews on TV in Something Ain't Kosher Here, The Rise of the "Jewish" Sitcom.[90] He correctly identifies some aspects of trends in Jewish representations, but he misses the real story in which early Jewish trends conformed to the project of assimilating Jews to American society and making non-Jews comfortable with Jewish neighbors. Gradually, the TV sitcoms switch first to the project of assimilating non-Jewish society to various Jewish (really ethnic Ashkenazi) social-cultural norms like female dominance in relationships, female breadwinners, early sexual initiation, sexual ambiguity and serial polygamy and then to the project of creating non-Jewish comfort with the blending of Jews into the dominant elite. Because the Hollywood Crowd are subjected to the same ongoing Israel advocacy activities as other Americans, the writers for the most post incorporate the State of Israel into everyday American culture and American civic religion as part of the scripts and thereby reinforce ongoing Israel advocacy projects.

American Jews reinforce the lessons of Israel education for themselves with a whole class of Israel or Jewish oriented novels (written by authors like Naomi Ragen, Herman Wouk, Leon Uris, Meyer Levin, and Elspeth Baker), comic books, or other literature, where one expects to find Zionist or Jewish prejudices, but another possibly larger class of writing responding to Zionist indoctrination contains all sorts of subliminal Israel advocacy, sliming of Palestinians, Arabophobia or Islamophobia.

Paul Anderson provides a fairly typical and subtle example of subliminal Zionist propaganda in The High Crusade, which is a science fiction novel that reinforces the inevitability of an Israeli Imperium on Earth. Here is a typical example from Keith Laumer’s 1964 science fiction novel, entitled A Plague of Demons (pp 127-128 in the 1965 Pocket Books version, approximately p. 76 in the online RFT version). (See A Plague of Demons.[91]) The book connects the State of Israel with the American icon Benjamin Franklin.

"What's the Ultimax Group?"

"An elite inner circle organization, international in scope, privately financed, comprising one hundred and fourteen individuals selected on the basis of superior intellectual endowment, advanced specialist training, emotional stability, and other factors."

"For what purpose?"

"To monitor trends in the Basic Survival Factors, and to take such steps as may be required to maintain a favorable societal survival ratio."

"I never heard of them. How long have they been operating?"

"Two hundred and seventy-one years."

"My God! Who started it?"

"The original Committee included Benjamin Franklin, George Loffitt, Danilo Moncredi, and Cyril St. Claire."

…

"That's that," I said. "Tell me more about this Ultimax Group. What's it been doing these past couple of hundred years?"

"It contributed materially to the success of the American War of Independence, the defeat of the Napoleonic Empire, the consolidation of the Italian and German nations, the emergence of Nippon, the defeat of the Central Powers in the First Engagement of the European War, and of the Axis Powers in the Second Engagement, and the establishment of the State of Israel. It supported the space effort . . ."

I was beginning to feel a little ragged now; the first fine glow was fading. I listened to the voice for another half-hour, while it told me all about the little-known facts of history; then I dismissed it and took another nap.

The comic book Stormwatch: Team Achilles like many others emphasized the categorical and moral imperative to do anything and everything to wage the War on Terror according to Israeli or Neoconservative principles.

At this point the Zionist equation of Arabs or Muslims with terrorists is so embedded in popular culture that people with no connection to the American Jewish community see terrorist financing in Arab or Muslim investments in American companies and denounce innocuous companies like Ptech, Dubai Portsworld or Arab financed investment fund management companies.

Pro-Israel vulture capitalists in media benefit from a similar phenomenon. As soon as potential advertisers learn that a pro-Israel investor has acquired a newspaper, their marketers discover a need to place adds to generate good will or for some other purpose. Eventually the newspaper enters the black. The vulture capitalist cashes in. New investors, who are perhaps not so pro-Israel, may lose revenue especially if editorial or Middle East coverage changes. The newspaper enters the red, and the vulture cycle can continue a few more times until Murdoch or some similar investor like CanWest incorporates it into an almost certainly pro-Israel media empire.

Ultimate Results

The changes that Israel lobbying and advocacy projects have introduced into American society are devastating as Zionists have attempted to control American discourse and have warped economic relations because the USA and Arab or Muslim countries.

Israel advocates try to control what books are available for Americans to read and have run campaigns against The Scar of David by Susan Abulhawa, A Little Piece of Ground by Elizabeth Laird, Dreaming of Palestine by Randa Ghazi, and Overcoming Zionism by Joel Kovel. (See Lobby activities: It's just a fr*ggin' novel!,[92] Zionist attack on Pluto Press,[93] and Making sure Americans hear only one story.[94])

US political debate is being reduced either to arguments whether Muslim Americans show loyalty by taking an oath of office on the Quran as happened in the case of Ken Ellison or to tests of loyalty Israel as happened in the cases of Findley, McKinney and Percy.

Through the Israel on Campus Coalition, the Israeli Consulates and Embassy are orchestrating censorship campaigns throughout American universities often with the aid of freelancers like former Harvard President Lawrence Summers. (See Boycotts and Priniples of Academia.[95])

The same groups and individuals are trying to enforce indoctrination of American students with Zionist mythology from kindergarten through university level by means of Holocaust Education programs generally developed in Israel.

The hyper-wealthy Zionist elite is trying to create Israel Studies programs in which only Zionistically correct scholars will teach while stealth and overt Israel advocacy groups and individuals attempt to drive any scholars critical of Zionism from American education. (See Jacob Lassner and Nadia Abu el Haj.[96])

Nadia Abu el Haj, Finkelstein, Arun Gandhi, Massad, Dabashi, Saliba, Debby Almontaser (Khalil Gibran International Academy, New York City) and many others have been subjected to such attacks. (See Zionism, Penisism, and Joseph Massad,[97] Arun Gandhi and Sholem Aleichem,[98] and Conspiracy Against Rights in NYC.[99])

The attempt to prevent Arab and Muslim Americans from working at universities and other educational institutions looks like a form of conspiracy against rights. As Arabs and Muslims become a larger part of the American population, Israel Lobbying and Advocacy groups and individuals like the David Project or Joe Kaufman (Chairman of Americans Against Hate, the founder of CAIR Watch, and the spokesman for Terror-Free Oil Initiative) are so desperate to prevent any rational discussion of the conflict over Palestine that they have engaged in similar conspiracies against rights both

· to prevent American Muslims from freely assembling to practice their religion and also

· to stop Arab and Muslim Americans from giving charity to Palestinians.

The standard modus operandi of conspirators has involved scare mongering and defamation, which has long been a specialty of Abraham Foxman and the ADL as well as of David Harris and the American Jewish Committee. These organizations and more specialized Israel Lobbying organizations like the Genocide Information Network are afraid of losing control of genocide discourse for fear that Americans might realize as a result of efforts like the Somerville Divestment Project that the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, which is the Nakba or the Holoexaleipsis (the Great Erasure), is a unique and perhaps the archetypal genocide. If such a realization became common among Americans, it would undermine US support for Israel. Campaigns like the ADL's "No Place for Hate" and attempts to thwart recognition of the Armenian Genocide make rational discussion of genocide in America practically impossible. (See More Jewish Genocide Denial.[100])

Fighting Back to Save America

Pointing out the cost of Israel to each and every American is a good starting point to counteract Israel lobbying and advocacy.

The Zionism of Christian evangelical fundamentalists is part of generational program of Jabotinskians but is not particularly deep. Obviously, Rapturists do not care much about the cost of Israel to America, but Christian Zionism can be fought by scriptural disputation, by questioning the patriotism of its leaders and by exposing surreptitious Jewish funding and organizing. (See Linguistics, Islam and the Beatitudes [101] and Islamic Marcionism in Malaysia.[102])

Moral Arbiters,
Major players in a dramatic narrative of national rebirth,
Beneficiaries of programs like Taglit (Birthright Israel [103]), Jewish networks in academia, the professions and politics,
Certain of their own righteousness, and
Wielders of the all-powerful accusation of anti-Semitism. (See Long History of Hindu Judeophobia.[104])

At the college level, the International Hillel Society acts like a junior auxiliary to the KKK by running racist programs like Taglit/Birthright Israel and by hosting extremist speakers that incite murder and genocide against Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims or deny that they are human.

Not just Jewish organizations are enmeshed in the tax fraud; the Harvard Kennedy School of Government Wexner Israel Fellowship Program (not the Wexner Israel Heritage Fellowship program) violates the principles of Bob Jones vs. USA. (See Bob Jones vs. USA [1][105] and Bob Jones vs. USA [2].[106])

(The Wexner Foundation > Wexner Israel Fellowship > General Information and Awards [107])

Established in 1989, The Wexner Israel Fellowship Program represents a unique and important partnership between The Wexner Foundation and Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government.[108] Each year, up to ten outstanding Israeli public officials are funded to pursue a Master Degree in Public Administration at the Kennedy School and to participate in a set of leadership institutes sponsored by the Foundation itself. The goal of the program is to provide Israel's next generation of public leaders with advanced training in public management and leadership development, thus enhancing the quality of democracy and the institutional vitality of Israel's public sector. Wexner Israel fellows find themselves at the hub of both the university-wide program in public policy and the Kennedy School's faculty, curriculum, students, and research centers. Consequently, they encounter a rich environment conducive to reflection and dialogue about Israel's policy challenges and the diverse leadership strategies that could address those challenges. Wexner Israel Fellows are awarded a Mid-Career Master in Public Administration (MC/MPA) upon successful completion of the academic year.

As is frequently pointed out in the Hebrew press, the Israeli public sector is highly discriminatory against non-Jews. This fellowship lets the racism of Israeli society exclude non-Jews (in 19 years only two non-Jews have participated even though depending on how one counts somewhere between 20-30% of Israeli citizens are non-Jews. Fellowship meetings are held at the Harvard Hillel. Fellows take part in programs at synagogues. It does not provide a particularly friendly environment to Israeli Palestinians with any sort of self-esteem, and one must wonder whether exclusion of residents of the Occupied Territories is really legitimate after 60 years of racist Jewish domination.

Obviously, Harvard is sponsoring a racist Jewish fellowship. The fellowship documents at the KSG websites indicate that fellows will establish personal relationships with current or future US government officials so that 10 to 15 years in the future, the decisions of US bureaucrats and leaders will be tainted by personal issues (Wexner's unstated goal).

This program should put Harvard University's status as a tax-deductible 501(c)(3) institution in jeopardy. Why should Harvard be allowed to engage in racist practices that forced Bob Jones University to lose its 501(c)(3) status? The program has run for 19 years, and one must wonder how many American universities are similarly sponsoring Jewish racism.[vi]

The Jack Abramoff case indicates that many SEC, FEC, and terrorism related violations are very much Israel-related; yet, according to newspaper reports no investigators are looking into aspect of ongoing criminality. It looks like US government officials are engaged in a conspiracy to obstruct justice or some other similar violation. There are major equal protection issues in the ongoing government persecution of Muslim charities without comparable investigation of Jewish charities that are supporting Zionist terrorism, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity and war crimes.

The US government also appears to have no interest in prosecuting violations against rights when the victims are Muslim communities that want to build Mosques or are Arab and Muslim American university professors or Arab school principals.

The Functions Manual: Criminal Division of the DOJ^{^[109]} says the following on the Office of Special Investigations.

Special investigations - since its creation in 1979, the Office of Special Investigations has been responsible for detecting, investigating, and taking legal action to denaturalize and/or deport persons who took part in Nazi-sponsored acts of persecution committed abroad during the period 1933-45 and, since December 2004, also for detecting, investigating, and taking legal action to denaturalize persons who participated abroad in acts of genocide or in acts of torture or extrajudicial killings committed under color of foreign law.

As far as I know the OSI has investigated neither for Jews involved in Soviet torture, extrajudicial killings, mass murder, ethnic cleansing, or genocide nor for Jews involved in revenge killings or torture after the defeat of Nazi Germany nor for Jews involved in pre-state Zionist or Israeli torture, mass murder, ethnic cleansing, genocide, or extra-judicial killings.[vii] Yet both Polish and also Lithuanian prosecutors have indicted or investigated Israeli Jews for such crimes. (See Yom Kippur and Ashkenazi Genocidalism [110] for discussion of a Lithuanian case.)

Is there some sort of equal protection violation in the possibly selective prosecution of someone like Zajanckauskas

To US, Vladas Zajanckauskases of Sutton is a war criminal; to his family, he is a good man [111]

Source: Boston Globe | Date: Sep 29, 2007 | By: Linda Matchan

...would make him the oldest person ever deported as a result of an investigation by the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations. To OSI officials, this is a story of justice served, a textbook case of a Nazi collaborator who managed...

or Henss?

Federal officials say 85-year-old Lawrenceville man was WWII Nazi concentration camp guard [112]

According Justice Department and Homeland Security officials, Paul Henss, an 85-year-old German citizen living in Gwinnett County, guarded prisoners "at the notorious Dachau and Buchenwald Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany."

According to Wikipedia, Congressman Rahm Emanuel's father, the Jerusalem-born pediatrician Benjamin M. Emanuel, was a member of the Irgun, a Zionist paramilitary terrorist organization that committed mass murder, ethnic cleansing, genocide, terrorism, and extra-judicial killings. So far OSI has undertaken neither investigation nor legal action against either Benjamin Emanuel or the multitudes of similar Zionist or Soviet Ashkenazi immigrants with similar criminal backgrounds.

Does the OSI only prosecute non-Jews? Can non-Jewish Eastern Europeans or Palestinians receive any justice from the US DOJ?

•Until the US government begins to enforce laws equitably, activists will have to research real estate transactions[viii] and investigate who is paying for Israel advocacy programs.

They will have to put together a who’s who of Zionist subversion in the USA.

To change the consciousness of Americans, activists must fight American Holocaust religion and work for recognition

that the mass murders of Jews during WW2 were not exceptional or unique,
that Palestinians, Armenians, Balkan Muslims, and Circassians have all been genocided from the nineteenth through the twentieth century and
that Soviet Jews were up to the eyeballs in mass murder, ethnic cleansing and genocide long before German Nazis, Eastern Europeans, and liberated Soviet nationalities began to kill Jews systematically out of fear and hatred resulting from the Jewish role in the Soviet Union.

that Americans are not obligated to support Israel and
that hating Jews for what they do (unlike hating Jews for being Jews) is not anti-Semitism.

Activists need to make effort to counter Israel advocacy and Holocaust studies at the high school and even grammar school levels. They need to work for coordination among anti-Zionist Arab American, Muslim American, genuinely anti-Israel Jewish American, conservative, liberal, and other religious (especially Catholic) groups.

Eventually, activists must work to create Palestinian-sympathetic or Palestinian POV Hollywood-style cinema for American audiences. (See Devorah's Two Weddings [113]and Two Weeks in September [114] for proof of concept.)

Yet, as cold as it is to state, the real issue is not Palestine.

Unless they are neutralized, Israel lobbying groups, Israel advocates, Zionists, Neoconservatives, and Friedmanites will steal America and effectively abolish the Constitution in all but name to create a society of servitude for all Americans except for those belonging to the hyper-wealthy transnational Zionist political elite.

Judonia Rising: The Israel Lobby and American Society

What the Israel Lobby Really Is
How It Hurts the USA

What to Do About It

A Working Paper

Part II: The Genesis, Development and Future of the Lobby
or
Accidental Empire

Forward, Part II

I have met John Brady Kiesling twice, once at Princeton and once at Harvard. The USA lost an able diplomat when he resigned from the Foreign Service [115]^,
[ix] on February 24, 2003 in order to express his opposition to the impending attack on Iraq. Despite his apparently increasing frustration, which in not a few cases seems to related to the special relationship between the USA and the State of Israel, [x] his book, entitled Diplomacy Lessons: Realism for an Unloved Superpower [116] is nothing if not diplomatic[xi] in its attempt to analyze the American practice of diplomacy objectively and to explain the logic of diplomacy for the world’s only superpower.

Some of his assessments require more justification than he provides. On p. 140, Kiesling writes:

One of the worst political deformations of Muslim elites, as of Greek elites until the 1990s, is the belief that unlimited American power absolves everyone else of moral responsibility. Few Muslims accept America’s legitimate argument that peace and justice in the Middle East depend first and foremost on the people who live there. America could have prevented Israel from colonizing the West Bank, but it did not. The CIA is an allegedly all-knowing intelligence service, so ignorance is no excuse. Therefore, America is an evil superpower, and evil must be resisted.

While the State of Israel and Zionism have caused some major political deformations of Muslim and Western elites, confused ideas about blame and responsibility hardly make the top ten among intellectual contortions. Kiesling’s position is forgivable but harder to defend after the destruction of Iraq because correct analysis of the real Middle East problem in the proper context of US politics requires knowledge of Jewish and Zionist politics beyond anything normally obtainable from academic studies in N. American, in European, or in any university system in the world today.

Kiesling’s inaccurate description of Israel as “a vibrant democracy” (p. 177) is excusable in a former student of the Classics and archeology because resisting the effects of the Zionist effort to obscure the true nature of the Israeli political system requires thorough familiarity with inter bellum Eastern European formal democracies of the class to which the State of Israel belongs.

Kiesling more than compensates for occasional questionable assertions with his willingness to reevaluate long held opinions belied by events. He confesses on pp. 107-108:

Most Greek bookstores carry Greek translations of all the latest books by Noam Chomsky, an American intellectual gifted at connecting all the dots of U.S. behavior into a tidy picture. In 2001 I assured Mr. Tegopoulos, the publisher of Athens’ most popular leftist newspaper, that his favorite American philosopher was clinically insane.” Chomsky, I said, had deduced a vast, invisible mechanism of systematic U.S. oppression and exploitation, one that was not true to human nature and could not have operated over decades without becoming visible to its employees. I reassured Tegopoulos that the U.S. foreign policy apparatus could not conspire its way effectively out of a paper bag.

I feel more charitably disposed toward Chomsky now. The Iraq War proved that the United States does have a small group of extremely intelligent, disciplined, highly competitive individuals competent enough to mobilize the U.S. bureaucracy around a single mission such as regime change in Iraq. Chomsky’s favorite conspirators, the former Troskyites turned neoconservatives, might even have read Chomsky in their youth. Certainly they made the same mistake he did. They confused mastery over the U.S. bureaucratic system with U.S. power to triumph over the real world.

I can empathize. I used to be highly sympathetic both to the American Jewish community and also to the State of Israel until Israeli behavior in the Occupied Territories as well as the policies of the second Bush administration forced me to reevaluate my original assumptions and to study issues relating to the Middle East in more detail.

Despite Kiesling’s statement above, describing Neoconservatives as Chomsky’s favorite conspirators is questionable. They do not even figure Chomsky’s Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians [117] with the exception of Richard Perle, who receives brief mention on p. 450 of the updated edition.

Just as Chomsky would probably criticize Kiesling’s apparent belief in a well-defined objective US national interest, I have to criticize Chomsky’s analysis of the relationship between the United States and the State of Israel as well as common assumptions that Americans make about Jews and Israel.

For the record, I knew a good number of the current generation of Neocons in their youth at Harvard and elsewhere, and I have to laugh at the attempt to identify them or the previous generation with Trotskyitism or Schachtmanism although I will concede that Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Jabotinsky are rather similar[xii] and that in general the first generation of Trotskyites and Revisionist Jabotinskian Zionists tend to come from the same rather narrow range of backgrounds.

Depiction of Neoconservatives as leftists turned right represents a way of distracting from the true nature of Neoconservatism as an ideology of Jewish special interest. (See The Real Origins of Neocons [118] and All in the Neocon Family.[119]^,
[xiii])

Yet, Kiesling’s resignation letter more than compensates for some minor foibles in interpretation by posing a question that clarifies the dilemma in the USA and the world finds itself:

Is the Russia of the late Romanovs really our model, a selfish, superstitious empire thrashing toward self-destruction in the name of a doomed status quo?

Zionism reached its final form in the late Czarist state and imprinted on Russian imperialism as the normal behavior of a Great Power. Neocons steeped in Zionist ideology and holding some of the most powerful positions in the US government have almost reflexively proposed policy in conformance with the belief that the normal behavior of a Superpower like the USA must follow the example of the imaginary brutality of the Czarist Empire of Zionist narrative.[xiv]

Americans should be feel reassured that there exist US diplomats with the knowledge base to make the connection between Neocon foreign policy and the Romanovs. They should be distressed that one such diplomat felt compelled as a man of integrity[xv] to resign from the Foreign Service in the lead-up to the Second Iraq War despite the habits of two decades of loyal service to the USA. Because of such strength of character, I dedicate The Israel Lobby and American Society to John Brady Kiesling.

Study Guide

Judonia Rising working Paper Part 2 contains about seventy-six pages within its main body as well as twenty eight pages of notes.

The table of contents on pp. 1-3 identifies the main divisions of the document.

The second and third sections, Introduction: The Virtual Colonial Motherland as Political Innovation and Disenfranchised Elite, assert that European Jews had the resources, skill set, and mentality to create their own colonial empire.

From the section, Jewish Capabilities and Resources, up to and including the section, Aspects of US Jewish Communal Organization, I attempt to prove this thesis.

Of these sections, probably The Economics of Judea and High and Low Politics of Nascent Judonia are most important.

The section Judonia, Balfour Declaration and Afterward briefly summarizes the history of the Virtual Colonial Motherland (i.e., Judonia) from the Balfour Declaration to this day.

The subsections Changing of the Guard, The Roaring 90s, and American Gleichschaltung, Burning Arab Countries, Crashing the US Economy are the most important parts of this section.

The Roaring 90s in particular points out

that the USA has become a client state of Judonia and
that President George W. Bush plays the role of Vidkun Quisling or Marshal Pétain.

The section, The Context of Jewish Violence and Subversion, asks whether the thesis is simply an updated version of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion while the concluding section, Fighting the Dystopic Future, addresses possible developments in the near term.

Introduction: The Virtual Colonial Motherland as Political Innovation

When Uri Avnery spoke upon receiving[120] the Lev Kopelev prize with Sari Nusseibeh in Cologne, Germany on November 22, 2003,[xvi] he tried to whitewash Zionism by joking:

What is a Zionist? A Jew who takes the money of a second Jew in order to send a third Jew to Palestine.

This quip has appeared in discussions of Zionism for about 75 years (including recently in the Mondoweiss blog[121]) and hides the facts by putting them in plain view with a sarcastic description that can apply to the colonial office of any imperial state that uses some portion of tax revenue to send settlers to live in a foreign colony. In other words, the goal of Zionism was not so much the establishment of a settlement or state in Palestine as it was of creating an Empire. In the context of the last decades of the nineteenth century, the idea was hardly unreasonable. The newly consolidated German and Italian states felt cheated or left out and fairly quickly sought to enhance their status, wealth and power by acquiring foreign colonies. In the 1880s Eastern European Jews outnumbered Danes, who already had their own colonial Empire. While the Dutch built their physical countryside as they became wealthier and more powerful through enlargement and exploitation of their imperial possessions, Zionists never bothered with a physical territory but expanded and elaborated the organizational capabilities of their virtual colonial motherland as they became richer and more influential in parallel with the development of the Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Because discussing a colonial motherland in connection with Zionism seems oxymoronic by definition within the framework of Zionist ideology and possibly because mainstream academics simply do not take Jewish history and politics seriously enough, the development of this virtual state structure has escaped the attention of all historians and political scientists that have studied the history of Modern Israel and its relationship with the USA. Professors John Mearsheimer and Walt use the term Israel lobby but explain:

We use “Israel lobby” as a convenient shorthand term for the loose coalition of individuals and organizations that actively work to shape U.S. foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction. (The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt,[122] p. 112.)

They add:

As with other special interest groups, the boundaries of the Israel lobby cannot be identified precisely, and there will always be some borderline individuals or organizations whose position is hard to classify. (Ibid, p. 113.)

James Petras writes in The Power of Israel in the United States:[123]

C. Wright Mills once wrote that the US “power elite” ruled by denying it held power. The Zionist elite follows this formula, but defends itself by accusing its adversaries of being “anti-Semites” and pursuing retributive measures that would please former Senator Joseph McCarthy. The Zionist power configuration (ZPC) cannot be understood merely as the “Jewish Lobby” or even the AIPAC, as formidable as it is, with 150 full-time functionaries. The ZPC can best be understood as a complex network of interrelated formal and informal groupings, operating at the international, national, regional and local levels, and directly and systematically subordinated to the State of Israel, its power holders and key decision makers.” (p. 46.)

In some regards ZPC is better than Israel lobby, but Petras is incorrect in claiming that the ZPC is “subordinated to the State of Israel, its power holders and key decision makers.”

Neither of the two terms does justice to the history or political economy of the Zionist virtual colonial motherland, which this document names by combining combining Iud/aeus (Latin: Jew) with Pol/onia.to create the term Judonia in order to emphasize the analogy with the historical concept of Polonia during the time period when the Polish state had ceased to exist.

Judonia’s leadership is unique among imperial governments, for it has no need to compromise with or compensate for the exigencies of ruling an actual physical nation-state. Because Judonia’s colonialism and imperialism function in particularly pure forms, they would long ago have become the subjects of immense scholarly inquiry if only mainstream historians and political scientists took Jewish history and internal politics seriously.

WORLD JEWISH POPULATION [124]

	1800	1840	1880	1900	1914	1938	1948
Europe (Incl. Russia)	1,500	3,950	6,858	8,900	9,100	9,500	3,700
Asia	-	300	370	510	500	1,000	1,300
Africa, Middle East	1,000	198	250	375	400	600	700
North & South America	-	50	250	1,200	3,500	5,500	5,800
Australia	-	2	10	15	-	-	-
TOTAL	2,500	4,500	7,738	11,000	13,500	16,600	11,500

Table 1 A summary of the distribution of Jews throughout the world from 1800 to 1948 (1000s)

A Disenfranchised Elite

The Jews of Commonwealth Poland (Rzeczpospolita Polska, 1505-1795) had lived in the center of a powerful state and constituted an economic elite with easy access to the rulers. In partitioned Poland they were a disenfranchised frustrated transnational elite of a vanished state. Without any relocation whatsoever, the members of this elite now inhabited territories, far less politically and economically significant, at the periphery of the Prussian, Austrian and Russian empires. While on the whole Jewish income was higher than that of their non-Jewish neighbors, it was nowhere near the levels to which many Jews aspired and felt they could achieve if granted access to the central imperial territories. Jews were subjected to various forms of exclusion and discrimination in all three states, and they felt humiliated.

A typical Jewish intellectual harboring such feelings was Peretz Smolenskin. He was a popular albeit not particularly successful writer. He was ostensibly responding to the pogroms following the targeted assassination of Czar Alexander II by a Jewish-led terror squad (see Followup (II): Origins of Modern Jewry [125]) with the essay “Let us search our Ways” (1881):

To our shame and sorrow we must admit that there is no peace and unity among us. We were weak within — therefore our strength was little in the day of evil. Would this have happened had we believed in our hearts that the ten million Jewish souls belonged to one nation? Every person in his right senses would reply: No! Why are we treated like this? Because we have sunk so low that our self-respect has died – because we have come to like charity flung at us in disgrace and contempt. (See The Zionist Idea, A Historical Analysis and Reader[126] by Arthur Hertzberg, p. 150.)

Just as the founders of the Dutch or Honorable (British) East India Companies had no inkling that they were founding the Dutch and British Empires (as they were experimenting with the new financial instrument of the joint-stock corporation), Smolenskin shows no obvious consciousness of proposing an Empire for Eastern European Jews as he identifies the territory, manpower, and resources necessary to create a colony:

[English explorers] have established that the [Land of Israel] is very good and that, if cultivated with skill and diligence, it could support fourteen million people. Even if we assume some exaggeration (though in truth there is none) and that there is room for only half that number, Eretz Israel can nonetheless contain all those who might wish to take refuge there. Not all Jews will go there — only those who are destitute or persecuted will look for a place to which to emigrate. It would be enough if only one million of our brethren would go, for it would be a relief both to them and to those remaining in the lands of the dispersion. (Ibid, p. 152.)

Our Jewish philanthropists should therefore not tarry, if they really want to help their less fortunate brethren. They should hasten to buy land and let Jews settle on it to begin a new life. We can be sure that money will not be lacking, if only men of sufficient vision can be found to initiate this project in the right spirit, with a desire to help their people. In all countries there exist such Jews, many more than we know of, who strive to help their people with all their might and main. Only one thing is lacking — a united purpose. As soon as we succeed in achieving unity for this great work, fruition will not be long in coming. (Ibid, p. 153.)

Because of exclusion from governmental or professional employment by law or prejudice, Smolenskin and similar underemployed Jewish intellectuals were available as a pool of organizers for all sorts of political, reformist or radical politics. Members of the then numerically insignificant[xvii] Zionist intelligentsia[xviii] developing in the 1880s would eventually become the original bureaucracy as well as the foreign and colonial office of Judonia that was coming into being. Like any other colonial bureaucracy few seem to have ever had any intention of relocating permanently to the Jewish settlement even if they publicly claimed otherwise.

If Smolenskin and fellow early Zionists showed any conscious realization that wealthy Western Jews had sufficient wealth in aggregate to found a low-budget colonial empire that did not have to distract itself with the maintenance of a physical colonial motherhood, they would count as some of the most astute practical political thinkers of the nineteenth century, but they like most political actors seem to have been sleepwalking through history and could not come up with the right marketing gimmick to shake money out of the pockets of western Jews.

Jewish Capabilities and Resources

The early colonial effort was only feasible

· because of historical developments that changed how Jews (and also non-Jews) related to their history and to scripture,

· because of the existing or developing non-Zionist communal infrastructure among British, French, German and Eastern European Jews,

· because of the appearance of a reformist non-Zionist intelligentsia that appears in the Russian Empire during the 1850s, and

· because of increasing wealth among Western European and North American Jewish communities.

[See Followup (II): Origins of Modern Jewry [127] and Jewish, Zionist War Against Salvation.[128]]

Ernest Renan: A Nation … Presupposes a Past[129]

Just as modern nations are imagined communities, modern empires are exploitive hierarchies ruled by a modern nation that dominates other national or population groups by means of force, various forms of compulsion, deceit and self-deception. (See Facts versus Delusions in Jewish History.[130])

Imperialism in the context of Zionism is unique and therefore worthy of study because of the exceptional levels of associated deceit and self-deception and because of the success of Zionists in piggybacking on or co-opting the force and power of the UK, the USA and France[xix] to defeat the native Palestinian and neighboring Arab populations.

Israelites and Judahites

The fundamental Zionist deceit and self-deception relates to the Hebrew Bible or Christian Old Testament.

Despite Zionist propaganda and ethnic Ashkenazi conceit, modern Jewry has no ancestral connection to ancient Israelite or Judahite populations. The Pentateuch (Torah, תּוֹרָה) is the founding story in a surviving remnant theology[xx] elaborated in literature that eventually became the canonical prophetic and hagiographic books of the Bible (Neviim, נביאים, and Ketuvim, כתובים). The Persian period Jerusalem elite used this material both to justify its rule over the native population and also to legitimize the status of the province of Yehud within the Persian Empire. (See Historiography of Pre-State Zionism.[131])

In The Bible and Colonialism: A Moral Critique,[132] Michael Prior describes in detail how modern Christian and Jewish groups have used material from the Pentateuch in more recent forms of imperialism and colonialism. The concept of the Covenant of Israel has proven at least as efficacious as the sense imperial mission (or white man’s burden[xxi]) or the idea of mission civilatrice in creating the mindset of domination.

Covenantal and dispensationalist ideas are most persuasive to ignorant Christians and Jews, who have not read past the Pentateuch or who have not understood the Covenantal logic that continues in operation to this day.

Because of the spiritual failure of the Israelite, Ephraimite and Judahite kingdoms, Israelites and their descendants are forbidden from ever establishing an independent kingdom in the Land of Israel. The establishment Yehud as a province of the Persian Empire was an expression of God’s mercy of which the Persian Emperor Cyrus was the agent or anointed messiah [Second Isaiah 45:1].

In this new religious political framework, the piety of the host of Israel was no longer contingent on a primitive barter or exchange, and the later Biblical prophets exhorted the remnants of the House of Israel to serve God out of love and gratitude.

Zionism represents a fundamental rejection of this Biblical Theology that is intrinsic to modern Judaism and Christianity.

Greco-Roman Judeans

The most important secondary Zionist deceit and self-deception relates to the Christian Bible, extra-biblical Jewish scripture and Greco-Roman literature.

Despite propaganda and ethnic Ashkenazi conceit, modern Jewry has practically no ancestral connection to Judeans of the Greco-Roman period.

In reality Zionist propaganda reinterprets and distorts the religious legacy that resulted from the following modifications or actions that the Hasmoneans, the Herodians and their successors undertook for their own political and economic purposes in association with their stewardship over Second Temple Judaism.

They created a concept of formal Judaization or conversion to Judaism. (See Followup (II): Origins of Modern Jewry.[133])
They inspired intellectual and spiritual developments leading to several proselytizing religious currents that ultimately crystallized into Christianity, Islam, and Medieval Judaism. (See Connecting Hanukkah, Christmas and `Idu-l-Adha.[134])
They fostered a wide-ranging network of European, North Africa, and Middle Eastern communities that were Judean in a religious but not in an ancestral sense. (See Yiddish Civilisation: The Rise and Fall of a Forgotten Nation[135] by Paul Kriwaczek.)
They left a history of noteworthy last stands that were later by used by Zionists to manufacture a blood-and-soil (la terre et les morts) consciousness of a non-religious ancestral connection between European Jews and the territory of Palestine. (See Recovered Roots, Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition[136] by Yael Zerubavel.[xxii])

Khazars and Medieval Judaism

Despite Zionist and general Jewish denial or ignorance, the Khazar Empire created Medieval and consequently Modern Judaism.

The interaction between post-Bar Kochba Judaism and the pagan and then the Christian Roman Empire is complex. (See Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E.[137] by Seth Schwartz.) Eventually the academies of the Geonim [138] managed to claim a degree of disputed intellectual and religious authority over Judean communities.

Developments within Judaism over the next three centuries are obscure, but the rising Khazar Empire needed a religion, a legal system, and a commercial organization in order to trade Slavic slaves with the Byzantine, Carolingian and Islamic Empires. There is evidence that Khazar funding gave the Geonic formulation of Judaism significant advantage over competing variants. In return the Geonim created a form of Judaism

that fostered the development of an international Jewish legal and financial system optimized for the high margin trade in Slavic slaves as well as associated luxury commodities and
that develops into Medieval Rabbinic Judaism.

Not only do the developments within Judaism in this early period have analogues with the Western legal and economic evolution described by Nathan Rosenberg and Luther Earle Birdzell in How the West Grew Rich: The Economic Transformation of the Industrial World,[139] but the Jewish trading framework constructed during the early Medieval period was also an important input into the creation of the modern Western financial system. (See Les origines des juifs actuels [140] and The Origins of Modern Jewry.[141])

The internal Medieval Jewish legal, political, economic system imposed a high degree of communal cohesiveness, provided mechanisms for strong control of social deviance, and was generally harsher and more coercive in its dealings with powerless non-Jews than with members of the Jewish community. For example, Sefer haMitzvot of Maimonides (twelfth century)[142] identifies positive commands:

to lend to poor Jews without interest and
to lend to non-Jews with interest[xxiii]

among the 613 commandments on which Jewish law (Halakhah) is based. (See Sefer HaMitzvot leRambam.[143])

Modern Jewry inherited small but long lasting economic, educational, and social organizational advantages as a legacy from the Khazars and Medieval Judaism. In addition, Jews developed a tradition of employment in professions associated with the Medieval Slave trade like medicine, banking, tax farming and estate management while the mixed Slavo-Turkic, Balkan, and Southern Russian population ruled by the Khazars survived the Empire’s demise and eventually developed into the Eastern European Ashkenazi ethnic group. (See How to talk about Zionism, a new improved guide.[144])

Ashkenazim, Pogroms, and Persecution

Despite the popular depiction of Eastern European ethnic Ashkenazi Jews as a poor oppressed population first of historic Poland and then of the Austrian, German, and Russian Empires, the advantages bequeathed by their Jewish forerunners made it possible for ethnic Ashkenazim to play a critical economic role within the Polish state and function as native collaborators within Austrian and German Poland. The Russian government had less use for ethnic Ashkenazim but recognized their economic value despite heavy ethnic Ashkenazi involvement in smuggling.

Ethnic Ashkenazim developed a sense of grievance as a result of the Chmielnicki Rebellion, and this feeling grew with the Russian Pogroms of 1881 and afterwards.

Chmielnicki

Lucy S. Dawidowicz describes the Chmielnicki Rebellion in The Golden Tradition, Jewish Life and Thought in Eastern Europe [145] on p. 10.

The Ukraine had come under Polish rule in 1569 and had been subjected to a harsh policy of Polonization and Catholicization: the Eastern Orthodox Church was suppressed and the Ukrainian peasants enserfed to the Polish nobility. The rise of towns on the steppe where Cossack horsemen once rode wild horses and the increasingly powerful economic role of urban Jews mediating between the Polish nobility and the Ukrainian peasants compounded the political and religiocultural tensions. Bogdan Chmielnitsky (1593-1657), hetman of Zaporogian Cossacks, led a Cossak uprising to liberate the Ukraine from Poland. Chmielnitsky agitated against Poles and Jews: “You know the wrongs done us by the Poles and Yids, their leaseholders and beloved factors, the oppressions, the evil deeds and the impoverishment, you know and you remember.”

Chmielnitsky did not succeed in liberating the Ukraine, but in the subsequent decade of war and violence, interrupted only by brief intervals of negotiations among the Poles, Russians, Swedes, and Turks, the Cossacks with their murderous bands of peasants, called Haidamaks, slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Jews, sacking and destroying hundreds of Jewish communities. That was the beginning of a series of blood-drenched encounters between Jews and Ukrainians that were to endure in Jewish historic memory. About one-tenth of the Jewish population remained in the Polish Ukraine, Volhynia, and Podolia. The other survivors emigrated into Lithuania, Poland proper, and to the Western European countries. In 1654, Chmielnitsky accepted Moscow’s protection, and finally in 1667, the Truce of Andrusovo split the Ukraine, with Kiev, its cultural center, and the left bank of the Dnieper going to Russia, and the right bank remaining with Poland.

In Yiddish Civilisation: The Rise and Fall of a Forgotten Nation [146] (pp. 235-6), Paul Kriwaczek provides a very different perspective on the role of Jews in sixteenth and seventeenth century Ukraine, which was then part of Commonwealth Poland. (Please not that it is probably too harsh on Polish nobles and too considerate of wealthy Jewish estate managers.)

This Yiddish takeover of the wild and lawless Ukraine's economy could be expected to have involved much exploitation and corrupt abuse of monopoly. Jews tried hard to keep such businesses as the collection of customs dues and taxes to themselves. Surviving customs records from the 1580s are written in a mixture of Yiddish and Hebrew. The historian Shimon Dubnow quotes a resolution passed by the Jewish Lithuanian Council, the Vaad Medina Litoh, ruling body of the Jewish estate: "We have openly seen the great danger deriving from the operation of customs in Gentile hands; for the customs to be in Jewish hands is a pivot on which everything turns, since thereby Jews may exert control."

...

The alliance between ruthless Polish nobles and insecure Yiddish frontiersmen proved dangerous and destructive. The Jews now held a position that nothing in their background or religious law had properly prepared them for. They had been placed in authority over another people, of another social order, another culture and another religion, a people whom the magnates, the Jews' masters, regarded as racially inferior and fair game for callous exploitation. Tragically, shaking off the restraining influence of wiser counsels of the West, the repeated warnings of the rabbis of metropolitan Cracow, Posen and Lublin, the Yiddish businessmen who flocked to the colony came to regard the peasantry in a similar light.

In some histories of the Chmielnicki Rebellion, Chmielnicki offered ordinary Jews safe passage out of cities about to be attacked, but they rejected it under the influence of a religious elite co-opted by the wealthy merchants allied with the Polish gentry. In any case, Dawidowicz makes ridiculous claims about Jewish casualties, which in the soundest estimates probably number between 10-20,000. (Some scholars – usually Ukrainian – put the number as low as 4,000.)

Pogroms and Persecution

[The following material comes from Followup (II): Origins of Modern Jewry.[147]]

Despite the claims about the severity of Czarist pogroms, the conscription crisis of 1850-4 probably represented the worst period for Russian Jewry before WWI.

Not only did the Russian government incorrectly conclude that the Jewish communities could supply more recruits, but it levied fines well beyond the resources of communities to pay.

In 1854 when Czar Nicholas I finally realized that the situation was intolerable, he abated both the fines and the levies of conscripts.

While conditions for Russian Jewry came nowhere near the persecution and oppression that Palestinians have suffered since the creation of the State of Israel, by the death of Nicholas in 1855, traditional Russian Jewish communal structures had shattered.

Michael Stanislawski summarizes the situation in his book Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews, The Transformation of Jewish Society in Russia, 1823-1855.[148]

Although the autonomous Jewish community persisted in fact as well as in law, it lost much of its former elan as the traditionalists and the enlightened, the rich and the poor, all increasingly looked to new sources of allegiance, organization, and power. [p. 186]

Fairly quickly, Russian Jewish thinking divided into assimilationist, orthodox, Yiddishist, radical revolutionary, and Zionist intellectual currents. While there were some hybrid groups, the Jewish tendency to bind together in the face of common threats was severely weakened by the end of Nicholas' reign.[xxiv]

After the police investigating the assassination of Czar Alexander II by Narodnaya Volya (Народная Воля, Popular Will) arrested the Russian Jewish revolutionary Gessya Gelfman (Hessya Helfman) as one of the plotters, awareness of increasing Jewish radicalism in the Russian Empire created a reaction of hostility and violence.

The 1883 capture, arrest and trial of Narodnaya Volya leader Vera Figner, who was also Jewish, created more anti-Jewish suspicions and hostiliy, to which Russian Jews responded with both increasing radicalism and also emigration.

Because the Czarist government viewed disorder and unorganized violence as a threat to itself, its reaction to the pogroms tended toward excessive brutality and probably caused more anti-Jewish hostility, which in turn created more Jewish radicalism.

The Czarist government became even more suspicious of non-Russians including (or sometimes especially) the most Russianized, who were often Jewish. Exclusion of Russianized Czarist subjects from positions of authority within the government increased revolutionary tendencies among all non-Russians within the empire.[xxv]

Stanislawski points out on p. 7 that “a patrimonial state such as Imperial Russia, discrimination was the rule rather than the exception and hence entirely relative. He also claims (p. 5): “By the time of Nicholas II, treatment of the Jews was indeed unique and anomalous.”

The meaning is unclear. By the time of Nicholas II, the government was aware of a dangerous radical faction among the Jewish population. Within the Czarist framework the normal Czarist response would probably have involved internal exile, expulsion from the Empire as the Circassians suffered during the 1850s and 1860 (see Slavery and Abolition in the Ottoman Middle East [149] by Ehud R. Toledano) or something worse, but Russian Jews were too valuable, and Jewish groups had the ability to put pressure on the Czarist government.

While the Russian government was improvising, Jews like probably most Imperial subjects felt victimized, and such feelings probably helped provide an alternative basis for Russian Jewish solidarity as the traditional autonomous Jewish religious communal structure broke down.

The situation was extremely volatile, and despite everything Russian Jews like practically all Jews throughout Europe had more money, better health, more education, and more effective communal organizations that the peoples among whom they lived. In the right (or better the wrong) situation, the combination of anger and resources could occasion a tremendous amount of harm.

Creating the Ethnicity and National Consciousness of Judonia

While this sense of grievance could increase Russian or Eastern European Jewish cohesiveness and possibly inspire short-term political action, creating a Jewish settlement in Palestine was a multigenerational effort requiring action by Jews outside of Eastern Europe. In another time period religion could perhaps have inspired the necessary long-term unity and focus, but traditional religion was breaking down throughout European Jews in general while the process of ethnicization – still continuing to this day – has become a mainstay of popular Jewish support of Zionist imperialism.

[See The Pity of It All, A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch, 1743-1943, by Amos Elon,[150] The Jewish Response to German Culture, From the Enlightenment to the Second World War, edited by Jehuda Reinharz and Walter Schatzberg,[151] Followup (II): Origins of Modern Jewry,[152] and Jewish, Zionist War Against Salvation.[153]]

Because the center of gravity for world Jewry from the sixteenth century onward was Eastern Europea, the Eastern European process that transformed Eastern European religion into confessionalism and then into ethnic nationalism had reverberations throughout practically all Jewish communities even though the changes were typically strongest in Eastern Europe.

Concretization of the Spiritual

Gershom Scholem discusses the pervasiveness of Zohar-based mysticism within Jewish communities in the seventeenth century in Schabbatai Zwi: Der mystische Messias [154] (Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, 1626-1676 [155]) and numerous other works. (See also Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism [156] or Die jüdische Mystik in ihren Hauptströmungen[157]) The stresses of this time period led to a concretization of ideas that had been hitherto abstract or spiritual concepts for both Christians and Jews. John Freely recounts Nathan of Gaza’s attempt during a visit to Rome to bring Talmudic prophetic passages into contemporary political effect in order to start the Messianic redemption. (See The Lost Messiah, In Search of the Mystical Rabbi Sabbatai Sevi,[158] pp. 155-170.)

Spiritual Exile Into Physical Exile

With the collapse of the messianic movements of Shabbetai Tzvi and Jacob Frank during the slow disintegration of Commonwealth Poland, many ideas of European Jewish mysticism cross over from learned religious discourse into popular Jewish culture generally in a distorted or debased sense. Galut or exile, which for the most part had served as an abstract notion of deterritorialized Rabbinic Judaism to describe the alienation of man from God, became a palpable aspect of Jewish life even though prayers like the tenth benediction of the Amidah prayer refer not to the Medieval and Modern Jewish Diaspora (tәfutzah) but to the Assyrian and Babylonian exiles (galuyyot[eynu]).

Figure 1 Kibbutz Galuyyot: Blessing Ten of the Amidah [159]

As the Polish state slowly dissolved and Poland ceased to be Poland any longer from the Jewish standpoint, ethnic Ashkenazim began to feel that they were in exile in their Polish homeland without having relocated, and they found it a lot easier to contemplate emigration to Western Europe, to the Americas, to the Central Russian provinces or to Palestine. A similar feeling probably facilitated the Greek Bulgarian Turkish population exchanges in the aftermath of WW 1 as old imperial states were replaced by newer more ethnically oriented states and traditional territories began to feel alien while new ethnic centers exerted a pull on communities living outside the new boundaries.[xxvi]

Because Zionist and non-Zionist Jewish leaders assumed that leaving homes and villages was similarly easy for all populations, they dreamed especially during the 1930s but even to this day of reaching some sort of final agreement with Palestinians by settling them in some other Arab country.

Because the cultural and ethnic centers for Palestinians are Jerusalem, Haifa, Jaffa, Nablus, Ramallah, and Hebron but not Baghdad, Basra, Najaf, Karbala, Ramadi, or Samara, Palestinians were never going to agree to transfer to Iraq or some other Arabic territory. (See Baksheesh Diplomacy, Secret Negotiations Between American Jewish Leaders and Arab Officials on the Eve of world War II,[160] by Rafael Medoff, pp. 61-62.)

Salvation and Racism

A lot of Jewish mystical ideas of the special nature of the Jewish soul facilitated the development of racist ideas among Jewish communities especially in Eastern and Central Europe. This type of religion-inspired racism is not specific to Judaism and may represent the influence of or a reaction to Christian belief that only Christian souls are saved because the Sufi-influenced pre-Kabala mysticism of Arab Jews had far different concerns (see The Treatise of the Pool: al-Maqāla al-Ĥawđiyya [161] by `Obadyāh Maimonides). The Christian concept of salvation and its mystical ramifications have played a major part in the development of European völkisch and color-based racism.

Here is a description of fairly typical example of early twentieth century Jewish racism from The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch, 1743-1933 [162] by Amos Elon, p. 225:

If the position of Germany’s Jews was not perfect, it was certainly bearable – at least for the well-to-do – and even quite hopeful in the eyes of the intelligentsia. Intermarriage became common, increasing from 8.4 percent in 1901 to 29.86 percent in 1915. Felix Theilhaber, a Zionist doctor in Munich, hysterically warned in 1911 that intermarriage and sinking birthrates – the result of modern women’s uppityness, he lamented – would bring about the complete disappearance of German Jewry by 1950. According to Theilhaber, marriage among Jews had in the past been a “national-religious” institution, designed to “serve the preservation of the family and the nation”; now, however, it was increasingly “based purely on erotic attraction,” as among Gentiles. Theilhaber decried the recent decline of what he called “racial consciousness” among Jews. Philosophies could be abjured at will, he announced. “Blood” was more permanent.

Theilhaber traveled from one German Jewish community to another speaking out against “racial mixing” through intermarriage. Kafka attended a speech in which Theilhaber warned of the biological damage caused by racial mixing: children of mixed marriages were likely to be decadent or morally depraved, and they often ended up as the worst anti-Semites. However preposterous, Theilhaber’s stereotypes must be read in historical context. The vocabulary of sociobiology and “race” was then an integral part of civilized public discourse. More remarkable was the lack of response to Theilhaber’s tirades. Intermarriage continued to flourish. In Breslau, a less “multicultural” city than Berlin, intermarriage rose from 11 percent in 1890 to 52 percent during the First World War, suggesting that integration was even more advanced in the provinces than was commonly thought.

Despite Elon’s attempt to belittle the significance of Theilhaber’s type of thinking among German Jews, such racism has persisted and expanded among Jews. Theilhaber differs very little from Harvard Professor Ruth Wisse.

[See "Jews and Power" versus "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy"[163] and Wisse Kokht Kugl mit Khazershmaltz![164]]

Tikkun Olam and Progress

While the idea seems strange today, during the nineteenth and the first decade of the twentieth century, various progressive leaders and movements incorporated into their ideologies racist ideas very similar to those of people like Theilhaber and Wisse.

In addition, some probably more specifically Jewish kabalistic concepts

of tikkun olam (repairing the universe, תיקון עולם)

by reuniting the kәlippot (shards, קליפות) resulting from shәvirah (shattering, שבירה) of the sәfirot (circles or emanations, רותספי) arising from the zimzum (contraction, צמצום) of the Divine

facilitated the transfer of Jewish allegiance from traditional religious observance to new political movements

that have often managed to maintain progressive credentials even into the twentieth century[xxvii] and
that were either internal to the Jewish community or
that joined Jews and non-Jews under a mostly Jewish leadership.

[See Jewish, Zionist War Against Salvation [165] and Followup (II): Origins of Modern Jewry.[166]]

German Reform and Prussian Israel

Rabbi Yisroel (Israel) ben Eliezer (רבי ישראל בן אליעזר, the Baal Shem Tov or Besht) in Eastern Europe and Moses Mendelssohn in Germany are two contemporary early reformers, who were both apparently inwardly directed.

The Besht founded the Hassidic movement. The conflicts between the Hassidim and their opponents contributed to the breakdown of Rabbinic authority in Eastern Europe.

While Mendelssohn’s proposed reforms of aspects of Jewish religious practice and education were quite minor, he provided the important example of a German Jew fully engaged in the larger German society as a German and possibly created the model of a national German for Protestants and Catholics as well as for Jews. By treating gentile scholarship as important as Jewish learning, Mendelssohn’s efforts undermined Rabbinic authority albeit unintentially.

Although Mendelssohn is considered both the father of the Haskalah (השכלה, Jewish Enlightenment) and of the Reform movement, he was personally fully observant. The earliest phases of the Eastern European Haskalah were probably true to Mendelssohn’s vision In contrast the German Reform movement attempted to make fundamental changes in Jewish Religion.

Mendelssohn’s successors reformed Jewish education by deemphasizing the Talmud, and consequentially, treated the Book of Leviticus as relatively unimportant even though and perhaps because traditional Jewish education focused on this Biblical text as an introduction to Talmud. Jewish education reformers brough Jewish Bible study more into conformity with the developing German concept of a Prussian Israel that served as the model for the Hohenzollern kaisers.

This pattern of Jewish education persists to this day in Israel. Jacob Lassner and S. Ilan Troen write in Jews and Muslims in the Arab World, Haunted by Pasts Real and Imagined,[167] p. 262:

As in the case of culling useful texts from the Talmud, the secular curriculum removed portions dealing with rituals and ceremonies associated with religious worship. Leviticus, a text that deals largely with the priestly code and rituals, was thereby nearly excised from the curriculum. Secular schools retained only those few sections that deal with celebrating the sabbatical and jubilee years and similar topics that could be interpreted, by modern Israelis, as ethical legislation protecting the rights of workers. The study of the Bible thereby corresponded to that of the Talmud in which similar sections from the tractate of civil jurisprudence were selected.

Haskalah, the Russian Draft and Odessa

As Haskalah moved East, a complex interaction developed among Hassidim, their opponents the Mitnagdim, and Russian governmental incoherence, incompetence and brutality. Often the Hassidim and the Mitnagdim banded together against the Maskilim (Enlighteners), and Professor Stanislawski provides evidence that at least one important Eastern Europe traditional religious leader, Yizhak ben Haim of Volozhin was not unsympathetic to the early phase of Haskalah.

As the severely troubled Russian Empire tried to reform itself, a subset of Russian Jews, influenced by the “Germans” tried to bring reform to the whole Russian Jewish population (see Jewish, Zionist War Against Salvation [168]) while at the same time the Russian government attempted to impose its own form of reform on its Jewish population generally on the basis of some severe misconceptions.

According to Michael Stanislawski in Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews, The Transformation of Jewish Society in Russia, 1823-1855,[169] (pp. 108-109),

By the beginning of the 1850s, therefore, the new power of the maskilim was matched, for the first time, with the security of numbers. From a handful of disjointed individuals clustered in tiny enclaves on the borders of the Pale or in insulated anonymity in the largest cities, the maskilim grew to a well-coordinated movement of several hundred adherents, preaching their gospel to thousands of committed students throughout the [Jewish] Pale [of settlement].

From this new coherence and potency there emerged a new self-consciousness, or rather, a manifest reaffirmation of self-perception. As one of their most articulate spokesmen explained, even the youngest maskilim now sensed their mission. Every student in the state schools

regarded himself as no less than a future reformer, a new Mendelssohn, and therefore, in the quiet worked out a plan of action which he jealously guarded from his friends. [They] were thoroughly convinced that they were going to bring about a complete revolution in the world view of the Jewish people, and they impatiently awaited their moment of action. They were like military commanders standing at the ready for the approaching enemy attack, waiting only for the moment when they will be able to display the wonders of their courage and to distinguish themselves for their fatherland [i.e., the Russian Empire].

This new sense of mission and power, this rejection of traditional society combined with a dedication to its restructuring on a new basis, transformed the maskilim from an amorphous set of intellectuals into a full-fledged intelligentsia. As Isaiah Berlin has taught, there is a fundamental difference between the concept of an intelligentsia and the notion of intellectuals. The former

thought of themselves as united by something more than mere interest in ideas; they conceived of themselves as being a dedicated order, almost a secular priesthood, devoted to the spreading of a specific attitude to life, something like a gospel.

Thus, we can date the emergence of a coherent Russian-Jewish intelligentsia to the latter part of the rule of Nicholas I, in large part as a response to the stimulus provided by the Russian government itself.

Not only was the emerging intelligentsia a competitor to traditional Jewish scholarly and economic communal elites, but in the provinces of Chernigov and New Russia, which were only opened up to Jewish settlement in the late eighteenth century, there were no traditional Jewish elites of any importance and the Russian government relaxed restrictions on Jewish participation in the local government in order to make relocation more attractive and to compensate for a dearth of persons qualfied to be officials in the region. (See The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History, 1794-1881,[170] by Steven J. Zipperstein.) As a result, internal and external pressures conspired to evolve the Russian Jewish religious community into an ethnic and even into a politically sophisticated ethno-national community albeit only in the Russian Empire, which ruled over many ethnic and ethno-national groups in various stages of development.

Emancipation of Jews and Women

In Western Europe the emancipation of Jews contributed to the breakdown of Jewish religious identity despite the best efforts of Modern Orthodox leaders like Samson Raphael Hirsch of Frankfurt, who founded the movement for Torah im Derech Eretz (Hebrew [171] תורה עם דרך ארץ - Torah with "the way of the land") in order to combat Reform Judaism, secularizing assimilation, and conversion to Christianity. His movement may have made it easier for German Jews like Martin Buber to combine the most extreme sorts of German blood and soil nationalism with immersion in neo-Hassidic mysticism as he did at the beginning of WWI. (While he later renounced the German nationalism, Buber’s obsession with blood in the racial sense persisted and played a role in his thinking throughout his life.)

Figure 2 Periodized Chart of Jewish Emancipation[172]

Martin Buber’s success in introducing a sort of völkisch-oriented Neo-Hassidic Zionism to German Jews may have resulted from the Ostjuden-ization of Central and Western European Jews as Emancipation pulled Russian Jews westward.

Shulamit Volkov discusses “The Dynamics of Dissimilation: Ostjuden and German Jews” in The Jewish Response to German Culture, From the Enlightenment to the Second World War, edited by Jeuda Reinharz and Walter Schatzberg [173] (pp. 192-211). She writes on p. 211 about the creation of the development of an inchoate transnational ethnic identity:

In a letter to his parents in June 1916, Franz Rosenzweig wrote:

One does not write more illogically about the Ostjuden than about the Westjuden; it is only that in the case of the Ostjuden it all seems to come at once, but if one could conceive of the whole literature about the Westjuden written – let’s say in the last twenty years, as condensed into one single year, so that literature too would turn out to be, as our Eastern-Jewish grand- and great-grandfathers would have called it, a nice Bilbul. There is no Ostjudenfrage, there is only a Judenfrage – and even that doesn’t really exist. By the way, imagine only that all that German fear of the Ostjuden were to be directed not at the Ostjuden as such, but at these same people as future Westjuden (well, your kind.)

A generation of Jews who were relatively free from the anxiety of social climbing was beginning to look inward. These were the years of Freud and the great Jewish cultural critics, the time of the inflow of Jews into the membership and leadership of the Social Democratic party, and of the emergence of Zionism. The constant handling of the Ostjudenfrage – the confrontation with the parvenus – served well the purposes of this reassessment. Recognizing the foreigners as a reflection of oneself was essential for the entire process. It is not by chance that the Viennese Jews took such an important part in it. After all, Vienna was the real capital of Galicia, constantly refilled with new Eastern immigrants.

As an aspect of this process of reconsideration, Ostjuden were beginning to be looked upon with a different eye – not by everyone, not everywhere, but surely by a significant, articulate, and outspoken minority. “It is a fact that not only I,” wrote Gershom Scholem in his memoirs, “but many, many of my contemporaries felt this pull toward the Ostjuden.” This was to a large measure, no doubt, a matter of a generational conflict, as Scholem indeed hastened to add, but it may have also been something else: an expression of a new sense of self. Jews were beginning to accept the heterogeneity of their communality and to acknowledge the positive potential of this pluralism. It was for many of them a matter of reaching the limits of assimilation and promptly halting at the brink. From that point one could only turn backward and inward, seeking a new definition for one’s identity, and often also a new self-respect.

By Central and Eastern European standards, ostjüdisch culture differed strongly in terms of male-female relations from that of neighboring non-Jewish populations as well as from historical norms among Jews belonging to other ethnic groups. Eastern European Jews had a propensity for early marriage followed by a sequence of divorce and fairly rapid remarriage. Roman Catholics and Orthodox Christians as well as non-Ashkenazi Jews tended to view such behavior as promiscuous. (See Late Marriage [in Hebrew, חתונה מאוחרת][174]).

In addition, Eastern European Jewish women were often breadwinners and as a result of Jewish educational reforms associated with the Haskalah often had superior knowledge of gentile culture than Jewish men or non-Jewish women did. Gentiles and assimilated Jews tended to view Jewish men – especially when Eastern European Jewish – as less virile than gentile males.

Not only did emancipation make far more non-Jews much more aware of the differences between non-Jews and Ostjuden and thereby thwart one of the major goals of emancipation by creating a stronger sense of otherness on both sides of the Jewish-Gentile divide, but the enhanced perception of Jewish difference in matters of gender mores also interacted with the ongoing process of the emancipation of women to create a separate sexually-charged non-religious identity for Jews in Central and Eastern Europe while at the very same time internal Jewish conflicts over the unfair treatment of Jewish women tended to weaken rabbinic authority.[xxviii]

In a sort of foreshadowing of contemporary criticism of Islam with regard to women’s issues like the hijab, an “official declaration [from German courts in the first decade of the twentieth century] to the effect that Jewish law ran counter to good German morals sent tremors through both liberal and Orthodox Jewry.”

[See Between Kant and Kabbalah, An Introduction to Isaac Breuer's Philosophy of Judaism,[175] by Alan L. Mittlemen, p. 142,[xxix] and The Oppression of Orthodox Jewish Women [176]]

As the legal controversy created doubt about Jewish religion among Jews, it strengthened a sort of defensive Jewish identity when critics of Jewish law showed evidence of anti-Semitism.

The dialogue between German Jews and German non-Jews about Jewish sexuality probably reached its highpoint in 1903 with the publication of Geschlecht und Charakter by the Austrian Jewish philosopher and culture critic Otto Weininger, who committed suicide after presenting his analysis of the feminine aspects of the character of the Jewish male and of the Jewish race in Chapter XIII Das Judentum (Judaism or Jewry).[xxx]

[See Smart Jews: The Construction of the Image of Jewish Superior Intelligence [177] by Sander L. Gilman for a succinct introduction to fin de siècle (i.e., nineteenth century) concepts of race and sexuality.]

As if to underscore such perceptions of Jewish sexual ambiguity, Jewish women because of cultural and educational advantages tended in the early twentieth century to take leading roles perceived as masculine in general politics.

[See The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch, 1743-1933 [178] by Amos Elon.]

Not only did the participation of Jewish women increase the disproportionate size of the Jewish voice in Central and Eastern European politics, but they also dominated the leadership of the feminist movement then as they do now. (Note that Rosa Luxemburg is typical of a cohort of politically active Jewish women at the beginning of the twentieth century.)

In parallel with such general political activities, Jews have taken the leading role in a homosexual regenderization program that has challenged traditional religion and culture among Jews and non-Jews while it has served as a club to demonize Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims.

[See Jewish, Zionist War Against Salvation,[179] Feb. 11, Harvard: Joseph Massad,[180] and Desiring Arabs.[181], [xxxi] by Joseph A. Massad.]

Not only has the increasing prominence of the issue of sexuality associated with the emancipation of women and concomitant regenderization activism sharpened the boundaries of Jewish secular identity, but it also seems to have validated a sense of superior secular Jewish ethics as a replacement for belief in God who made the Covenant with Israel. A similar phenomenon also exists among Islamists, who like Sayed Qutb disdain the West because of a perception of Western sexual license and also among Orientalists of past generations, who associated Arabs and Muslims with hedonism.

German Nazism, Zionism, and Ethnic Fundamentalism

In the post WWII period the organized American Jewish community, wealthy Jewish donors and the State of Israel have each for their own purposes fostered such feelings of Jewish uniqueness and superiority through the development of special Holocaust or Israel study materials at the pre-college level and of “scholarly” think tanks or academic institutes to study the Holocaust or the ME from a Zionist viewpoint.

Such institutions serve as the main source of knowledge about Jews, Judaism, Zionism, the State of Israel, and the ME with resulting distortion of American Jewish and non-Jewish discourse on

the history of the rise and fall of German Nazism,
the mass murder of Jews during WWII, and
the nature and practices of Zionism. (See USHMM: National Thought Control.[182])

In addition to influencing American foreign policy, this ongoing indoctrination effort has strongly affected American Judaism. At this point, except for small groups of religious anti-Zionists, Jewish religion in the USA barely exists in any living form, for it has been cannibalized by an ethnic fundamentalist cult consisting of:

· Ethnic narcissism,

· Holocaust obsession, and

· Worship of the state of Israel.

All the remains of the traditional Jewish communal consciousness is a very dangerous form of politicized ethnic fundamentalism, which judges good and evil in all situations by benefit to “the Jews.” As a result, not only does Judonia – as it exists in America – suffer none of the doubts that plagued the British Empire from the end of the nineteenth century until the collapse after WWII, but by creating a system of Holocaust commemoration and observance to play the role of a secular American religion, Judonia has also inured Americans to the Palestinian, Lebanese, Iraqi and Somali suffering that has resulted from Neoconservative policies. Judonia selects worthy genocides on the basis of benefit to the Jewish people as defined by Zionist ideology. (See Monsters: Hillary Clinton, Samantha Power.[183])

The Economics of Judonia

Maintaining the infrastructure of Holocaust memorials, Holocaust study programs, Zionist think tanks, and Israel studies programs is fairly costly, but the organized Jewish community is extremely wealthy. J. J. Goldberg, who is the son of Arthur Goldberg (see USHMM: National Thought Control [184]), writes In Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment (1996),[185] pp. 38-39:

As straightforward as the national politics of America Jews may seem, the politics within the Jewish community are something else again. The inner workings of the Jewish organizational world are arcane, Byzantine, and convoluted, so much so that even seasoned insiders often feel lost without a compass. The authoritative American Jewish Year Book lists about three hundred national Jewish organizations and close to two hundred local federations of Jewish charities. Their combined budget – counting synagogue dues, Sunday school tuition, and Medicare payments to Jewish hospitals – totals somewhere upwards of $6 billion per year. That is more than the gross national product of half the members of the United Nations. Indeed the precise total has never even been calculated.

Today, the budget is even larger, and this figure does not include many organizations and private individuals involved in Judonia activities separate from the organized Jewish community.

The assets of the 200 chief donors to Israel advocacy activities probably total somewhere between $100 billion to $250 billion,[xxxii] which is comparable to or larger than the GDP of the State of Israel. If the megadonors are treated as constituting practically the entire economy of Judonia, and if Judonia’s GDP (= consumption + gross investment + Judonia’s spending + [exports − imports]) is calculated from the total resources they own or control, the size of Judonia’s economy as measured by its GDP is probably an order of magnitude larger at approximately $2 trillion dollars.

Judonia’s economic power has developed over a long time period that starts in the pre-Judonia period as early as the beginning of the Middle Ages when the Jewish involvement in trading Slavic slaves and luxury goods gave the Jewish community small economic advantages over other populations despite various religious restrictions. Over time small advantages compound.

While the wars of the Reformation impoverished a large section of German Jewry just as it ruined many German Christians, the Jewish upper economic classes had been poised to profiteer from financing both sides in the wars and in outfitting the soldiers. In addition, the movement of German Jews Eastward meant that they extended their economic activities into collapsing Poland, which remained a cash cow even as it collapsed or because it was collapsing in a sort of foreshadowing of disaster capitalism. (See The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism[186] by Naomi Klein.)

The Napoleonic Wars and continuing dissolution of the Polish state created

the foundation of the Cousinhood of the wealthiest British Jews,
the beginnings of the modern French wealthy Jewish elite, and
far closer connections between the German aristocracy and moneyed German Jews (Geldjuden[xxxiii]) both financially and by marriage.

This last development brought a pattern already existing in Poland for several centuries westward to the German territories.

Not only did German and Austrian policy in their Polish territories (or more accurately Polish colonies) create tremendous opportunities for Polish Jews as native collaborators, but both states attempted to exclude all but the most economically useful Polish Jews from settling in central German-speaking territories while erratic government attempts to restrict Jewish family size and marriage among native German and Austrian Jews tended to drive younger sons or less wealthy German and Austrian Jews westward to France, the UK, and the USA. In all cases, these Jewish immigrants had tremendous advantages over most natives and other immigrants to these three countries because Jews often brought their own capital to their new homes and generally still connected into some sort of family or supra-family support network in the old country.

In the USA before the Civil War, German and Austrian Jewish immigrants with some knowledge of European estate management and the Polish arenda system [187] profited immensely while they helped to make the economics of Southern Slavery financially sound. While it is difficult to determine whether Yankee or NY German Jewish investors were more significant to the Southern economy, the foundations of NY Jewish investment and commercial banking lie in slavery.[xxxiv]

Meanwhile, Eastern European Jewish immigrants brought westward aforementioned much more aggressive Polish business practices than those to which German Jews or Christians were accustomed. For example, Jewish domination of the wholesale cattle trade and associated exploitive practices often expressed themselves as middle market restraint of trade and angered German Christian butchers to no end especially because Jewish butchers were favored in various forms of vertical collusion. As a result, not only did Saxon Christian butchers become important organizers of anti-Semitic political activity in Germany, but in “On the Jewish Question[188]” Marx simply described the reality that the Saxon butchers and other non-Jewish German interest groups faced because of the transformation of German and to a lesser extent Austrian Jews into a highly aggressive entrepreneurial class as an inadvertent consequence of state policy:

Let us consider the actual, worldly Jew – not the Sabbath Jew, as Bauer does, but the everyday Jew.

Let us not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion, but let us look for the secret of his religion in the real Jew.

What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.

Very well then! Emancipation from huckstering and money, consequently from practical, real Judaism, would be the self-emancipation of our time.

An organization of society which would abolish the preconditions for huckstering, and therefore the possibility of huckstering, would make the Jew impossible. His religious consciousness would be dissipated like a thin haze in the real, vital air of society. On the other hand, if the Jew recognizes that this practical nature of his is futile and works to abolish it, he extricates himself from his previous development and works for human emancipation as such and turns against the supreme practical expression of human self-estrangement.

We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time, an element which through historical development – to which in this harmful respect the Jews have zealously contributed – has been brought to its present high level, at which it must necessarily begin to disintegrate.

Modifications in German regulatory law could have controlled or limited the offensive business practices, but the alliance of German aristocratic political might and German Jewish economic clout conspired to prevent change. Columbia Professor Fritz Stern describes this relationship at a personal level in Gold and Iron: Bismarck, Bleichröder, and the Building of the German Empire.[189] (The book is disappointing because it focuses on personal relations and fails to discuss the effect of ethnicity on the economics of German state.)

The marriage of the children of Bismarck and his Jewish banker Bleichröder personified the ultimate conjunction of money and power in Imperial German political life.

[See The Pity of It All, A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch, 1743-1943, by Amos Elon [190] and "Jews and Power" versus "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy"[191].]

Political power and Jewish wealth established a pattern of collaboration and mutual protection at the expense of the bourgeoisie that persists today as the recent bailout of Bear Stearns shows. (See Fed's Bear Stearns Move Breaks New Ground : NPR.[192]) Amos Elon describes similar special treatment on pp. 211-212 of The Pity of It All:[193]

In October 1873, a stock market crash changed this state of affairs in one blow. The economy had heated to the boiling point, a result of billions in French war reparation payments. The crash affected the entire Continent and came in the wake of feverish speculation in several European countries by reckless promoters with close political connections. Although the various governments had been warned of these machinations, they had done little to restrain them. The bubble burst first in Austria. From there the panic spread to Germany and the rest of Europe. In Germany alone, tens of thousands of middle-class and aristocratic families lost everything. The crash provoked a wave of anti-Semitic agitation unlike anything Germany – or France – had seen since the Crusades or the Black Death. Jews were said to be “inferior” and “immoral”; their successes over the preceding two or three decades were due entirely to devious, even criminal manipulations. It was not an accident that so many stockbrokers happened to be Jews. At whose expense had they been enriching themselves?

Nine months earlier, in a sensational speech in the Reichstag, the Jewish liberal Eduard Lasker had sounded a first dire warning. Lasker exposed the ruthless activities of Bethel Henry Strousberg, a Prussian railroad tycoon and converted Jew, revealing Strousberg’s notorious system, of winning government concessions by lining the pockets of parliamentarians and high officials. Strousberg had played a major role in the German economy for years. “That fellow will one day soon be emperor of Germany,” Engles had written Marx in September 1869. “Wherever you go, everyone speaks only of Strousberg. His enormous industrial and railroad holdings collapsed even before the general crash. For the sake of his aristocratic partners – who included the Silesian dukes of Ujest and Ratibor, the Prussian count Lehndorff-Steinort, and a Prince Wilhelm zu Putbus (soon dubbed Kaputbus) – Bismarck, with Bleichröder’s assistance, made a last-minute effort to stave off their bankruptcy with state funds. In his characteristic style, Bismarck told the French ambassador:

2 dukes, 1 general, half a dozen ladies in waiting, twice that many chamberlains, 100 owners of coffeehouses and all the cabmen of Berlin found themselves totally ruined. The emperor took pity on the dukes, thee aide de camp, the ladies in waiting and charged me with pulling them out of trouble I appealed to Bleichröder, who on condition of getting a title of nobility, which as a Jew he very much valued, agreed to rescue the duke of Ujest and General Count Lehndorff. Two dukes & an aide de camp saved – frankly this is worth the “von” we bestowed on the good Bleichröder.

For all intents of purpose Judonia’s financial structures and their relations to important external power brokers and power centers were fully in place in the 1870s before the 1881 pogroms, from which the beginning of the Zionist movement is usually dated.

Before the founding of the State of Israel there were two important post-1881 developments in the economy of Judonia:

the Great Crash followed by the Great Depression and
the Great Liquidation of Jewish Assets in Germany and Austria under the Haavarah Agreement.

Great Crash and Great Depression

While the New York German Jewish elite was important in the 1870s, it was nowhere near as exalted as the German Jewish elite and had competition from the investment banks founded by older non-Jewish merchant elites of Philadelphia, Boston, and New York. A sort of ethnic competition or warfare divided the US investment banking industry. The conflict was particularly strong in the 1920s until Goldman Sachs discovered leverage. At this point determining how decisions were made is difficult. Top management could have made the choices, but then as now informal networks of Jewish financiers worked together to protect one another or share information and sometimes strategies. In any case, the preponderance of the evidence suggests that Jewish investment banks managed through the use of leverage and derivatives to cause the Great Crash while simultaneously they became disproportionately crash rich. Together the banking community advised the Federal Reserve Board of Governors to pursue of policy of contracting the money supply to transform the Great Crash into the Great Depression. Little actual persuasion was necessary to convince the Federal Reserve to pursue exactly the same policies it had followed successfully in 1924 and 1927.

The ultimate scope of the economic downturn was probably not anticipated. It lasted for the most part until the beginning of WWII in the USA (or 1946 by some analysts) even though Germany managed to achieve recovery by 1936. During the Great Depression the Jewish and non-Jewish investment banks acquired valuable equity and assets at fire sale prices, but Jewish institutions did distinctly better.

In combination with the Great Liquidation this result made the American sector dominant within the developing Judonian economy and made it possible for American Jews to displace the traditional American WASP elite by the twenty-first century.

Discussion or investigation in the USA about the reasons for the Great Crash and the Great Depression has rarely gone beyond identifying investment strategies that exacerbated the Crash and monetary policy that lengthened the Depression. In any case, not only was the type of forensic statistical analysis yet to be developed that could have helped elucidate the nature of the Great Depression, but McCarthyism seized the public’s attention in the late 1940s, and no one was willing to address the ethnic aspect of the finance industry after the mass killing of Jews during WWII became general knowledge.

Figure 3 1947 Anti-communist Comic Book cover

Great Liquidation

Reich decree 55/33 and attached letters between representatives of the German government and Zionist representatives constituted the Haavarah or Transfer Agreement. It became official on August 10, 1933, ended the Jewish boycott of Germany, and facilitated Zionist economic and infrastructure development in Palestine as well as the emigration of Jews from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia to Palestine. The agreement provided the Zionist movement in Palestine with tremendous infusion of cash that went to purchases from Germany. (See The Transfer Agreement: The Dramatic Story of the Pact Between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine [194] by Edwin Black, pp. 249-250.)

Because the German Jewish financial elite was in the forefront of Jewish opposition to Zionism, the Liquidation removed an impediment to Zionist goals and probably made other wealthy Jews less hostile and more willing to work with Zionists and Zionist organizations. This effect was particularly important in the USA.

During the Liquidation descendants of Bleichröder and Bismarck made repeated application for Aryanization. Because the most important German Nazis officials often came from the German and Austrian petite bourgeoisie, which was often at least as hostile to the German aristocratic elite as it was to the German Jewish money elite, with whom the aristocrats were so entangled, refusal was practically reflex, and members of two of the most powerful and influential families in German history had no choice but to leave Germany for the USA and the UK.

High and Low Politics of Nascent Judonia

In the nineteenth and twentieth century Jewish politics modernizes rapidly and develops a much more international apparently philanthropic character while at the same time it begins to make far more sophisticated use of the legal or political system. In other cases it begins to take a grass roots and occasionally conspiratorial form.

Philanthropic Politics

Jewish communal philanthropy has deep roots in the Bible and the Talmud.

Deuteronomy 22:4 commands the members of the community to help one another:

Thou shalt not see thy brother's ass or his ox fall down by the way and hide thyself from them thou shalt surely help him to lift them up again

οὐκ ὄψῃ τὸν ὄνον τοῦ ἀδελφοῦ σου ἢ τὸν μόσχον αὐτοῦ πεπτωκότας ἐν τῇ ὁδῷ μὴ ὑπερίδῃς αὐτούς ἀνιστῶν ἀναστήσεις μετ' αὐτοῦ

לא־תראה את־חמור אחיך או שורו נפלים בדרך והתעלמת מהם הקם תקים עמו׃

Exodus 23:5 demands that such assistance even be extended to enemies:

If thou see the ass of him that hateth thee lying under his burden and wouldest forbear to help him thou shalt surely help with him

ἐὰν δὲ ἴδῃς τὸ ὑποζύγιον τοῦ ἐχθροῦ σου πεπτωκὸς ὑπὸ τὸν γόμον αὐτοῦ οὐ παρελεύσῃ αὐτό ἀλλὰ συνεγερεῖς αὐτὸ μετ' αὐτοῦ

כי־תראה חמור שנאך רבץ תחת משאו וחדלת מעזב לו עזב תעזב עמו׃

According to the Talmud (Bava Batra 8b) redeeming captives is a “great commandment” (mitzvah rabbah) upon the community to act upon its members.

In a particularly famous case during the Middle Ages Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg (Maharam) forbade Jewish communities from paying a ransom for his freedom because he feared that rulers would take advantage of the communal obligation.

The ransoming of captives is a sort of proto-insurance system that was particularly important for a community, whose income depended on long distance trade, and the Maharam acted to protect the system just as an insurance executive would try to avoid paying claims based in insurance fraud.

Jewish charity served Jewish business interests and many other purposes including providing a social welfare network for the community, providing a means of self-memorialization, influencing the community, manipulating non-Jews and of course sincerely expressing devotion to God.

As the Jewish financial elite became richer in parallel with the spread of Enlightenment, the members became much more involved in charity and social welfare as Jewish and Enlightenment ideals merged in their minds.

From the 1840s onward Jewish philanthropy becomes especially systematically international in addressing specifically Jewish causes célèbres.

International Jewish Crises

The following cases of distressed Jewish individuals and communities became important foci of international non-Zionist Jewish activism that employed sophisticated fund-raising and media campaigns:

Damascus blood libel (see The Damascus Affair: "ritual Murder," Politics, and the Jews in 1840 [195] by Jonathan Frankel),
Edgardo Mortara (1858, see The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara [196] by David I. Kertzer),
Albert Dreyfus (1894, see Prisoners of Honor: The Dreyfus Affair [197] by David Levering Lewis[xxxv]), and
Mendel Beylis (1913, see Blood Accusation: The Strange History of the Beiliss Case [198] by Maurice Samuels[xxxvi]).

There were a few others, but the above four all had the same basic structure and gradually took on a sort of mythic meaning that has little connection to reality. International Jewish philanthropic efforts provided a regular international framework for some of the wealthiest Jews to interact outside of business, and the philanthropists looked for non-emergency situations, where their largesse and connections could be helpful.

Non-Crisis Jewish Philanthropy

Southwestern University Professor Lisa Moses Leff discusses the development of modern French Jewish philanthropy in her book Sacred Bonds of Solidarity: The Rise of Jewish Internationalism in Nineteenth Century France.[199] It appears to contain useful information but contains a chapter “The Myth of Jewish Power” even though it generally makes more sense to discuss the myth of Jewish powerlessness or is probably more correct to discuss the conditions under which some Jews were able to exert a tremendous amount of financial or political power during the time period in question.

Vice-President Adolphe Crémieux (Isaac Moïse Crémieux) of Consistoire Central des Israélites de France" (Central Consistory [200] of the Jews of France) is a typical powerful well-connected French Jewish politico of nineteenth century. As a Frog Prince,[xxxvii] he attempted to intervene with the French government on behalf of Damascus Jews during 1840 and worked closely with the Cousinhood to pressure the Egyptian and Ottoman governments.

Wikipedia [201] describes one of his ongoing philanthropic efforts:

Alliance Israélite Universelle is an international Jewish organization based in France. It was founded in Paris in 1860 by Adolphe Crémieux, as a response to the Damascus affair, with the goal to protect human rights of Jews as citizens of countries where they live. The organization was created to combine the ideals of self-defense and self-sufficiency through education and professional development among Jews around the world.

In addition, the organization operates a number of Jewish day schools, and is responsible for the standardazation of the Ladino language.

In 1870, Charles Netter of the AIU received a tract of land from the Ottoman Empire as a gift and started an agricultural school Mikveh Israel, the first modern Jewish agricultural settlement which grew oranges.

During the Pre-1948 period in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine, the AIU ran anti-missionary schools to teach young Jews French and Hebrew to help create a more cohesive Jewish nation in Israel.

The AIU schools constitute the first attempt to create a uniform international Jewish school system. Because after 1900 many AIU teachers were Zionists, the AIU paid for Zionist indoctrination of Arab, Persian, and Spanish Jewish students from North Africa to Iran. In Farewell, Babylon: Coming of Age in Jewish Baghdad,[202] author Naim Kattan mentioned his Zionist instructor at an AIU school in Baghdad.

Later as a member of the French government of national defense, Crémieux opportunistically acting at least partially for Jewish special interest used his position to manipulate France into an act of exceptional largess in the 1870 Décret Crémieux (Crémieux Decree), which conferred French citizenship on European colons and Ibero-Berber Jews in Algeria. In one fell swoop he turned Algerian Jews into native colaborators in a situation comparable to that of ethnic Ashkenazi Jews in Polish or Austrian Poland while at the same time Algeria as an integral part of France suddenly began to look a lot like Ireland within the UK of the same time period.

French Jewish philanthropy in Algeria ultimately created a French Algerian Jewish consciousness that benefited the State of Israel. During the Algerian War of Independence important French Algerian Jews whispered to French politicians that France and the State of Israel faced a common foe in Arab nationalism. Since Algerian Jews emigrated to France after Algerian independence, they have often served as a stealth pro-Judonia pressure group in French politics.

Political Meaning of International Jewish Philanthropy

In the nineteenth century until Israeli statehood, international Jewish philanthropy probably constitutes an important international regime governing collaboration of organizations and individuals from the Americas through the territories of the Czarist Empire. It should not be surprising that the International Jewish Philanthropic Regime develops in parallel with the International Telegraphic Union (ITU), which was founded in 1865 and whose regulated technology was so important in Jewish aid efforts. Today, Jewish philanthropy serves as the social services sector of Judonia. When modern American Jewish (Judonian) rescue efforts conflict with Israel government desires or goals as has happened in the cases of Russian and Ethiopian Jews, eventually the State of Israel has acquiesced to policies defined by Judonia.

International Jewish Philanthropy and the Media

The media campaigns associated with Jewish philanthropy benefited from the disproportionate role that Jews played then as now in the newspaper industry, which itself was an outgrowth of the publishing industry, which had become so important to Jews because of the guaranteed market in Jewish religious books.

[Here are a selection of articles that discuss current journalistic biases that result from disproportionate Jewish influence: NY Times Panders Jewish Prejudice,[203] Letter to the Editor: What is Really Left Unsaid,[204] Attack Journalist Swiftboats Ron Paul,[205] Ron Paul Supporters Attack Islamophobe,[206] Beware of Jews Flinging Slurs,[207] Bring Back the Fairness Doctrine?,[208] Harvard: Jews Better Than Muslims,[209] Followup: Harvard -- Jews Better Than Muslims,[210] Open Letter to the Globe Editorial Board,[211] Battle waged in Boston over new mosque,[212] Globe Covers Academic Best-Seller,[213] El "problema" que tiene el Boston Globe con los musulmanes,[214] Boston Globe Islam-Bashing: Complain!,[215] The Boston Globe's Problem with Muslims,[216] Falafel and Better Jewish-Muslim Relations,[217] Letter to the Boston Globe: Dishonest American Genocide Discourse,[218] The "Sale" of the Boston Herald,[219] Open letter to the Boston Globe: A Lawsuit without Merit,[220] Presidential Evil Not Presidential Courage,[221] Time to interrogate Jacoby,[222] and Public letter to the Boston Globe.[223]]

Jewish Philanthropic Politics in the USA

Philanthropic politics has also been successful for manipulating non-Jewish politicians and groups especially when it has been applied to non-Jewish groups like African Americans.

In this particular case, the interplay between Jewish radicalism, the organized Jewish community and extremist Jabotinskian politics on issues of civil rights for African Americans has been complex but has nevertheless prevented the development of significant pro-Palestinian activism within the American black community and has even provided a means to involve African American community leaders in ongoing effort of Jewish Neoconservative Jabotinskians to incinerate the Sudan in an act of anti-genocide philanthropy.

[See 5th Question: Darfur,[224] Israel-Incited "Genocide" in Darfur?,[225] Followup: Israel-Incited "Genocide" in Darfur?,[226] USHMM: National Thought Control,[227] Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Service -- Today,[228] Profiteering from humanitarianism,[229] and African Americans, Jews, and Islamophobia.[230]]

Zionist Use of International Jewish Philanthropy

Philanthropic politics in the context of the Dreyfus Affair proved to be the gimmick by which Eastern European Zionist leaders managed to get access to Western Jewish money. Professor Michael Stanislawski points out in Zionism and the Fin de Siècle, Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism from Nordau to Jabotinsky,[231] p. 13-14, that Herzl and other contemporaries reinterpreted the Dreyfus Affair to prove that West and East European Jews faced a common threat of anti-Semitism only after they became Zionists:

In the face of the seeming dissolution of the cosmopolitan dream, Herzl began to obsess over the future of the Jews. Typically, of course, he is said to have come to Zionism as a result of the Dreyfus Affair, a claim he himself made repeatedly in later years. But in an important 1993 study, the historian Jacques Kornberg carefully analyzed Herzl's reportage on the Dreyfus Affair from the beginning of the case to its end and demonstrated that Herzl's reactions to the first stages of the Affair, well into 1897, were entirely typical of those of other writers in Die Neue Freie Presse or other liberal (and often Jewish-owned) newspapers, and indeed of most Jews in France and else where. It was only after Herzl was a convinced Zionist, and the case itself was transformed in the late 1890s into a cause célèbre that he began to interpret it through Zionist lenses. Nordau also went through exactly the same stages in Dreyfusardism, to the extent that he, too, would later counterfactually insist that it was the Dreyfus Affair that made him a Zionist.

Even though the French military leadership was probably only interested in using anti-Jewish bigotry as a means to avoid admitting error, early Zionist marketing among Western Jews employed the Dreyfus Affair to create fear that they would soon be subject to pogroms and that they could only escape the danger by creating a Jewish settlement or state in Palestine (or possibly elsewhere -- see Followup (II): Origins of Modern Jewry [232]).

Linking humanitarianism to self-interest is an exceptionally effective fund-raising technique and begins to motivate individuals among the Western and Central Jewish financial elite to give Judonia substance via

1. increasing funding of Zionist organizations,

2. British Jewish investments in Jewish settlement activities, and

3. Zionist Jewish political contributions to political parties to encourage pro-Zionist British foreign policy.

In other words, Judonia’s virtual state consolidation began when the Zionist intelligentsia uses the Dreyfus affair to unite themselves as a national bureaucracy with a subset of wealthy Western Jews as a governing plutocracy and with a (potential) mass following on the basis of Zionist nationalist politics. In fact, the development of anti-nationalist and non-nationalist politics among other wealthy Western Jews willing to fund their own political bureaucracies to serve their own constituencies facilitated Judonia’s development even if it hindered Zionist goals in Palestine, for the non- and anti-Zionists came to serve as a loyal opposition within Judonia and not as outsiders trying to defeat Judonia.

The Balfour Declaration represented the first major Zionist success. It took the form of a letter addressed to Lord Rothschild [233] (Lionel Walter Rothschild, 2nd Baron Rothschild), who was a leader of the Cousinhood.

Figure 4 Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild

Then, as fears of rising anti-Jewish feeling resulting from common gentile assumptions about the Jewish nature of the Bolshevism increased among the Cousinhood and among the German American Jewish elite (“Our Crowd”), the Cousinhood took direct charge of Zionist politics in the UK while philanthropy directed toward the Jewish settlement in Palestine became the hook to enmesh wealthy German American non-Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews in Zionist politics after the British government took charge of Mandatory Palestine.

During the 1930s this philanthropic politics evolved into refugeeism, which sought to aid German, Austrian, and Czech Jewish communities under threat from the German Nazis. (See Baksheesh Diplomacy, Secret Negotiations Between American Jewish Leaders and Arab Officials on the Eve of world War II.[234])

Various Jewish groups have applied refugeeist politics with varying degrees and kinds of legitimacy in order to justify bringing Ethiopian Jewish[xxxviii] communities to Israel while Neocons initially used the Russian Jewish Refusenik issue as a way of validating their Jewish credentials. (See The Real Origins of Neocons.[235])

Since the Holoexaleipsis (Nakba, Holoexaleipsis, Holocaust, Holosphage and Holodomor [236]) Jewish philanthropic has served an additional purpose of distract from Zionist crimes against Palestinians.

Defending Judonia Inside Legal System

As aggressive anti-Semitic politics develops in nineteenth Europe, Jewish philanthropic efforts begin to include an equally aggressive legal component.

Judonia in Wilhelmine Germany

The Downfall of the Anti-Semitic Political Parties in Imperial Germany [237] by R. S. Levy Describes in detail how German Jewish advocacy organizations like the Zentralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (Central Association of German citizens of Jewish faith) used the legal system

to force perceived enemies into bankruptcy,
to attack members of the academic community believed unfriendly,
to ban books, or
to force publishers to change offending passages.[xxxix]

(See Updating "The AJC attacks"[238] or AJC Attack on Progressive Jews.[239])

Levy argues that anti-Semitic politics was for all intents and purposes defeated by the 1920s. He is supported by available demographic statistics and by the behavior of the NSDAP (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter Partei, German Nazi Party), which went out of its way not to run as an anti-Semitic political party in 1932.

German Jews founded the Zentralverein (CV) in 1893, and German American Jews to some extent used it as the model for the American Jewish Committee (AJCommittee), founded in 1906 “to safeguard and strengthen Jews and Jewish life worldwide by promoting democratic and pluralistic societies that respect the dignity of all peoples” according to the AJC website.[240]

Both organizations were initially anti-Zionist, but they are early expressions of the materialization of Judonia as are the AJCommittee’s sister defense organizations, which are the American Jewish Congress (AJCongress) and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). The Zionistische Vereinigung für Deutschland [241] founded 1897 was the original main German Zionist organization.

Judonia as Plaintiff and Defendant within the American Legal System

J.J. Goldberg attempts to contextualize the three official American Jewish defense organizations within the framework of American Jewish history in Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment [242] on pp. 12-13:

Three main immigrant waves created American Jewry: Portuguese marranos in the colonial era, German Jews in the mid-nineteenth century, and Russian Jews in the early twentieth. Each wave consisted of Jews who wanted to escape the world they knew. They were fleeing both from the Jewish community and from the Gentile society surrounding it, Hertzberg wrote. “[T]hese immigrant Jews … felt betrayed by the societies, the governments, the rabbis, and the rich Jewish leaders who had cast them out, or, at the very least, had failed to find room for them…. They would not allow the very people who had betrayed them in Europe to exercise authority in America.”

To be sure, these immigrants recreated a Jewish community in America. But it was a Jewish community with a difference. This was a new world, where religion was disestablished. Churches had no legal hold over believers; likewise, the Jewish community had no hold over Jews. It was defanged. Over time, Jews developed a new mythology of an organized American Jewish community led by well-meaning bumblers.

No one ever summed up the mythic image of inept Jewish leadership better than the late author-activist Paul Jacobs. In his 1965 memoir Is Curly Jewish? He offered an imaginary crisis that captured the layperson’s picture of the three best-known Jewish agencies: the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith (ADL), American Jewish Committee (AJC) and the American Jewish Congress.

“A fanciful way of describing the work of these groups,” Jacobs wrote, “is that some guy walks into the toilet of a ginmill on Third Avenue, New York, and while he’s standing at the urinal, he notices that someone has written ‘Screw the Jews’ on the toilet wall.” A quick phone call is made and “an ADL man rushes down to the bar” to dust the wall for fingerprints. The ADL checks the prints against its files of 2 million known anti-Semites, then publishes a photo of the wall in its next bulletin, saying it shows anti-Semitism is on the rise and “everyone should join B’nai B’rith.” Next to arrive would be the representative of the American Jewish Committee, who would look around, the announce plans for a major academic study of “anti-Semitic wall-writing since Pompeii.” AJC would also publish a booklet proving that a Jew had invented the martini, to be distributed in bars nationwide. Then the American Jewish Congress would arrive, thow up a picket line outside the bar, and petition the Supreme Court to bar the sale of liquor “to anyone making an anti-Semitic remark.”

The passage above contains several misconceptions but is typical of the effort to make present Jewish “defense” organizations specifically and Jews in general appear as harmless and insignificant in order to assuage gentile concerns and fears. Such self-camouflaging may be an historical practice

that could have arisen in Commonwealth Poland because Jews were so economically important and indispensable and
that may have reappeared today because the behavior of Jewish defense long ago crossed the boundary into intimidation and abuse with ADL espionage and with accusations of anti-Semitism against private individuals like the Quigleys in Colorado.

[See SPYING ON FNB,[243] ADL Blinks, Settles Spying Case,[244] Were the Spies Journalists?,[245] 01-1228 -- Quigley v. Rosenthal -- 04/22/2003,[246] Defamation row.[247]^,
[xl]]

The public relations catastrophes associated with the aggressive “defense” operations of these three official Jewish communal organizations indicates that Judonia is hardly the most competent of empires and can make severe misjudgments leading to diminishing returns, disastrous outcomes, or blowback, but Judonia, as a sort of stealth virtual empire, does not have the sort of competition that the UK faced from other Great Powers during the nineteenth century, and the hyper-wealthy Jewish plutocrats lightly directing Judonian bureaucrats have no problem with abandoning one project or strategy in order to fund another with greater promise of return.

Sometimes the wealthiest Judonian leaders even sponsor public contests to find the best “philanthropic” causes, to wit, Charles Bronfman’s[248] Competition for Jewish Communal Innovation. (See The Big Ideas Series: Introducing 13 Proposals for Jewish Communal Innovation [Phase One].[249]^, [xli]), but most of the time political communal entrepreneurs like Charles Jacobs or Roz Rothstein approach the mega-donors to Jewish causes with business plans in order to obtain funding to back new organizations or projects.

As a result, a lot of the nastier Jewish defense projects involving the court system have moved from the three traditional defense organizations to Israel Advocacy organizations like the David Project or StandWithUs while the ADL, AJCommittee, or AJCongress work on inciting Islamophobia, Arabophobia, or the incineration of Arab and Muslim countries on the basis of high-minded humanitarian anti-genocide principles.

[See Subjugating American Muslims to Israel,[250] Harvard Supports Incinerating Arab Countries,[251] Dissident Veteran for Peace: Against Zionist Censorship,[252] Zionist attack on Pluto Press,[253] Kovel Pulls No Punches,[254] and Zionism, Penisism, and Joseph Massad.[255]]

The discovery evidence described in Subjugating American Muslims to Israel [256] was particularly striking for it indicated

that the David Project from the start led the Boston conspiracy against rights to marginalize American Muslim citizens via scare-mongering against the Roxbury Mosque and
that later the David Project made use of the New England Israeli consulate as a subcontractor or supplier of resources and personnel.

Likewise, when American Jews try to use the American legal system for political harassment of the Palestinian resistance, the plaintiffs appear to receive little support from the Israeli government while funding for the lawsuits appears to come almost entirely from non-Israeli or former Israeli Jewish “philanthropists.”

[See Palestinian Authority's US assets are frozen - The Boston Globe,[257] Sderot sues Palestinian Authority for millions in rocket damages ...,[258] BBC NEWS | Americas | Palestinian assets in US frozen,[259] ISRAEL: ISRAELI FAMILY FILES LAWSUIT ON EU FOR PALESTINIAN ATTACK,[260] State Dept. considers caving to pressure in terror lawsuit,[261] and NJ man gets green light to pursue terror lawsuit | New Jersey ....[262]]

Judonia in the US Federal and State Judiciary

The US legal system is particularly friendly to anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian legal action because of the disproportionate role that Jews play in the US judiciary.

Brandeis and Frankfurter argued that Zionism would make American Jews (particularly those of Eastern European origin) better citizens by resolving the “Jewish Question,” and in the 50s the establishment of the State of Israel may have encouraged the final abandonment of Yiddish identity with the result that American Jews seeking authenticity began to find it only in Israel while a whole plethora of marketing and publicity campaigns through schools, universities and the mass media seems to have encouraged a majority of American Jews to identify more strongly with the State of Israel than with their fellow non-Jewish American citizens.

An American Jew serving in the US regulatory and legal system or the IRS probably receives a continuous stream of hardcopy and email alerts every month about the threat that Arabs and Muslims and especially Arab and Muslim American citizens represents to the USA and to Jews.[xlii] International Hillel Society fundraising letters routinely libel Arab and Muslims Americans as terrorists or terrorism-supporters.

This constant din must be having an effect because discussing USA legal discrimination in terms of separate systems for Blacks and Whites is no longer adequate. Today American Jews, American non-Muslim non-Arab non-Jews, and American Muslims or Arabs are subject to very different justice systems with regard to the enforcement of 501(C) (3) IRS regulations, anti-terror laws, FEC rules, SEC rules, and OSI law, and the situation is particularly egregious with regard to anti-terrorism laws, for Zionists have been terrorizing the native population of Palestine for over a century. Yet, no US government official ever suggests enforcing the US legal code against Israeli Zionists or their supporters.

[See Jewish Dominance Ohio, Subversion KSG,[263] Set Up for Another Holocaust,[264] Zajanckauskas, Henss, Selective Prosecution and Equal Protection,[265] Followup: Natalie Portman's Genocidal Racism ...,[266] The Persecution of Sami Al-Arian,[267] Video Is a Window Into a Terror Suspect’s Isolation,[268] Public letter to the Boston Globe,[269] AIPAC Traitor Trial Begins Soon,[270] and Timeline of Zionist Crimes.[271]]

As the primary loyalties of an ever increasing number of US government officials in the judiciary, the State Department, the Pentagon and elsewhere prove to lie with Judonia or the State of Israel, the current situation in the USA is rather reminiscent of the British practice of “lending” colonial official to serve in the Indian princely-states or the Emirate of Transjordan in order to make sure that their nominally independent governments served British interests properly.

Defending Judonia Outside the Legal System

Because working strictly via the legal system is in general too limited for the needs of empire, Judonia also uses forms of grass roots mobilization and conspiratorial politics.

Early indoctrination in communal cohesiveness and control of deviant thought may have made it possible for the elite members of the Jewish community to mobilize a conspiracy against the interests of the majority of the Jews of Lemberg in Austrian Galicia to murder Reform Rabbi Abraham Kohn as Michael Stanislawski describes in A Murder in Lemberg: Politics, Religion, and Violence in Modern Jewish History.[272] Such mobilization (generally but not always without murder) by (often self-defined) elite groups among Jews is fairly common in the nineteenth century even before nascent Judonia to mobilize Central and Eastern European Jews via extremist organic nationalist ideology associated with the political Zionism of Theodor Herzl and his colleagues.

The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History, 1794-1881 [273] by Steven J. Zipperstein p. 115, provides some interesting information difficult to find in English about pre-Zionist conspiratorial Jewish behavior in Belarus (see The Origins of the Zionist Lobby [274]):

The faith of Russian Jewish intellectuals in the prospect of improvement in the political and civic standing of the Jews had already been challenged in the first part of Alexander II's reign, when in 1863 Polish rebellion led to increased hostility toward all non-Russian nationalities. To the surprise of his Jewish admirers, even the eminent liberal journalist, M. N. Katkov now began to air chauvinist sentiments. Suspicions of the patriotism of Russia's Jews grew common in this tense atmosphere. Therefore, when in 1868 the Christian convert Jacob Brafman charged that Jews constituted a distinct state within a state, he struck a particularly sensitive nerve in Jews and non-Jews alike.

Basing his observations on the minutes of the Kehillah of Minsk, Brafman argued that the Kehillot, though officially disbanded by the Russian authorities in 1844, still functioned as an invisible Jewish government. This invisible yet pervasive body affiliated with the ORPME [The Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment among Jews, Russian acronym] based in St. Petersburg, the English Brotherhood for the Assistance of Jewish Emigrants, and the Alliance Israelite Universelle -- collected taxes, imposed its own court system, and through seemingly innocuous fraternal organizations, made its powerful will known in the everyday lives of Jews. Even rules about clothing and food were determined by the ubiquitous and omnipotent organization. Brafman argued that Jewish isolationism arose from the "Talmudic municipal republic," or the Kehillah, rather than from the teachings of the Talmud, as Russian antisemites had previously assumed. Brafman thereby redirected Russian concerns about the integration of the Jews from the religious to the political sphere. The book's impact was profound. Within two years of its publication, the governor-general of Kiev warned in his annual report to St. Petersburg that the "cause of every last Jew is also the cause of the worldwide Jewish Kahal ... that powerful yet elusive association."

Gessen, Istoriia, 2:200-201; John D. Klier, "Iakov Brafman's Book of the Kahal and Its Enemies," paper presented at the Midwest Slavic Conference, May 4, 1980; Hans Rogger, "Government, Jews, Peasants," p. 17.

While the official disbanding makes it hard to know for sure, Stanislawski’s research indicates that despite Brafman’s claims the traditional communal mechanisms of control of social deviance were considerably weakened by the 1860s even if they did persist in secret. Over the next 100 years the power of such “grass roots” local organization probably waxed and waned in power according to circumstances.

American (and Russian) Jewish communities to this day will put a tremendous amount of energy into suppressing critical views of Zionism and often organize through entities within the Jewish Federation, which is at least partially a descendant of the traditional Kahal.

[See Lobby activities: It's just a fr*ggin' novel!,[275] Seva Brodsky of Somerville comments on Steve Grossman's letter,[276] Ghada Karmi's Boston College Talk,[277] and The Battle for Divestment from Israeli Securities in Somerville ....[278]]

Even Jewish political activism, organizing and fundraising unassociated with Israel or Zionism has become a tool for Judonia. Because “progressive” Jews have become indispensable for left of center politics in the USA,[xliii] AIPAC and other Israel advocacy and mainstream groups within the organized Jewish community (really Judonia) paralyzed anti-War activism by tainting anti-war efforts with accusations of anti-Semitism or anti-Israelism.

[See Confronting War and Discussing Peace on Campus,[279]^,
[xliv] The Banning of Rabbi Lerner,[280] Anti-War: 1960s versus 2000s [281] and How Anti-Iraq-War Jews Licensed Neoconservatism.[282]]

Jack Nelson proposes in Terror in the Night: The Klan's Campaign Against the Jews [283] that a conspiracy between the leaders of the Meridian Mississippi Jewish community and representatives of ADL to manipulate the FBI in committing extra-judicial murder. He writes on p. 264:

Maria Knowles, the secretary who typed up Scarbrough’s reports of meeting with the informants and worried that she had participated in a murder plot, lives in Meridian, where she serves as secretary of the Seventh-Day Adventist church and as a teachers’ assistant at the church’s school.

He adds on p. 265:

Jim Ingram retired from the FBI at age fifty in 1982 and succeeded Moore at the Deposit Guaranty National Bank. He lives in Jackson. In 1992 he was appointed Mississippi’s commissioner of public safety, the state’s top law enforcement post.

Ingram disagrees with his close friend Moore about what happened at Meridian. “It was an ambush, that’s what they meant to do,” Ingram told me. “No question about that. They meant to kill them out there that night.”

The techniques that the ADL learned in manipulating the US government into violating the law may have later proved useful in manipulating US government officials into facilitating conspiracy against the rights of Arab and Muslim Americans. Agents of Judonia within the US government almost certainly have aided this ongoing project.

Pre-Zionist Gate Keeping and Facilitation

Jewish philanthropic, defense and other political or public activities have benefited since the early nineteenth century from extensive media gate keeping and facilitation in book publishing, the newspaper industry, entertainment and academics.

Publishing, Newspapers, and Entertainment

Because Jews then as now constituted a disproportionate component of the book buying public with specialized tastes, Jewish firms represented the major part of the industry. As Jews developed a taste for non-Jewish literature and as Jewish publisher branched out from religious literature, Jewish publishers quickly became the major content providers of nineteenth century Central and Eastern Europe and consequently became major players in the related news and entertainment industries.

As a result certain Jewish themes probably received disproportionate exposure in the media, but for most Europeans Jews were rather exotic and such subjects did fairly well with the general public. (See Opera, Liberalism, and Antisemitism in Nineteenth-Century France: The Politics of Halévy's La Juive.[284])

There was a good deal of criticism of distortion in news coverage as well as discrimination and favoritism in selecting writers, artists and performers, who were to succeed, but there was a good deal more heterogeneity in opinion and politics among the Jewish proprietors and investors in content-production before Judonia became powerful enough to enforce the discipline that exists today in the modern American media.

Academia

Pre-Zionist gate keeping and facilitation in academia is a special case.

Higher levels of education and involvement in publishing, journalism, and entertainment predisposed large numbers of European Jews to seek academic employment, but there were such high barriers against admission to the professorate that Jewish academics could not practice the same sorts of gate keeping and facilitation:

that Jewish publishers, newspaper owners and investors made common in other professions and
that Jewish academics and affiliated polemicists practice throughout schools and colleges today.

[See The Petition: Israel, Palestine, and a Tenure Battle at Barnard,[285] <CORRECTION> Said, Abowd, Kovel, Elahi Attacked,[286] WSU: Thought Control in Michigan,[287] Fight Zionist Thought Control,[288] Zionism, Penisism, and Joseph Massad,[289] Jacob Lassner and Nadia Abu el Haj,[290] Conspiracy Against Rights in NYC,[291] Boycotts and Priniples of Academia,[292] and Please sign petition to support Nadia Abu El Haj.[293]]

When pre-Zionists Jewish academics sought to control university discourse perceived as Judeophobic, they relied on the Zentralverein and harassment by non-academic Jewish defense organizations.

Jewish professors and scholars responded to challenges to traditional Jewish self-understanding like Higher Textual Criticism or to the controversial proposals of Karaite scholar Abraham Firkovich with topic filtering or by creating the orthodoxies that have today become the basis for intellectual intimidation. At the same time wealthy Jewish philanthropists began to found new Jewish institutions to host the new generation Jewishly-correct researchers and academicians.

Figure 5 Karaite Scholar Abraham ben Shmuel Firkovich

Topic Filtering

Anthony Grafton's article "In Bernays, Scaliger, and Others," which is found in The Jewish Past Revisted: Reflections on Modern Jewish Historians,[294] discusses the German Jewish classicist Jacob Bernays, who was a very important 19th century scholar in the tradition of the religious historian Joseph Justus Scaliger. Grafton includes a significant reservation on pp. 34-35 about Bernays' work that applies to modern Jewish ethnoreligiously and Zionistically correct scholarship of academics like Alan Segal of Columbia, Aren Maeir of Bar Ilan, Jacob Lassner of Northwestern University, and Alexander Joffe formerly of Purchase College.

Most important of all, Bernays could not deal honestly with some of Scaliger's most radical and challenging theories about history and exegesis. Bernays insisted that he himself had no faith in biblical criticism. Historical readings of the Old Testament he dismissed as pseudo-scholarly profanations of a sacred text, based only on wild hypotheses. Scaliger had other views. He not only found but published (and refused to abridge the Egyptian dynasty lists that plunged the world of European historical learning into a century and more of crisis. Worse still, he speculated in radical ways about the gaps and defects of the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible. Scaliger noted that the Masoretic text was relatively late: he dated it to around the time of Gamaliel, whose remark that masoret seyag la-torah (tradition is a fence to the law) he took as a reference to the Masoretic apparatus. And he insisted that even this well-preserved official text represented only a version of a lost original. Its language, Hebrew, was not -- = so Scaliger claimed -- a special, holy language, with which God had created the world and in which Adam had named the animals, but the ordinary tongue of ancient Assyria. Neither was its script original or sacred, since the Jews originally had used a different one, much like that of the Samaritans. Only after their return from the Babylonian exile did they transliterate the text into the square [Aramaic] characters used in extant manuscripts and the printed Hebrew Bible. The Old Testament, like the new, suggested Scaliger, incorporated many errors and showed some worrying gaps. The Masoretes, narrowly Jewish in culture and tradition, had known little or nothing about non-Jewish history. Their vocalizations of non-Hebrew names, for example, were often faulty; much less accurate, Scaliger thought, than those of the more cosmopolitan Alexandrian Jews who had translated the Septuagint. Finally, all texts of the Old Testament referred to stories and texts now lost, such as the story of the young man killed by Lamech, referred to -- but not recounted in Genesis.

The attempt to filter certain questions out of scholarly discussion continues even more aggressively today as indicated by the controversy over Barnard Professor Nadia Abu el-Haj, who had the audacity to be a scholar of Palestinian ancestry addressing topics in Jewish and Israel studies and who had the bad manners to challenge assumptions, e.g. on pp. 127-128 of Facts on the Ground, Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society:[295]

It is important here to consider the issue of ethnicity in (Israeli) archaeological practice and the ways in which positivism and nationalism met on its terrain. What is it that makes an Israelite an Israelite?

That question was never posed in this Israelite settlement debate. There was no need to ask the question at all. The Israelites were a category of people known from the Bible who entered Palestine at a particular historical moment, (eventually) conquered the Canaanite city-states then regnant in the land, and ultimately built a nation-state of their own – the fore fathers of contemporary Israelis. The question is not who they were, but how to identify and locate them.

Creating the Orthodoxies

Stanislawski discusses one of the basic constructed orthodoxies of Jewish studies in theory only tangentially related to Zionism but deeply connected to Judonia in Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews, The Transformation of Jewish Society in Russia, 1823-1855 [296] on p. 3:

Before we can study the history of the Jews in the Russia of Nicholas I, we must examine the legacy of interpretation bequeathed to us by the classic historians of Russian Jewry. With the luxury of hindsight it is possible to discern that this scholarship reflected the social and political circumstances of its authors as much as history itself. This is, of course, true to some extent of all history writing, but Russian-Jewish historiography was particularly conditioned by contemporary reality: apolitical objectivity was neither its hallmark nor even its pretended goal. On the contrary, all the major historians of Russian Jewry consciously and candidly wrote history as a political and national statement, hoping to redress the tragedies by chronicling their horrors and thereby to influence in the most direct fashion the political fate of the Jews. Many of the resultant works were issued as party publications or parliamentary briefs. Most were published by openly ideological presses or periodicals. While the ideologies involved ranged across a reasonably broad spectrum of political opinion, they were all united against one common enemy, the tsarist regime and its obvious anti-Semitic bent as exemplified by the governments of Alexander III and Nicholas II.

This exogenous stimulus to scholarship quite naturally had considerable effect on the assumptions, as well as the conclusions, of the scholars. To a large extent, their research was aimed at tracing the origins and background of contemporary attitudes and actions of the Russian authorities in regard to the Jews. This led, perhaps inevitably, to what now appears as an overidentification of the past with the present, a projection backward of the context of the government’s relations with the Jews.

The analogy with contemporary Holocaust scholarship can hardly be avoided. (See Bringing Holocaust Religion to Arabs.[297])

Because so many non-Zionist groups including Yiddishists and anti-Semites had an interest in defining the Jewish people biologically (i.e., according to völkisch racist principles) or historically, most of the other basic orthodoxies associated associated with Zionism were already in place before 1881 and the founding of the first modern Zionist organizations like Hovevei Tzion and the emigration of the first groups of Biluim-Pioneers to Palestine.

Jon Entine’s book Abraham's Children: Race, Identity, and the DNA of the Chosen People[298] provides a simplified basic introduction to this sort of material. In Discussion on Abraham's Children,[299] the author provides a brief introduction to his ideas.[xlv] He even manages to include some of the traditional ethic Ashkenazi bigotries against oriental Jews and writes on p. 302 of his book:

Non-Ashkenazi Jews – Sephardim and Oriental Jews who have undergone more intermixing – do not have higher average IQ scores, nor are they more likely to be in high-achieving jobs.[xlvi]

This belief in contamination of Jewish genetic stock and culture among Oriental Jews was common among nineteenth century ethnic Ashkenazim as Elliott Horowitz points out (pp 150-1) in “Jewish Life of Israel Abrahams” from The Jewish Past Revisited: Reflections on Modern Jewish Historians [300] edited by David N. Myers and by David B. Ruderman:

An issue of even greater interest to Abrahams was that of distinctions between European and Oriental Jews. He claimed that there was “less warmth in the Oriental Jewish home, less of that tenderness,” which was once a common characteristic of all Jews but came eventually “to distinguish Western Jews from their gayer but more shallow brethren of the East.” Similarly, Abrahams felt it possible to detect “a feebler sense of responsibility in the mental attitude of an Oriental father to his offspring, just as one detects more volubility but less intensity of an Oriental father to his offspring, just as one detects more volubility but less intensity in the Oriental Jew’s prayers.”

Abrahams describes modern oriental Jewry as in some sense racially degenerate, and the pervasiveness of such ideas among nineteenth century ethnic Ashkenazim explains the general lack of interest of Zionist leaders in bringing oriental Jews into the Zionist movement until they realized that the State of Israel could not be adequately defended in the immediate aftermath of 1947-8 ethnic cleansing of the native population without an infusion of cannon fodder.

In the nineteenth century German and Eastern European Jews were among the strongest proponents of theories of racial revival through racial purity. Not only was the German Jewish culture critic and Zionist leader Max Nordau probably at least as important among German non-Jews as he was among Jews (see 'Do not have children if they won't be healthy!'[301]) in spreading ideas of racist eugenics, but many German Jewish academics were also important in the construction of the German people according to völkisch racist principles and put their ideas to Zionist use only when German non-Jewish racists excluded German Jews from membership in the German people.[xlvii]

The New Institutions

In other words, just as the financial system of Judonia was in place by the 1870s, likewise by the late nineteenth century the basic themes of Judonian educational material were already almost fully fleshed out. To a large extent Judonian academia could piggyback within the German, British or US university systems, but in those environments controlling discourse was not guaranteed, and eventually wealthy donors were funding new institutions like the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums (later renamed the Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judensthums) in Berlin, Das Jüdisch-Theologisches Seminar (Fränckelscher Stiftung) in Breslau, and the Jewish Theological Seminary, originally established by Spanish American Jews in New York City, in a prefiguration of the institutional network :

that consists of think tanks and of institutes for the study of the Holocaust, of the Jewish community, and of the State of Israel and
that functions inside and outside of university environments for the purpose of manipulating Jewish and Gentile discourse.

The Judonian academic system seems to benefit from a secularization of the Central and Eastern European Jewish tradition that conferred merit upon rich Jews for funding individual scholars and kolalim (collegia) to engage in Torah study as well as from the fear that American Jews can no longer control the subject matter taught at the Middle East studies departments of American universites. The new Israel studies departments currently being funded by wealthy Jewish donors at many American represent a new approach to creating Judonian departments within American universities. (See Jacob Lassner and Nadia Abu el Haj.[302])

Jewish Political Diversity at the Fin de Siècle (Nineteenth Century)

A century ago Jewish opinion was considerably more diverse and reflected some of the differences in opinion among the wealthy Jews that provided the money, but Zionist success has reinforced a political orthodoxy that has begun to consume non-Judonian and non-Zionist institutions like YIVO and dominate Jewish opinion throughout the world. (See Making YIVO a Zionist Organization [303] and YIVO News No. 204 - Winter 2008 [304])

Circa 1900 the situation throughout the Jewish political world was immensely different from that of today. Throughout Europe Jews played prominent roles in all sorts or radical movements from Marxism to fascism and various forms of politicized ethnic fundamentalism often to the distress of the wealthy Jewish elite (Claudia Koonz discusses ethnic fundamentalism in the German context in The Nazi Conscience.[305])

Taxonomy of Political Elites

In North America and most of Europe where Jewish political parties did not generally exist, Jews participate in political parties or political elites across the political spectrum, but even though the majority of Eastern European Jews probably were probably assimilationist in orientation and preferred less ethnically oriented politics, a sizable number of Eastern European ethnic Ashkenazim were heavily involved in five exclusively or predominantly Jewish transnational political elites:

Marxist,
Political Yiddishist,
Social patriotist Zionist,
Jabotinskian Zionist, and
Occult nationalist.

[See Followup (II): Origins of Modern Jewry,[306] The Real Origins of Neocons,[307] All in the Neocon Family,[308] Money Jews, Brain Jews, Politics,[309] Press Self-Censorship about Jews,[310] Francis Fukuyama and Islamo-Fascism,[311] The Hitler and Nazi Slurs,[312] USHMM: National Thought Control,[313] Jewish Racist Bullies Imam Elahi,[314] Backgrounder on Occult Mystical Zionism,[315] Tohar HaNeshek in Jerusalam Attack,[316] Followup: Natalie Portman's Genocidal Racism ...,[317] and Zionism, Penisism, and Joseph Massad.[318]]

Each political elite was associated with a number of political parties and mass followings.

The political and ethnic boundaries among Jewish elites as well as between Jewish and non-Jewish elites were often indistinct and permeable to some extent.

Marxists

While the transnational Marxist political movement was disproportionately Jewish, it was not wholly Jewish but contained many Jewish cliques and sects throughout Europe and North America.

Political Yiddishists

As a political elite, Yiddishists were committed to Yiddish cultural autonomy within a multicultural state (doikkeyt). The Algemeyner Yidisher Arbeter Bund (Jewish Bund) was Marxist but belonged to Yiddishist politics just as did the earlier generation of non-Marxist Yiddish socialists. The members of the Yiddishist political elite were for the most part politically active only in the territory of historic Poland, which spanned Russia, Germany, and Austria before World War I and even more states afterward.

Many Yiddish-speaking Jews tried to preserve Yiddish culture after they emigrated westward.

Lenin considered Marxist Yiddish speakers an important target population for recruitment into the Russian Communist Party and derided Bundists as Zionists that were afraid of the water. The Polish Agudas Yisroel Party (Yiddish pronunciation) was a Yiddish-speaking party that took part in Yiddishist politics in order to oppose to secular Yiddish culture. Because the Agudoh was also anti-Zionist, it could often find common grounds to work with the Jewish Bund and Jewish Marxists.[xlviii] After the founding of the State of Israel, the Israeli Agudat Yisrael Party (Hebrew Pronunciation) and various splinter parties have gradually moved toward Occult nationalism.[xlix]

Some more strictly anti-Zionist Yiddish religious groups like Neturei Karta have remained committed to preserving Yiddish religious culture while they disdain the secular Yiddish culture of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Unlike the secular Yiddishists, such religious Yiddish-speakers have managed successfully to transplant their culture and politics to North America especially in Brooklyn, Spring Valley, NY and neighboring regions.

Social Patriotists

Despite the historical acceptance by European socialists of Labor Zionism as a genuine socialist movement, the Labor Zionist political elite belongs to the Eastern European political current that Eastern Europeans often called social patriotist. Hebrew University Professor Zeev Sternhell tries to argue in The Founding Myths of Israel: Nationalism, Socialism, and the Making of the Jewish State [319] that Zionists were nationalist socialists but not National Socialists (i.e. Nazis) or fascists because Labor Zionists were democratic at least among Jews.

Sternhell’s book is somewhat dishonest because it ignores the class of Eastern European fascist movements to which Labor Zionism belongs. In Eastern Europe and especially in regions of historic Poland, fascist ideology was never as reflexively anti-democratic as fascist movements in the West, and Eastern European fascism has generally preferred to operate within a formally democratic framework.

In Neither Right Nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France [320] Sternhell argues on p. 212:

Yet, on the other hand, the revision of socialism by the French and Belgian socialist rebels itself developed into fascism for one essential reason – the same reason that underlay the move toward the extreme right of the generation of 1910. For the revolutionary syndicalists at the beginning of the century as for the exponents of the new socialism twenty years later, the proletariat had ceased to be a revolutionary force and Marxism no longer provided a suitable answer to the problems of the modern world. This loss of faith in the vitality and capacities of the proletariat, joined with an unhesitating denunciation of the essential principles of Marxism and social democracy, this desire to achieve quick results by utilizing the full force of political power but without undertaking structural changes, this need to come to terms with the existing social order because one has come to regard it as natural and immutable, this replacement of Marxism by a national socialism, and of the revolutionary impulse of Marxism by a planned, organized, rationalized system of economy, led, through a natural inner logic, to fascism. Thus in the thirties, fascism often appeared to be the only system of thought that answered to the logic of the twentieth century.

Where the above analysis does not apply to Labor Zionism is hard to discern. In any case, the Labor Zionist ideologue Berl Katznelson plagiarized the Belgain fascist Henri de Man while another Zionist leader Vitaly Viktor Haim Arlosoroff openly renounced democratic principles if they were to apply to the native population of Palestine. In New history, old ideas [321] Edward Said discusses the intellectual contortions through which Zionists put themselves to defend Zionism.

Jabotinskians

Zionist historiography calls Jabotinskians Revisionists or Maximalists. They are politicized ethnic fundamentalists, who believe in social Darwinism, free markets, biological determinism, and an essentialist primordialist form of extremist organic nationalism. Neoconservatism is the latest incarnation of the American branch of Jabotinskianism.

Occult Nationalists

The Occult nationalist transnational political elite evinces the least intellectual development since the Shabtai Tzvi debacle. Jewish occult nationalist groups and parties include

Mizrahi Zionists, whose current official Israeli political party is Mafdal,
followers of Tzvi Yehuda Kook, who was head of the Merkaz HaRav Yeshiva as well as a leader of Gush Emunim, and
other groups like Lubovitchers, which are nominally anti-Zionist or non-Zionist as well as extremely anti-Gentile in politics and attitude.

Lobbyist Jack Abramoff was part of this elite as is film critic Michael Medved.

Implications for the Jewish Financial Elite

Of all the transnational Jewish political elites Zionists offered the most to wealthy Western Jews with increasing capital resources while the Marxist transnational political elite promised the least.

Yet, there was a tremendous similarity among the first generation Jabotinskian Zionist and Jewish Marxist leaders and later events[l] have indicated that some sort of Jewish identity has persisted among Soviet Ashkenazim even including those that remained members of the Soviet elite after

the founding of the State of Israel.

Despite membership in the former Soviet elite, Russian Jewish oligarchs hooked up with incredible alacrity with both the international organized Jewish community and with the Friedmanites (or Neoliberals), whose movement is in many regards the negative mirror image of that of the Marxism even to the point of being characterized by a mostly Jewish leadership with a mostly non-Jewish following. (See Re: Report: Finkelstein Lecture at MIT.[322])

Not only have Friedmanites as members of a predominantly Jewish movement proselytizing to non-Jews found it easy to collaborate with Jabotinskian Neoconservatives on the basis of shared principles and assumptions, but many Jabontinskian Neoconservaties are also Friedmanite Neoliberals.

Aspects of US Jewish Communal Organization

The transnational Political Yiddishist elite did not take root successfully in the USA. Immigrant Eastern European Jews created a sort of shadow form of Yiddish socialism in the American labor movement, but it differed strongly from Eastern European Bundism.

Even though labor organizing in the USA had a strong color racist component, Yiddish American unionizing was not völkisch in the Eastern European sense, and the Jewish Daily Forward edited by Abraham Cahan to serve as the voice of Yiddish socialist labor openly ecouraged assimilation.

Yaacov Goldstein’s book Jewish Socialists in the United States: The Cahan Debate, 1925-1926 [323] contains a transcript of a series of articles that appeared in the Forward after Cahan arrived in Palestine to tour the Jewish settlement and that continued after his return to New York City. In the introduction Goldstein writes (pp. vii-viii).

Following his study tour as he defined it, Cahan published a series of telegrams and articles in his paper which described, sympathetically, the national endeavor in Palestine in those days, the time of the fourth Aliya. This led to the development of a wide-ranging debate, initiated by Cahan, which persisted from late 1925 to mid-1926. Its participants were an entire echelon of high-ranking personalities in the Jewish workers’ movement in America. Essentially the debate centered on the position of Jewish socialists in America toward Zionism and Palestine, in light of the tragic circumstances of the Jews of eastern europe and the closure of the gates of America to immigration.

This debate is of major importance for research into the attitude of a community numbering hundreds of thousands to Zionism and Palestine in the years under review. It reflects the traditionally hostile Bundist positions, but also the notable difference between them and the veteran socialists who immigrated to America in the pre-Bund years. The debate highlights the uncertainties and the ideological crucible through which a segment of the Jewish socialists passed due to the volatile conditions endured by the Jewish people in those years – uncertainties which ultimately caused some modifications in their ideological, but chiefly practical position, and their adoption of a more positive approach to Zionism and Palestine. In this sense the debate constitutes a turning point, a shift toward affirmation of the national enterprise in Palestine by Cahan, the journal Forward and the group of leaders associated with it, but also by a group of activists among the leaders of the Jewish trade unions.

Figure 6 Forward endorsement of Roosevelt in Nov. 1, 1936 edition

If American Political Yiddishists had developed favorable attitudes toward Zionism because of uncertainties and volatile conditions that Jews faced in Central and Eastern Europe, there should be some substantial of similar changes amon other Political Yiddishist groups outside the USA. Instead diminished hostility toward Zionism among among non-socialist and even religious anti-Zionist Political Yiddishist American Jews suggests that the American environment was mediated their ideological transformation. [li]

Not only was Zionism marketed in America as a way for Jews to become better Americans, but during the same time period that the Cahan and the Forward turned Zionist, Weizman was using humanitarian arguments to persuade a significant number of non-Zionist members of the wealthy “Our Crowd” to join the Jewish Agency [for Palestine, Executive, American Section], which collaborated with the Zionist movement in the development of the Jewish National Home under the terms of the British Mandate for Palestine. (See Baksheesh Diplomacy, Secret Negotiations Between American Jewish Leaders and Arab Officials on the Eve of world War II,[324] pp. 15-16.)

The Strata of American Judaism

“Our Crowd” and the Yiddishist elite belong to two separate strata of the American Jewish community. Spanish American Jews who constituted the oldest stratum of the American Jewish community played little direct role in the expansion of Judonia in America except for the founding of the aforementioned Jewish Theological Seminary as the first Judonian academic institution in the USA.

Spanish American Jews

Spanish Jews arrived in the Americas mostly before the Revolutionary War. They were often connected to large family and trading networks. They probably came to the British colonies with more resources than other immigrants. They were often and probably disproportionately involved in the triangle trade. Several Spanish American Jews become noteworthy plantation owners in the slave states, and several Spanish American Jews played important roles in the Confederacy. The character of Rhett Butler from Gone with the Wind [325]may have been loosely based on Judah Benjamin, who was Spanish American Jewish and served the Confederate States of America as Attorney General, Secretary of War, and Secretary of State successively.

German American Jews

The second stratum of Jewish immigration to the USA consisted mostly of German Jews with smaller Austrian and Swiss Jewish components. Like Spanish Jews the members of the second Jewish immigrant cohort were generally affiliated with family and business networks. They often benefited from the existence of Jewish communal institutions founded by Spanish American Jews.

German Jews generally entered the USA with some capital, which looked huge in contrasted to the resources that contemporary Irish immigrants brought along to the USA on fleeing the Potato Famines.

German Jewish immigrants often possessed expertise in peddling, commodity trading, wholesaling, retailing, and estate management. Such skills were directly applicable to the economy of the Old South, and several German American Jewish families used profits from trading in the southern USA to found important investment banks that continue to do business to this day.

Once they achieved riches and became “Our Crowd” – especially in New York idiomatic usage, wealthy German American Jews tended unlike moneyed Spanish American Jews to prefer to work behind the scenes and had a tendency to throw money at problems.

“Our Crowd” set up numerous Jewish communal organizations like B’nai B’rith, which is the world’s oldest continuously operated Jewish community service and welfare organization. While the founding of B’nai B’rith was an important example of German American (and Spanish American) Jewish altruism, the founders hoped that better social services for impoverished Jews would make the Jewish poor less of a threat to the status of elite Jews.

At a later period “Our Crowd” founded the initially anti-Zionist American Jewish Committee to struggle to improved conditions for ethnic Ashkenazim in Eastern Europe partially out of fear that Eastern European Jewish immigrants to the USA might threaten the status of German American Jews. (Nowadays, both B’nai B’rith and the AJCommittee are very vocally Zionist. In 2002 B’nai B’rith worked with AIPAC to create the B’nai B’rith Youth Organization 4 Israel.)

In addition to organizations specifically for Jews, the dominant universalistic and humanitarian ethos of “Our Crowd” required the establishment of institutions to benefit the larger society. Brandeis Professor Jonathan Sarna[lii] writes on p. 308 of American Judaism: A History:[326]

Jewish patricians loomed large in the financial, legal, political, and administrative work of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the National Urban league.

Such charity is part of Judonian foreign aid, and just as the USA expects a return at least in the form of good will, Jewish donors to African American causes expect American Black leaders to forego criticism of Zionism and the State of Israel.

When the NAACP was first founded, wealthy American Jews might have hoped that mainstreaming African Americans could provide a sort of elevator effect to move the Jewish elite upward in American society as a whole.[liii]

Whether opportunistic or sincere, the universalistic humanitarian politics of “Our Crowd” played very well in the American press and especially in those papers owned or run by German American Jews, who immigrated to the USA with expertise in the heavily Jewish German publishing and newspaper industries.

As publishers of the New York Times, the German American Jewish Sulzberger family has tried to position the paper as the national journal of record while