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.

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.

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?]

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.[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.)

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.[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.

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.

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.

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.[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.

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.

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.

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. 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])

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 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])

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, when renders them

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.

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.

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?

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[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.

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 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

· publicizing the good works of “Our Crowd”,

· covering up the ethnic Ashkenazi background of a disproportionate number Soviet leaders during the twenties and thirties and the role they may have played in the Holodomor,[327] and

· burying in the back pages any Holocaust news reports that made any mention of Jews as an ethnic group. (See Anti-War: 1960s versus 2000s.[328])

Nowadays, the Times has apparent given up any pretense to objective and honest reporting.

It puts MEMRI [329] propaganda on the front page. (See NY Times Panders Jewish Prejudice.[330])

[See also What Sanabel said.[331]]

Not only does the paper give an op-ed column to Thomas Friedman, who was a major player in the Neocon effort to manipulate the USA into attacking Iraq, but it has hired William Kristol as a columnist. (See Conservative William Kristol becomes NY Times columnist | Politics | Reuters.[332])

Edward Rothstein, who often serves as a Jewish Zionist media gatekeeper at the New York Times, used the publication of Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by Daniel C. Dennett as an excuse to equate Muslims protesting vicious anti-Islamic xenophobia with ants whose brains have been eaten by parasites. His February 20, 2006 article is entitled "History Illuminates the Rage of Muslims." (See History Illuminates the Rage of Muslims [333]).

At this point, the NY Times plays a major propaganda role as Judonian journal of record.

Eastern European Ethnic Ashkenazim

The last and by far largest stratum of Jewish immigration to America (until Russian Refuseniks began to enter the USA as asylum seekers) consisted of ethnic Ashkenazim (the “Yids”) coming mostly from the Russian Empire but also from elsewhere in Eastern Europe.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, “Our Crowd” viewed the Yids as a unlovely mass of primitives and put a lot of effort in trying to control and to reform their radicalism, religious practices, superstition, personal hygiene, and social behavior. (See Jewish, Zionist War Against Salvation.[334])

In reality, the Yids divided themselves into two main categories, the Yiddish elite or sheyne Yidn and the Yiddish common people or proste Yidn. (See Money Jews, Brain Jews, Politics.[335]) At that time period the Yiddish elite either in Eastern Europe or in America did not include a class geltyidn (Yiddish: moneyed Jews) equivalent to the Geldjuden (German: moneyed Jews), but the class of sheyne Yidn (Yiddish: beautiful or elite Jews) did include some very wealthy members. Kiev Jews are supposed to have quipped in the immediate aftermath of the October Revolution that they obtained “tea from Wissotsky, sugar from Brodsky and law from Trotsky.”

Many histories of Yiddish immigration are like the PBS documentary entitled The Jewish Americans [336] extremely misleading when they discuss the poverty of Yiddish immigrants.

Generally in comparison with the non-Jews among whom they lived, even proste Yidn were well off. They often brought a little capital with them to the USA. In addition, not only were they often members of family and communal networks, but they also benefited from the social service and welfare organizations established by German American Jews in contrast with immigrant groups like Sicilians, who probably had to deal with an exploitive padrone on arrival to the USA.

Eventually Yiddish Americans developed their own communal and official organizations like the American Jewish Congress, which was Zionist from the start. While German American Jews tried to exert influence through communal service organizations, ethnic Ashkenazim tended toward social and political aggressiveness, and the Anti-Defamation League, whose leadership included many Yiddish Americans tended to use coercive techniques in defending Jews even though the organization was part of the predominantly German Jewish B’nai B’rith.

A good number of Yiddish Americans, who generally had some connection to Eastern European cinema or theater (see Followup (II): Origins of Modern Jewry [337]), fairly quickly managed to stake out Hollywood as an “empire of their own,” whose Yiddish elite became the “Hollywood Crowd.”

Sander Gilman points out in Smart Jews: The Construction of the Image of Jewish Superior Intelligence [338] on p. 178 that the “German Jewish ancestry of [the ’boy genius’ Irving Thalberg] was almost unique among the Eastern European Jews of Hollywood.”

Despite the wishes of Yiddish studio owners, Hollywood Yiddishkeyt often expressed itself during the 20s and 30s by presenting a positive image of communism and the Soviet Union. (See Re: Report: Finkelstein Lecture at MIT.[339]) After the start of the Cold War, the Blacklist, and the Rosenberg Trial, Yiddish Hollywood discovered its love for Zionism, and since the 1950s the Hollywood Crowd has played an immense role in the Zionist indoctrination of America. Films like Rules of Engagement (2000)[340] are as sinister as any German Nazi anti-Jewish production, and many members of the Hollywood Crowd deserve imprisonment for incitement to genocide of Arabs, Muslims and Palestinians as well as related crimes against humanity at least as much as Otto Dietrich, who was the Third Reich Press Chief.

[See Ghada Karmi's Boston College Talk,[341] The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust [342] by Jeffrey Herf, Zionist Film: Exodus - Terrorism is Good,[343] Married to Another Man, Married to Another Woman,[344] Zionist Film: Even Costa-Gavras Makes a Zionist Propaganda Film,[345] and Zionist Film: Normalizing Jewish Dual Loyalties.[346]]

Judonia, Balfour Declaration and Afterward

A financial network, funding, a bureaucracy, media, a growing academic community, and potential settlers were a good start on consolidating Judonia, but the Zionism lacked an army and international cover for a program that amounted to the brutal theft of Palestine from the weak native population by wealthy, aggressive, organized European invaders. With sufficient funding, the Zionist bureaucracy could have hired mercenaries and trained its own army, but doing so would have been expensive, time consuming, and perceived as illegitimate. Getting a free ride by piggybacking on an existing imperial apparatus and infrastructure made a lot more sense, reduced risk, and could provide international legal cover.

The earliest phase of Judonia required a partner.

A Partner for Judonia

There were four sufficiently powerful imperial states where the local Jewish financial elite had enough influence to strike a deal:

the USA,
the German Empire,
France, and
the UK.

The United States of America

While the United States in theory could have offered tremendous resources to the Zionist movement, mixed feelings among Americans about American imperialism as well resistance to Zionism among the German American Jewish elite and significant groups among Yiddish Americans made the USA unusable as the Judonian command and control center in the startup phase.

The German Empire

Not only was the German Jewish financial elite generally at least as hostile to Zionism as “Our Crowd,” to whom the Geldjuden had many ties of family and business, but Germany was also far less involved in extra-European international imperialism than was the USA and had an interest in propping up the Ottoman Empire as a potential ally against the Czar.

France

Although France was a major international imperial and colonial power, it supervised its colonies much too closely for Zionist purposes, and it would probably have undercut Zionist marketing and fundraising for the Zionists to collaborate with the French. French Jewry was ethnically heterogeneous and consisted of some very recent immigrant communities as well as some very ancient communities including those of Algeria. French Jews at the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century were probably even more insistent on being nationally French than German Jews were on being nationally German.

The United Kingdom

While the fit between the British and the Zionists was less than perfect, proto-Zionist and Orientalist popular literature like

Daniel Deronda [347] by George Sand,
Alroy, The Prince of Captivity,[348]
Tancred or the New Crusade [349] both by Benjamin Disraeli, and even
Ivanhoe [350] by Sir Walter Scott

prepared the British public and leaders for involvement with Zionism.

Figure 7 John Tenniel,[351] Disraeli and Queen Victoria
Exchanging Gifts (Punch Magazine,[352] 1876)

While some of the Cousinhood viewed Zionism as a threat to their integration into British society, the Cousinhood like British Jewry in general was as diverse in opinions as it was in ethnic background, and pro-Zionist members of the Cousinhood could point out that national identity within the UK was not quite so monolithic or hegemonic as that of Germans or even that of Americans.

Bernard Lewis tells the following story among some subtle Islamophobic incitement in One on One: When defeat means liberation | Jerusalem Post.[353]^, [liv]):

No. When I joined the British army in 1940, I was interviewed by a sergeant who, while taking down all the relevant particulars, asked, "What is your race?"

Well, nowadays, I would say "white" or "Caucasian," but at the time, that wouldn't have occurred to me. In England, we never spoke about race. I knew what the Germans meant by it, however. So I asked the sergeant whether I should put "Jewish" in that category.

"Nah," he dismissed. "That's your religion, and we've already got that on another line."

At that point, I was completely mystified. "What, then," I asked, "am I supposed to put?"

"As far as the British army is concerned," he replied, "there are four races: English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish. You are clearly English."

So, I went to war with documents that said that I was British by nationality, English by race and Jewish by religion.

The reluctance to impose a uniform identity within the British Isles may be related to the historic tendency within the British imperial system toward tolerance of individual ingenuity, initiative and autonomy that altogether provided the space for adventurers like the White Raja Sir James Brooke to establish his own kingdom. Zionist leaders generally assumed that similar freedom of action would be available for their goals.

The UK did not have nearly as large a population – either relatively or absolutely – of Eastern European ethnic Ashkenazim with “radical tendencies” as either the USA or Germany, and the Cousinhood preferred that the situation remain unchanged. Zionism offered a way of maintaining the status quo.

The Balfour Declaration

The first step in the realization of Judonia as a virtual colonial motherland came when Arthur Balfour acting as British Foreign Secretary issued the Balfour Declaration to Lord Walter Rothschild.

The British government made the commitment because of

personal persuasion,
some misunderstandings about the nature of Jewish power, and
some well placed political contributions by wealthy British Zionists.

Those Jews willing to extend personal influence and large sums of money for the sake of the Zionist program became the first members of the leadership of Judonia.

Because Judonia has a competent, cost-effective, ideologically-driven bureaucracy among its staff, the leaders of Judonia rarely involve themselves in day-to-day issues, and Judonia is much more like a small, private, extremely exclusive club with about 400 members at preset than like a governing body.

The staff of club consists of all the people that work for the Israel-oriented Jewish communal, pro-Israel think tanks, divisions of think tanks, and specific Israel advocacy organizations as well as all the unofficial Jewish professional networks that enforce a pro-Israel discipline. It makes more sense to refer generally to the members and staff of Judonia than to leaders and officials or bureaucrats.

While the members are extremely rich, they are like the Krafts of Boston not particularly deep and often are not particularly knowledgeable about Zionism or foreign policy. The Zionist intelligentsia within the staff does the policy planning and organization that has eventually to brought Judonia so much power.

Walter Rothschild was probably the first member of Judonia, and he was joined by others that helped make sure that the Balfour Declaration became British policy and international law through the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine even though the dismantlement of the Ottoman Empire was not obvious in UK interests and angered British Muslim subjects.

While creating an ethnic conflict where there previously was none might have been a cynical way to create a need for British rule, the Mandatory authority could have functioned perfectly well or even more smoothly without a requirement to establish a Jewish national home in Palestine.

For all intents and purposes, the incorporation of the Balfour Declaration into the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine benefited only the Zionists because it provided the Zionists with the desired legal cover for the slow motion theft of Palestine from the native population.

During the Mandatory Period

The Cousinhood or Judonia took charge practically immediately with the appointment Sir Herbert Samuel as High Commissioner for Palestine, and the British government far more than Zionist efforts made the New Jewish Settlement (Yishuv Hadash) a reality.

Samuel worked hard to maintain a façade of neutrality between the native Palestinian population and the immigrant Eastern Europeans but was careful to make sure that Palestinians had practically no legal means either to impede the immigration Zionist settlers into Palestine or to hinder the purchase of property by Zionist groups and individuals for settlements.

The British far more than the Zionists created spoken and written Modern Israeli Hebrew (MIH).

Before Samuel brought Jewish education in Palestine in varying degrees under the authority of the mandatory government, the Zionist leadership had had little success with creating a Hebrew-speaking settler population in Palestine[lv] despite the consensus claim that the “[Hebrew] language revolution took place between 1906 and 1913.” (Language in Time of Revolution [354] by Benjamin Harshav, p. 110.)

Yael Zerubavel describes the situation very differently in Recovered Roots, Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition, [355] pp. 30-31:

The attitude toward the exilic languages and the commitment to turn Hebrew into an everyday language was not uniform, however, even among the Zionists. The emergence of Hebrew as the Yishuv’s national language was a complex process that entailed a struggle on both ideological and practical grounds. The 1913 “Languages War” marked the success of the pro-Hebrew teachers and students, supported by the Socialist Zionist settlers of the Second Aliya, in abolishing the use of European languages in Jewish schools and establishing Hebrew as the main language of instruction. For most Jewish immigrants, Hebrew was not a native tongue but a newly acquired spoken language. While its vocabulary was rich in some areas, it was severely limited in others. The use of the language thus required an ongoing effort to find (or construct) appropriate words, idioms and concepts.

Harshav writes (pp. 111-112):

We must warn against over-optimistic estimates. For example, as the Jerusalem statistician Roberto Bacchi showed, in the census of 1916, about 40% of the Jews declared Hebrew as their main language (see Bacci 1956a, 1956b). But as we know, declarations are one thing and reality is something else. There was a consciousness of the need to speak Hebrew and pride in it as the great achievement of the Zionist entity, hence the respondents identified with Hebrew speech, especially for external, political purposes, and declared as they did. (What language could they declare: Arabic, which would indicate an even larger proportion of Arabs? Russian, the language of the enemy in World War II?[lvi] The despised Yiddish, connoting Diaspora? The French they hardly knew? Nevertheless, 60% did declare such languages.

Harshav recognizes but underrates the British contribution on p. 85:

It is only after the world war, that is, under the orderly British Mandatory rule that recognized Hebrew as one of the three official languages in Palestine, that the Language Committee [of the Hebrew Teachers’ Association] published a journal Leshonenu: Our Language: A Journal for the Improvement of the Hebrew Language, and seriously launched its standardizing activities. Indeed, the glory of the earlier Language Committee can only be understood as a back-projection from the present-day prestigious Academy of the Hebrew Language (which had turned Leshonenu into a journal of research rather than “improvement.”)

[See The Emergence of Spoken Israeli Hebrew,[356] Languages of Science in the Era of Nation-State-Formation: The Israeli Universities and their (Non)Participation in the Revival of Hebrew,[357] and Hebrew after a century of RLS efforts.[358]]

Figure 8 Sir Herbert Samuel

He managed to stabilize the situation in Palestine to the point that private business investing would return a profit as long as the UK was willing to bear all costs of security under the calculation that ruling Palestine was worth more politically than Britain lost in paying to suppress the Palestinians. The claim probably was not true even then, but agents of Judonia still continue to sell this sort of patent medicine – most recently in the case of the occupation of Iraq.

Expanding Judonia to Include Non-Zionists

The members of Judonia during the twenties and thirties probably had no great dreams of conquest or empire. The British members of Judonia probably expected Palestine to become a successful imperial holding that would function profitably as a middleman between the West and the Orient. Palestine was the members’ private philanthropic effort that was probably even more satisfying than most because it was profitable.

The members of Judonia in the UK and the USA with the assistance of important Zionists like Weizman quickly used the hook of humanitarianism to encourage more extensive involvement of Felix Warburg[lvii] and other important non-Zionists from “Our Crowd” and the Cousinhood in Zionist organizations like the Jewish Agency for Palestine, Palestine Economic Corporation, the Palestine Development Corporation, and the Palestine Endowment Funds. (See Baksheesh Diplomacy,[359] p. 13.) As a result Judonia begins to appear less ideological and more administrative or governmental in attempting to direct policy for the greater good and not specifically for the benefit of Zionism or Zionists. The pattern of Zionist bureaucratic obedience to Judonian decisions was quickly established and continues to this day.

During the 30s because of the liquidation of German Jewry and the Haavarah Agreement, Judonian investments became far more profitable as the New Jewish Settlement expanded. The rogue British officer Orde Wingate trained Zionist fighters in terrorism and assassination techniques, and the Zionist leadership in Palestine began to feel stronger. The situation culminated in the intra-Judonia conflict over the the 1937 Peel Commission Partition Proposal,[360] which was written in response to the 1936 Arab Rebellion with strong “encouragement” from the Zionist UK-based members of Judonia.

Medoff describes in Baksheesh Diplomacy,[361] pp. 89-92, how Warburg under the influence of non- and anti-Zionists like the AJCommittee President Cyrus Adler and Maurice Karpf from the Jewish Agency became increasingly hostile to the proposed Zionist state in part because of probable deleterious economic effects that threatened to wipe out the value of all investments in Palestine.

In the end the Zionists and Judonia developed a formula with which practically everyone except the Jabotinskians could live. As with the Roadmap today, the Zionist leaders accepted the plan “in principle” but rejected the details.

Figure 9 Vladimir Jabotinsky

Jabotinskians and the Partition Proposal

On April 30, 1937, Jabotinsky as leader and commander of the Irgun militia cabled the senior staff in Palestine:

This is my order under the prevailing conditions: if the riots are renewed and there is a tendency to attack Jews as well, do not hold back.

Jabotinsky testified before the Peel Commission in the British House of Lords on July 11, 1937 (Normal Portion [362] by Mark Ellenson and The Mentor Who Shaped Begin's Thinking: Jabotinsky [363] by Mark Bruzonsky):

It is quite understandable that the Arabs of Palestine also prefer to be the Arab state No. 4, or No. 6 -- that I understand. But when the Arab claim is confronted with our Jewish demand to be saved, it is like the claims of appetite versus the claims of starvation.

The idea is that Palestine on both sides of the Jordan should hold the Arabs, their progeny, and many millions of Jews. What I do not deny is that in that process the Arabs of Palestine will necessarily become a minority in the country. I do deny that that is a hardship. It is not a hardship on any race, any nation, possessing so many national states now and so many more national states in the future. One fraction, one branch of that race, and not a big one, will have to live in someone else's state: Well, that is the case with all the mightiest nations in the world."

Jabotinsky’s testimony is fundamentally dishonest. Even if European Jews were under dire threat, the native population of Palestine had no greater obligation to turn over their country to European invaders than the people of Massachusetts would have had.

Not only was mass murder of the Jews absent from the German Nazi agenda in 1937, but the Zionists still had a good working relationship with the Nazis, and Walter Rinderle and Bernard Norling even note in The Nazi Impact on a German Village [364] (p. 135) that:

[until] 1938 Jewish families in Lahr county [Germany] believed themselves to be well-integrated into their communities. In Lahr city they received permission to form an NSDAP "Party of Jewish Youth" in 1935, and in Offenburg Jewish founded their own group of patriotic War Veterans.

The real threat to Zionists came from outstanding offers from various Arab leaders to facilitate immigration of Jews into Arab countries if Zionist renounced the program to make Palestine into a Jewish state and from the attempt of the Mufti’s agents to start a discussion with non-Zionist members of Judonia in June, 1937 (Baksheesh Diplomacy,[365] p. 82, Ghada Karmi's Boston College Talk [366]).[lviii]

Because Zionist and non-Zionist members of Judonia disdained Jabotinksy for his overt völkisch racism and tendency toward violence even more than they despised the socialist (really fascist) politics of the Labor Zionists, Jabotinsky had no direct mechanism to stop the dialogue except by inciting a renewal of the Arab Rebellion with publicly reported inflammatory statements before Parliament in order to scorch any possibility of a negotiated non-Zionist solution to the conflict over Palestine.

The renewed violence may have helped Jabotinsky with grass roots fund-raising, which was for the most part his main occupation after the British forbade his return to Palestine in 1930 and he was cut off from the deep pockets of the Cousinhood and “Our Crowd.”

Because of this peripatetic effort, Jabotinsky left a legacy of a devoted cadre outside of Palestine.

The Jabotinskian movement survived Jabotinsky’s death in 1940, and his followers in the USA

established strong ties with the extreme Republican rightwing,
connected with Yiddish Broadway (A Flag is Born [367]) and to some extent Yiddish Hollywood (albeit apparently not to the A-list actors, producers or directors of the Hollywood Crowd to any significant degree[lix]), and
managed to inject Zionism into the eschatological thinking of Southern white Christian evangelical fundamentalists. (See Backgrounder on Christian Zionism [4 yrs old but still relevant].[368])

Jabotinsky’s American followers included Benjamin Netanyahu’s father Benzion, Nixon’s favorite Rabbi Baruch Korff, and Leo Strauss, who as a teenager had been a member of German Zionist groups connected with Jabotinsky.[lx]

During the 30s Jabotinsky coupled his message with ever increasing emphasis on the free market probably in order to make his form of Zionism more attractive to Yiddish Americans with some extra money. Milton Friedman’s father, who immigrated to the USA from Hungary, belonged to this category before his business went under in the 1930s.

“Our Crowd” Takes Charge

American entry into WWII and increasing awareness of the mass murder of Jews in Europe forced non-Zionist members of Judonia to reevaluate their ideas. “Our Crowd” with their strong family ties and German heritage could not help but commiserate with the anger, pain and resentment of the former Geldjuden of Germany and Austria. (In The Pity of It All,[369] pp. 243-247, Amos Elon describes the shame and anguish of Willy Ritter Liebermann von Wahlendorf over the life that he had tried to live.)

Even though the belief has no connection to historical reality, after 1945 the members of Judonia as well as Jews in general began to assign increasing blame to the British and to the Palestinians for murder of European Jews.[lxi]

The UK seemed to have outlived its usefulness as a partner for Judonia while the Soviet leadership (and probably especially the Soviet Ashkenazim in important government positions) saw a possible opportunity to drive the British from the Middle East. (See Re: Report: Finkelstein Lecture at MIT.[370])

While Zionist and formerly non-Zionist German-American Jewish members of Judonia publicly lobbied President Truman and secretly bought weapons and military hardware to ship to Palestine, grass roots Jabotinskians lobbied against reconstruction loans for the UK, and the Soviet Union “facilitated” the emigration of some Eastern European Jews to Palestine.[lxii]

Palestine became an almost perfect model for the Shock Doctrine that Milton Friedman would develop at the University of Chicago where Leo Strauss had become a Professor in 1949 and later became a Neoconservative icon.

Shock and Aftermath: Consolidating the Great Erasure (or Holoexaleipsis)

Milton Friedman wrote in the Preface to Capitalism and Freedom,[371] p. ix:

Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable. (Cited from The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,[372] p. 140.)

There is hardly a better description of the Zionist enterprise, and once the crisis associated with driving out the British and ethnically cleansing the Palestinians, who were surrogate German Nazis in the minds of most Jews of the time period, passed, the new Israeli government and members of Judonia took on

the tasks of consolidating the conquest, bringing cannon fodder to new State of Israel (“redemption of exiles”), and erasing the Palestinian historical record (“restoration of the land via reforestation”)

[See The Jewish Exodus from Iraq, 1948-1951 [373] by Moshe Gat, In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Struggle Between Jews and Zionists in the Aftermath of World War II [374] by Yosef Grodzinsky, and Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land Since 1948 [375] by Meron Benvenisti.]

as well as
the efforts to make the State of Israel secure in the Middle East, US politics, International Politics, and Western intellectual discourse.

Consolidation

The consolidation tasks seems to have been left mostly to Israeli government officials and Zionist bureaucrats, but US and UK members of Judonia were heavily represented in funding the redemption and reforestation as humanitarian and charitable efforts with the same sense of righteousness with which many anti-regulation bankers and financiers supported Milton Friedman during the same time period.

Figure 10 Milton Friedman

Naomi Klein writes:

The movement that Milton Friedman launched in the 1950s is best understood as an attempt by multinational capital to recapture the highly profitable, lawless frontier that Adam Smith, the intellectual forefather of today’s neoliberals, so admired – but with a twist. Rather than journeying through Smith’s “savage and barbarous nations” where there was no Western law (no longer a practical option), this movement set out to systematically dismantle existing laws and regulations to re-create that earlier lawlessness. And where Smith’s colonists earned their record profits by seizing what he described as “waste lands” for “but a trifle,” today’s multinationals see government programs, public assets and everything that is not for sale as terrain to be conquered and seized – the post office, national parks, schools, social security, disaster relief and anything else that is publicly administered. [The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,[376] pp. 241-242.]

In the above formulation, Friedman has created a movement for the negation of the exile (shəlilat hagalut) from the free market and seeks to return the free market capitalists oppressed by regulation to their ancient homeland.

Friedmanism almost certainly grows out of the epistemic culture (mentality or mindset) associated with the perfervid Zionism of the Jewish community in the area of Rahway, NJ where Friedman grew up. (See Facts on the Ground,[377] pp. 101-105, for a discussion of the Zionist epistemic culture of Israeli archeologists.)

While lots of non-Jewish bankers and financiers also support Friedmanism, many do not. In contrast, the Zionist thought patterns in Friedman’s economic theory are so natural and reflexive for members of Judonia that practically all members were enmeshed in Friedman’s ideas, the only exceptions being those few with no important connections to banking and finance.

No member of Judonia seems to have lost money on any investments during the 1950s, and the members seem to have benefited very well from the theft of practically all Palestinian movable and immovable assets within the territory of the State of Israel. Nevertheless, the members would almost certainly have preferred less Zionist socialism (really fascism) and more free market in the State of Israel, but they still had a lot of visceral antipathy to the Jabotinskians, and the German reparations controversy did nothing to decrease the disdain.

In any case, not only did most of the Mandatory economic structures end up under Labor Zionist control, but a transformation to free market economics would also have rendered the new Zionist state far less attractive both to American Jews and also to European non-Jews inclined to progressive politics.

Friedmanism finally established a beachhead in the Israeli economy when Simcha Ehrlich became Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s finance minister.

Security

For “Our Crowd” security first of all meant making sure the State of Israel functioned on a sound financial basis and had reliable cash flows, and Judonia was well represented in German reparations negotiations by the bureaucrats from the Jewish communal organizations dominated by “Our Crowd.”

For the members of Judonia, the second component of security was an atomic bomb. So far the best book on the subject is Israel and the Bomb [378] by Avner Cohen. The key early Israeli atomic bomb makher [379] was the German Jewish chemist David Bergman.

In August 1948 Ben Gurion appointed Bergmann head of the scientific department of the IDF. On 15 July 1951 Bergmann was made scientific adviser to the minister of defense, and in early 1952 was appointed director of research of the newly created Devision of Research and Infrastructure (Agaf Mechkar Ve’tichun, or EMET) of the Ministry of Defense. … In June 1952 the Israel Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC) was quietly established with Bergmann as its head. He held these three posts until his final resignation in April 1966. [p.15]

Bergman also shared Ben Gurion’s conviction that the Holocaust justified Israel in taking any steps to ensure its survival. “I am convinced,” Peres cited him as saying, “that the State of Israel needs a defense research program of its own, so that we shall never again be as lambs led to the slaughter.” Bergman elaborated on this theme in a 1966 letter to Meir Ya’ari, the leader of the left-wing MAPAM, who opposed nuclear weapons. After writing that the spread of nuclear weapons was unavoidable and that many countries, including Arabs, would achieve nuclear capability, he said:

I was surprised that a man like you…is prepared to close his eyes and assume that reality is how we would all like to see it. There is no person in this country who does not fear a nuclear war and there is no man in this country who does not hope that, despite it all, logic will rule in the world of tomorrow. But we are not permitted to exchange precise knowledge and realistic evaluations for hopes and illusions. I cannot forget that the Holocaust came on the Jewish people as a surprise. The Jewish people cannot allow themselves such an illusion for a second time. [pp. 15-16]

Finding a partner for building a bomb was not much different from finding a partner for establishing a colonial settlement.

Cohen writes on p. 49:

The circumstances contributing to the development of the relationship [between Israel and France] were both geopolitical and domestic. By 1955-56 the situation in France’s North African colonies was deteriorating, and the French military establishment viewed Nasser as the force behind the Algerian rebellion, which was becoming uncontrollable. A militarily strong Israel, capable of threatening Nasser was now in France’s interest.

The warming of the French-Israeli relationship after September 1955 was not only the result of geopolitics, but was also driven by domestic, economic, and even personal forces. With the help of the French ambassador in Israel, Pierre Gilbert, Peres formed a pro-Israel coalition combining pro-Jewish and socialist sentiments with nationalistic interests in the expansion of the French aerospace and nuclear industries. Peres also took advantage of the structural weaknesses of the Fourth Republic. Recognizing the fragmentation of France’s policy-making, organs, Peres developed a close relationship with the French defense and interior (intelligence) ministers, bypassing the pro-Arab Quai d’Orsay bureaucracy. As Sylvia Crosbie puts it:

With the executive paralyzed by a domineering legislature, which was in turn immobilized by its own failings, there was widespread freedom of action at various levels of the bureaucracy. This enabled a relatively small group of individuals in the defense establishment and related ministries to cooperate intimately with Israel without any formal arrangement, sometimes in opposition to official government policy. Acting independently and often autonomously, they were in essence conducting their own foreign relations directly with the Israel Defense Ministry.

Peres arranged to obtain French weapons through unconventional channels, using these channels to explore whether France would assist Israel in pursuing nuclear weapons. That France itself was still undecided about the acquisition of its own nuclear weapons, and that the pronuclear camp advanced its case stealthily and incrementally, made it easier for Peres to advance Israel’s nuclear objective. Defense Minister Maurice Bourges-Maunoury, a supporter of French nuclear weapons, understood Peres’s vision just as he understood the need to keep the two countries’ nuclear plans opaque. [pp. 49-50]

Yet, Cohen does not really provide a clear understanding of activities taking place in France, the UK and the USA during Israel and Judonia’s quest for an Israeli atomic bomb. Cohen neglects to mention that Bergmann’s CEA (Commissariat à l’energie atomique) counterpart Bertrand Goldschmidt was Jewish.[lxiii] Were Sayanim,[380] the Frog Princes, members of Judonia, or staff of Judonia pressuring, manipulating or taking advantage of the French government?

Professor Joel Kovel mentions in Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine,[381] p. 2:

While reading Seymour Hersh’s largely forgotten book about the development of Israel’s nuclear bomb I was struct by an off-handed sentence that the “CIA had even been tipped off about the fact that Israel was raising large sums of money for Dimona from the American Jewish community.”

The article Where Did AIPAC Come From?[382] by Grant Smith identifies the connection between AIPAC and the Jewish Agency [for Israel] Executive American Section, whose US based board of directors consisted for the most part of members or staff of Judonia. (Baksheesh Diplomacy[383] investigates the connection between the predecessor Jewish Agency [for Palestine Executive American Section] and “Our Crowd.”)

AIPAC’s creation seems to have resulted from concerns that the conviction of the Rosenbergs might draw Congressional attention to Israel’s nuclear ambition and nuclear espionage and strengthen the feeling or charges associated with the Rosenberg Case that American Jews were disloyal to the USA. (American Accused of Spying for Israel [384] describes a recent case.)

Not only was shaping the Congressional view of Israel a primary concern for the State of Israel and Judonia during the 1950s, but American and Israeli Jewish leaders were obsessed with the image of Israel in American and world discourse. By the late 50s and early 60s the Israeli government and Judonia began an attempt to manipulate success in the film and print journalism industries with effects that still remain to this day. (Haim Saban may be a result of this sort of manipulation.)

During the late 50s and 60s, the Israeli government and Judonian staff were placing articles in newspapers while members of Judonia were contracting authors to write books (like Exodus [385]), in movies (e.g., Solomon and Sheba[lxiv]) to indoctrinate the American public in Zionist ideology, and funding journalistic entrepreneurs with the right attitudes.[lxv]

In addition to this economic and media manipulation members of Judonia start endowing professorships and establishing university institutes in Middle East and Jewish Studies with the expectation that Zionist academics would be able to stake out these areas of US academia for the permanent exclusive use of Judonia. Because reality no longer meets this expectation, Judonian staff members like David Horowitz are running a campaign to marginalize non-Zionist academics by accusing them of opposing academic freedom among other sins.

[See Horowitz: Archetype of Racist American Jewish Incitement,[386] David Horowitz' Glass House,[387] and Another Take on David Horowitz.[388]]

Changing of the Guard

In general Judonia and the State of Israel successfully created a structure for Gramscian hegemonic blocking in the USA of any non-Zionist controlled discussion of Israel, the Middle East, and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, but the behind-the-scenes, subtle string-pulling and quietly manipulative techniques of “Our Crowd” showed signs of ultimate failure because of the conflicts

between Eisenhower and Israel over the 1956 Suez War,
between Kennedy and Israel over the Israeli nuclear weapons effort (Israel and the Bomb [389]), and
between Johnson and the organized Jewish community over the Vietnam War.

The tension with Johnson arose because he expected support for his Vietnam policy in return for backing Israel in the 1967 War (Anti-War: 1960s versus 2000s [390]) and for preventing too hard a look into the attack on the USS Liberty. (See Money Jews, Brain Jews, Politics.[391])

The Yids Take Over: Nixon, Southern Strategy, Neoconservatives, and Neoliberals

Even before the Nixon administration took office, Israel advocates – against all the traditions of “Our Crowd” – had already opened up a public attack on state department Arabists.[lxvi] While the degree of Richard Nixon’s sympathy for Jews was debatable, some senior members of the incoming administration were almost certainly sympathetic to the anti-Arabist argument. (See Those Arabists In the State Department; Those Arabists in State [392] and THE "ARABISTS" FUNCTION.[393])

The Nixon Administration [394] is a table of some of the important members in the Nixon administration, who have become major players during George W. Bush’s presidency. (The creator of the table has only a superficial understanding of the history of Neoconservatism.)

Richard Nixon brought Henry Kissinger and Milton Friedman into his administration right from the start.

As National Security Advisor, Kissinger, who was a German Jewish refugee from the Third Reich, approached foreign policy from the standpoint of Realpolitik as do John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt.

Nixon appointed Milton Friedman to the Gates Commission in March 1969, met with Friedman regularly, and appointed Friedman’s friends and colleagues like George Shultz and Donald Rumsfeld to high administration positions. (The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,[395] p. 132-133.)

Friedman’s Zionism-for-Capitalists economic theory dovetailed both with Kissinger’s power politics and US corporate greed

· because it provided the logic to wage economic warfare against Allende and

· because the proposed sell-off of the state-owned corporations of developing countries to private sector US owners (in a sort of anti-Marxist withering of the state) promised a quick infusion of cash to local elites in order to inspire “free market coups” like that of Pinochet in Chile.

These new neocolonial revenue streams coming to the USA would prove to benefit business and investment sectors, whose domination by “Our Crowd” and by a developing class of wealthy Yiddish Americans or geltyidn was increasing rapidly because of covert ethnic networks whose members protect one another and share insider information.

In general, application of Friedman’s economic theory corresponds so closely with the arenda system [396] and with the history of Jewish exploitation in the Ukraine that it could be considered to be an expression of an epistemic culture associated not merely with Zionist politics but with Zionist politics hybridized with traditional Yiddish economics.

Because the Friedmanite profiteers are so far away from the modern equivalent of potentially enraged Cossacks or ethnically cleansed Palestinians, Friedmanism is a far superior as a form of theft or brutal exploitation than either Zionism today or the arenda system in the seventeenth century Ukraine.

The counter-Marxist Friedmanist concept of withering away the state by selling off its functions to private enterprise worked well with Nixon’s southern strategy because it was a way for the Republican party to promise racially anxious whites a theoretically weaker federal government less inclined in the future to engage in civil rights activism like the 1970 decision of the IRS to remove the tax-exempt contribution status of Bob Jones University on account of the school’s rules against interracial dating.

Irving Kristol realized that the ideological mix that permeated the Nixon administration was compatible with the first generation Neoconservatism that had developed out of American Jabotinskianism for the following reasons.

1. Southern white racist evangelical desire for Christian prayer in school, racial segregation, and subordination of women despite Supreme Court decisions paralleled very closely the Zionist rejection of increasing international criticism[lxvii] of the basic ideology and practices of the State of Israel including the concept of a Jewish state, denial of Palestinian rights, and waging a demographic war against Palestinians.

2. Forcefully confronting the Communists in Vietnam was the same as forcefully confronting the Arabs in the Middle East. And

3. Friedmanism could hardly have been more of better fit with Jabotinsky’s own free market ideas.

In addition, both Kristols seem to have had personal connections with Baruch Korff,

· who in the early 70s lived in Taunton, MA,

· who had been an important American Jabotinskian leader during the 1940s,

· who developed a close personal relationship with Nixon during the 1968 campaign, and

· who as an outspoken defender of Richard Nixon after 1973 became known as Nixon’s Rabbi. (See j. - Baruch Korff, `Nixon's rabbi' and activist, dies of cancer at 81.)

Politics and personal relations brought Irving Kristol and his son Bill to back Richard Nixon and his Vietnam policy during the 1972 presidential campaign. (See Neoconservatives, Then and Now [397]^,[lxviii] and On the Political Stupidity of the Jews.[398])

As details of the Watergate scandal became public, prominent members of the Jewish community expressed discomfort with Irving Kristol’s and Baruch Korff’s continuing support for Nixon.

According to the New York Times,[399]

Rabbi Alexander M. Schindler, president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, called [Rabbi Korff] an "apologist for rampant immorality" and suggested that many people in the Jewish community were embarrassed by his actions and statements.

Despite such reservations, younger Neocons managed to validate themselves within the Jewish community by championing Russian refuseniks. Even though the campaign provided at best mixed benefit for Russian Jews, who generally had higher incomes and higher status jobs than any other group in the Soviet Union, it was spun as a tremendous success, and Neocons benefited both by sharpening their skills in manipulating the US government and also by establishing strong anti-Soviet credentials. (See The Real Origins of Neocons.[400])

The backing of Neocons and older Jabotinskians seems to have been meaningful to Nixon and the sort of gesture that LBJ always wanted but never received. After some apparent reluctance on the part of Kissinger, who might have been playacting to establish his dominance in relation to the Israeli government, the USA launched the largest resupply effort in its history during the October 1973 War.

When the Arab oil producers reacted by imposing an embargo, the Kristols and their fellow Neocons, responded by discovering that “US security interests” required Friedmanist privatization of Arab oil companies so that they would be run solely for profit with no possible future use as a political weapon. No other rational interpretation of Greenspan: Ouster Of Hussein Crucial For Oil Security [401] is possible because some future ruler of Iraq could easily be even worse than Saddam Hussein by whatever criteria are current at that time. In this sense, the Second Iraq War probably was all about the political threat oil represents to Israel and not about any compelling American security requirement except in the minds of those that cannot distinguish American and Israeli interests.

Camp David: Icing on the Cake

Even though the American Neocons were no longer close to presidential power during the Camp David negotiations, they were busy. Not only was Black Sunday [402] released as the first truly Neoconservative feature film, but Begin while not precisely a Neocon was an original Jabotinskian, and he negotiated $3 billion in yearly aid, which initially was half for purchasing US weapons systems and half in unaccounted cash grants.

The Israeli government promptly began to use the cash grants to develop a homeland security industry consisting of interlocking companies based in the USA and Israel. As a result, the State of Israel eventually was able to buy weapons systems from Israeli-funded US companies as required under the terms of US military aid. Yet all benefits from such purchases accrue to the State of Israel or Judonia.

Not only do such US or Israel-based Israeli government-subsidized businesses have a substantial advantage over native American businesses thanks to US cash grants, but in effect a lot a good portion of US aid to Israel thus passes back to the USA through a web of interlocking family and business relations and is used and even leveraged to influence US politics at the national level.

Those openly or covertly Israeli companies benefiting from US government largess have reaped tremendous profits to the benefit of Judonia as part of the homeland security bubble described by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,[403] pp. 283-307. (See also BUSINESS; The Military-Technological Complex Is Thriving in Israel ....[404])

Reagan and the Moral Majority

As the Bob Jones vs. USA case wended through US courts, the anger of Southern white evangelicals increased and culminated in the establishment of the Moral Majority PAC coalition that gave Reagan two-thirds of the evangelical vote. Reagan reciprocated with verbal support for states rights, but it is hard to identify any acts the Reagan administration took to materialize a states rights policy.

The Israeli government now dominated by Jabotinskians targeted the Moral Majority as a possible source of pro-Israel activism in the USA and established a program of tours and indoctrination in an effort to reap the harvest that Jabotinski and his supporters had planted in the USA during the 20s, 30s and 40s.

The pro-Israel support of the Moral Majority is a sort of prefiguration of the Israel advocacy of John Hagee and Christians United for Israel.

The Last Arabist

After Philip Habib’s temporary return to service to negotiate an end to the Israeli siege of Beirut in 1982, it is hard to identify any important rising Arabists in the US State Department, which while not a wholly owned subsidiary of Judonia was becoming heavily infiltrated.[lxix]

Iran Contra: The Marriage of Friedmanism and Neoconservatism

The Iran Contra operation, which involved Neocons and Friedmanites in close collaboration, represented the marriage or total integration of aggressive Neocon ideas for transforming the Middle East with free market aggression against non-capitalist Latin American states.

By the end of the Reagan administration both the World Bank and also the IMF were transformed into aggressive mechanism of Friedmanite intimidation and control not so much for the USA but for US corporate and banking interests that during the Reagan administration had become even more Jewish and Zionist thanks in good measure to Israeli governmental manipulation of the US economy with the new funding and investment orientation that resulted from the Camp David Accords.

No longer would Judonia simply have one settler colony but it would develop new purely revenue generating virtual colonies through the acquisition of formerly state-owned corporations of developing countries whose markets were forced open to Western and in a steadily increasing number of cases to Judonian investment.

Paul Wolfowitz’ desire to lead the World Bank after architecting policy to disintegrate Iraq with the Second Iraq War makes perfect sense as a way for Judonia to maintain total control over one of the most important Arab counties.

The Roaring 90s

The combination of Christian apocalyptic evangelical Zionism, integrated Friedmanite Neoconservative ideological aggressiveness, pressure for a solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict because of the first intifada, the collapse of the Soviet Block and the Soviet Union, and the Internet Bubble created a world-historical moment that cannot even be categorized.

Jewish Demographics

Yet within the very exclusive membership of Judonia the real shocker came from the November 1990 release of the National Jewish Population Survey sponsored by the Council of Jewish Federations, for the document possibly erroneously put the Jewish intermarriage rate at 52%. (See Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment (1996),[405] pp. 66-67.)

More than any other event since 1948 (including the 1973 October War – the new threat was considered more grave), this report seems to have aroused the wealthiest second and sometimes third generation members of Judonia and given them a strong consciousness of a new mission.

In the context of the First Intifada and new access to Russian Jews, the members responded with increased funding for Jewish communal organizations to develop Holocaust- and Israel-focused programs in cooperation with the Israeli educational bureaucracy to strengthen ethnic identity. As a result, the organized Jewish community, which in most localities has extensive political influence and tremendous resources for mass mobilization, began to reflect the ideological orientation of the large donors far more than that of the majority of community members, and far more Jewish communal organizations adopted a strong Israel orientation. At the same time, the remuneration for employees of the Zionist communal organizations seems to have increased, and there are new special rewards for promising employees and those pleasing to Judonia. (See Scamming Americans Robbing Palestinians [406] and Followup: Scamming Americans Robbing Palestinians.[407])

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

The completion of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) on April 22, 1993 was timely for this new educational program, which overlapped with the Oslo process, to which Neocons objected and which worsened conditions for Palestinians.

President Carter probably supported the creation of a USHMM in order to improve relations with the Jewish community angered by his sympathy with Palestinian suffering. Within the Jewish community, the project indicated that the Jabotinskian Holocaust-based narrative and justification for the Zionism as expressed in the ending of Schindler’s List [408] had triumphed over the Constructive Zionist narrative that was associated with pre-Begin pre-Likud Israeli governments and that was immortalized in a very preachy way in the movie Exodus.

Fairly quickly after its opening the USHMM became a propaganda tool to drown out Palestinian suffering in American discourse. (See USHMM: National Thought Control [409] and Arun Gandhi and Sholem Aleichem.[410])

In addition, massive Holocaust marketing effort managed to distract from revelations of heavy communist Jewish involvement in mass murder, ethnic cleansing, and genocide in association with the Bolshevik Revolution and the consolidation of the Soviet Union from WW I through the 1930s. Because law and politics have precluded the USHMM from incorporating this new historical data and information in USHMM exhibits and programs, the USHMM no longer maintains the semblance of presenting history but functions solely to spread Jewish and Zionist mythology at US taxpayer expense even as the American Jewish community became even wealthier as a result of the Internet Bubble.

The Financial Orgy

Because of unfamiliarity with Internet-based corporations, many investors had difficulty in judging their true value, and Wall Street seems to have been induced into a feeding frenzy, in which IPOs took place because new Internet companies showed even one quarter of profitability. It will require some serious forensic statistics and accounting to be sure, but Israel-associated venture funds and Jewish networks in investment banking seem to have conspired to make sure that Zionistically-correct entrepreneurs benefited in the unprecedented investment environment. As the Internet bubble created steadily increasing real estate prices throughout the USA, Asset-Backed Securities (ABS) and Collateralized Debt Options (CDOs) constructed out of subprime mortgages became the foundation of a secondary bubble, which seems to have involved heavy market manipulation to make sure that investors with proper Zionist credentials profited.

The Russian Oligarchs

Meanwhile under the careful watch of Lawrence Summers and his Russian American Jewish colleague Andrei Shleifer, Friedmanite free-market privatization of the Russian Federations state economy created yet more Jewish and Zionist wealth.

[See Zionist Control: Sovereign Wealth Funds?,[411] Fighting Hegemonic Blocking on Campus -- Ousting Summers at Harvard,[412] and Poisoning the atmosphere at Harvard.[413]]

Naomi Klein thinks it was a mistake that Russian state corporations ended up in the hands of Russian oligarchs, all but one of whom was Jewish, but there is reason to suspect otherwise.

Not only was Lawrence Summers undergoing a transformation into super-Jew as a result of a midlife crisis, but a similar pattern of Jewish profiteering has also been discernable in the Egyptian Infitah (opening up to foreign investment).

Dr. A`laa el-Zayat used to teach occasionally as a visiting professor at the Harvard Medical School and apparently was a close friend of Egyptian Presidents Jamal Abdul-Nasir and Hosni Mubarak. Through the Egyptian Jewish community, to which the Zayat family covertly belonged as crypto-Jews, he may have had a connection to Harvard Professor Nadav Safran, who worked with both Israeli and American intelligence.[lxx] During the 80s Dr. el-Zayat and his son Ahmed had a close relationship with the Bostoner Rebbe, who appears to have arranged the marriage of Ahmed’s sister to a Lakewood Yeshiva bokher of Syrian Jewish background. (See Charedi Rabbis Rush To Disavow Anti-Gentile Book - Forward.com"[414] and Zayat's great colt doing more than schooling horses.[415])

Through the Rebbe the Zayat family developed a close relationship with the Newton Jews, who form an intellectual and financial center within Judonia. As the Egyptian economy opened up, Ahmed and his brother bought al-Ahram beverage, found funding within the American Jewish community, and eventually put together a $1.33 billion dollar sale to a Bronfman subsidiary.[416] In this way Bronfmans [417] have acquired a foothold in the Egyptian economy while keeping the money within the tribe.

The Zayats do not seem to be the only Egyptians with the strategy of linking up with Judonia for the sake of financial success or financial advancement. In Salata Baladi or Afrangi?[418] Columbia Professor Joseph Massad reviews the film Salata Baladi, which is a documentary about the director’s part Jewish Egyptian family and an Egypt that no longer exists. Massad writes:

As a friend of mine, an Egyptian woman academic who works on questions of cosmopolitanism in Egypt and who also saw the film in New York, remarked, there is very little nostalgia that the film or the director registers for a time when many Egyptians were communists, national liberationists, socialists, and everything in between (Hala Halim's forthcoming book addresses these exact issues). But this kind of diversity, it seems, the film and the director do not miss at all. Only the diversity of the non-Muslim and the foreign communities, including Greeks, Italians, Syrian Arab Christians, European Jews, and Arab Jews is missed by the contemporary cosmopolitans who live in Cairo and Alexandria. One wonders if the European funders of the film would have been interested in a film of nostalgia for Arab or Egyptian communism, of which both of Nadia's parents were part. But then the Ford Foundation, which contributed funds to the New York based ArteEast film festival (organized by Israeli scholar Livia Alexander) that screened Salata Baladi in New York might not have funded it either. When I saw the film in the middle of last November at Columbia University, where I teach, Nadia Kamel introduced it. She stood there and declared to her American audience (which included many Americans of Egyptian Jewish background and a number of officers from the Ford Foundation): "I come from a country full of taboos."

The audacity of that statement is not to be underestimated. In a post-9/11 New York city and a post- 9/11 Columbia University where taboos on free speech and academic freedom are part of everyday life, for Nadia Kamel to complain to her audience and enjoin them to sympathise with her plight against the taboos of her country borders on the obscene. This is not to say that Egypt does not have taboos, it is to say that playing native informant to a Western audience, most of whom, like Nadia Kamel, only recognise Egypt's taboos but not America's, is not a courageous act. Exploiting the sad and touching story of Naila Kamel to push an ideological agenda that the United States and Israel have been pushing for years against the will of most Egyptians is hardly a progressive or democratic enterprise either. This is most pronounced in the director's attempt to attack the anti- normalisation campaign with Israel, rather than Israel itself, as the party responsible for her mother's sadness and yearning for her cousin. Kamel's screening the film in East Jerusalem and Ramallah more recently, where it sparked much controversy, demonstrates that there are many kindred spirits to Nadia Kamel who live there and who look to benefit from normalisation under Occupation. What this documentary film is able to prove, however, is not that most Egyptians come from origins that are "salata baladi," as that is hardly unknown to Egyptians, but that the ideological positions the film wants to push is nothing short of salata afrangi, made up exclusively of Western neoliberal ingredients.

Massad’s description of the film opens the question whether Kamel is simply a more sophisticated version of Nonie Darwish [419] and has created a film of the sort that Jewish Zionists would want to watch so that Kamel could work her Jewish connection in order to attract funding from the Hollywood Crowd.

The Empire Awakes

With increasing wealth, Judonia’s support staff and institutions proliferate both in the USA, in Europe, and in Israel. With the publication of papers like the 1996 A Clean Break: A New Strategy for the Defense of the Realm,[420] the Neocons revealed their true nature as the American branch of a seamless transnational Jabotinskian political elite.

This time period seems to mark the first glimmerings within awareness within Judonia that Judonia constitutes a virtual state with its own empire. The tip off comes from the Holocaust extortion racket that Norman Finkelstein describes in The Holocaust Industry [421] and that has appearance of the Roman-style extraction of tribute from weaker states. In addition, the concomitant erection of Holocaust Memorials throughout the USA and the world looks like the dedication of temples to Roman Emperors and Gods through the Roman Empire by subject populations in order to demonstrate their loyalty and subordination to their rulers.

By the end of the Clinton administration Judonia had created such a state of intimidation and dependency in US national politicians both afraid of offending pro-Israel groups and also desperate for Jewish funding to run political campaigns that by normal definitions the USA today is a client state of Judonia.

The Neocons and associated media organizations have tried to depict George W. Bush as Churchillian but in his subservience to Ariel Sharon he only managed to look like an inferior imitation of Marshal Pétain or Vidkun Quisling.

American Gleichschaltung,[422] Burning Arab Countries, Crashing the US Economy

When Bush took office, his main concern seemed to be realizing the Friedmanite “dictatorship of the anti-proletariat,” which is the hyper-wealthy class whose Jewishness and Zionism had increased tremendously during the Clinton administration.

Then came 9/11 came. Maybe the US government had forewarning. Maybe it did not. Maybe some US government security group thought the goal was an ordinary hi-jacking and helped in order to get more information on the terrorist leadership. Maybe nothing of the sort happened. Maybe the Russian FSB staged the attack to bring the USA onboard with the Russian “War Against Terror.” All the speculation is irrelevant. Judonia through its agents and collaborators in the US government and also through its own sophisticate media apparatus put into effect a sophisticated marketing campaign that Judonian staff like Daniel Pipes had been fine tuning for years to convince American Jews and non-Jews that the USA and Israel were fighting a common war against terror.

Keeping the majority of American Jews, who are neither members nor staff of Judonia, on board with the War on Terror has been a particularly important part of the project because so many are in important gatekeeper and facilitator positions inside and outside government. Yet, as the members of Judonia, who number about 300-400 today, have become richer, greedier, and more powerful, their interests have diverged to the point of practically no points of contact whatsoever with practically all members of the American Jewish community except for those functioning as the staff of Judonia.

Extremist Israel advocacy groups like the David Project have developed training programs and then attempt to place graduates throughout mainstream Jewish communal organizations as well as in critical positions in media and in academia or even in primary and secondary education. The organization seems to have developed a more sophisticated version of the techniques that Abba Hillel Silver used to Zionize reform Judaism in the 1940s along Jabotinskian parameters. (See Abba Hillel Silver and American Zionism,[423] edited by Mark A. Raider, Jonathan D. Sarna, Ronald W. Zweig, pp. 26-28.)

The originally German American Jewish AJCommittee, which is in the final stage of extremist Zionization with an ongoing take-over by recent Russian American Jewish immigrants, has adopted a policy of controlling intellectual deviance among American Jews via intimidation. (See Updating "The AJC attacks".[424])

At this point Judonia has managed to co-opt almost all mainstream Jewish communal organizations except for the Workmen’s Circle, which opposed the David Project during the Roxbury Mosque controversy.

[See Muslim, Jewish leaders see fresh start - The Boston Globe,[425] Subjugating American Muslims to Israel,[426] Removing an Islamophobe's soapbox,[427] Singing HaTikvah while inciting a disastrous US invasion,[428] Poisoning Human Rights Discourse,[429] Letter from the Islamic Society of Boston,[430] Open Letter to the Globe Editorial Board,[431] The Passion of Roxbury,[432] Report on Robert Spencer and the Boston Anti-Islamic Controversy,[433] Battle waged in Boston over new mosque,[434] Emails show pro-Israel anti-Mosque Campaign in Boston,[435] Web of Zionist enmeshment,[436] and Anti-Mosque complaint was a hate crime.[437]]

Judonian Law versus International Law

The Neocons have brought a comparable Israelization of the American legal system since 9/11 in terms of

the dismissal of the Geneva Conventions,
the restriction of citizens’ rights via the patriot act, and
the use of torture.

[See Human Rights Watch Criticizes Israel, Roth at Harvard.[438]]

In public discussion, Ambassador Kiesling has tried to explain the phenomenon as a form of clientitis, which is characterized by a desire to view Israeli behavior as correct, proper, or even admirable.

Yet the Ambassadors’s discussion “Bush’s public, brutally inept repudiation of the International Criminal Court (ICC)” suggests otherwise. (See Diplomacy Lessons: Realism for an Unloved Superpower,[439] p. 11.)

Kiesling writes on pp. 11-12:

America’s position was a disgraceful one: the U.S. Congress had embraced a pressure group of cynical populists with a Goebbelsian lie that UN black helicopters were poised to take away America’s freedom. Taking a page form the rhetoric of friends like Slobodan Miloševic, the ex-ruler of Serbia, Congress decided to demonstrate the virility of its concern for “national sovereignty” by passing a law to shield America’s future war criminals from legal scrutiny by the international community.

I was diplomatic about it. I reassured the Greeks that America was not endorsing war crimes. The ICC treaty made clear that each country has the right and responsibility for trying its own war criminals, with the ICC acting when the criminal’s home state failed to act. America had a track record of punishing war criminals, its own as well as others’. America remained firmly committed to bringing all such criminals to justice. Still, Greece and the EU needed to find a way to accommodate U.S. concerns, or the United States would walk away from its international peacekeeping commitments and cut off military assistance to all but key allies.

Personally, however, I was certain that America’s pusillanimity on the ICC was stupid and immoral. Americans benefited handsomely from international law because the United States had written much of it. Now the United States was hacking away at the moral and political foundations of its own creation. Why would anyone else accept international law as a legitimate argument for self-restraint when the United States would not? America’s alternative to law and diplomacy was the ugly threat of U.S. military might, but the U.S. military – unlike the president and Congress – at least understood how expensive an alternative it was.

The ICC threat to U.S. citizens was far-fetched. To eliminate that threat, my colleagues and I dutifully squandered diplomatic capital bullying or bribing states to sign symbolic agreements. In Greece, the effect of Congress’s American Service Member Protective Act was to make our service members less safe than before. The odds were always remote that any of the hundreds of uniformed Americans at our base in Souda Bay would ever be accused of being international war criminals. It was certain, however, that each year young, frisky American military personnel would be arrested by Greek authorities for brawls, traffic accidents, or misunderstandings with shopkeepers. We had just negotiated a sensible new status-of-forces agreement that waived criminal jurisdiction for such incidents back to the U.S. military justice system except in cases of “major political importance” to Greece. Furious at our ICC stance, the Greek foreign and justice ministries ruled that almost every fistfight by a U.S. service member was a crime of sufficient political importance to require trial by Greek court. Greek jails have improved, but the average American seaman would be better off taking his chances with the ICC.

The Bush administration Neocons that supported the repudiation of the ICC were never concerned about US servicemen, whom they have casually viewed as cannon fodder to make the Middle East safe for Israel. The Neocons were acting as staff members of Judonia to protect Jewish Americans or Israeli Jewish Americans (and of course Jewish Neocons) that had committed international crimes while they served in the IDF.

Not only does the Israeli military have no hesitation about perpetrating crimes against humanity when the victims are Arabs or non-Jewish Americans defending Palestinians as Rachel Corrie [440] was when the IDF brutally murdered her, but the legal system of the State of Israel is demonstrably dysfunctional in dealing with crimes committed against Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, and non-Jews in general.

In a show of relative power in the US-Israel alliance, the State of Israel has even refused to extradite Jewish American criminals back to the USA even in cases when the crime took place in the US. (See Sheinbein Can’t Be Extradited.[441])

American Gurkhas, Native Collaborators and American Kafiris

The Neocon Jabotinskians and Neoliberal Friedmanites have run the Afghanistan and Iraq wars and occupation to a large extent on Judonian principles by using proxies and contractors or mercenaries so beloved of Neocon pundit Max Boot. (See Killing Muslims Under Humanitarian Cover [442] and Harvard Supports Incinerating Arab Countries.[443])

If the US and other states can be hollowed out and virtualized by privatizing normal government functions and services like the military, Judonia as the most highly developed virtual state will be first among equals. Because many groups within the organized Jewish community have long supplied social services, the members of Judonia could even profit by turning some of the service-providing groups into for-profit corporations.

Mercenary organizations like Blackwater have strong similarities to native fighters like the Gurkhas, who were favored by the British Empire, which established a special Gurkha regiment just as the Russian Empire established special units for Polish nobles, who also had a strong, unique military tradition.

Because Blackwater management and staff consists of fanatically pro-Israel Christian Zionists, members of Judonia probably invested in the organization, and when Judonian staff within the government put Blackwater on government payroll in Iraq, the opportunity to enrich Judonia was almost certainly an incentive.

Judonian use of Christian Zionists is not confined to native auxiliaries. Not only does the new Christian Zionist politics focus almost exclusively on pro-Israel activities in contrast with the earlier Moral Majority movement, which had political concerns beyond Israel, but John Hagee and his colleagues among the Christian Zionist leadership look very much like a native collaborator elite rewarded by Judonia for its effort in influencing American political parties or the US government (RJC and CUFI Incite Islamophobia [444]).

The followers of the new Christian Zionist leadership act like the Kafiris in The Man Who Would be King [445] by Rudyard Kipling and have religious beliefs with more similarity to the Tanna Island Cargo Cult than anything resembling a recognizable form of Christianity.

[See Linguistics, Islam and the Beatitudes,[446] Connecting Hanukkah, Christmas and `Idu-l-Adha,[447] Followup (II): Origins of Modern Jewry,[448] and Islamic Marcionism in Malaysia.[449]]

A part of the Zionist intelligentsia mostly of Jabotinskian orientation seems to be trying to integrate the new Christian Zionist movement more officially within Judonia because by Jabotinskian standards these Christian Zionists are more reliable than large sections of the Jewish community, but large sections of the American Jewish community have qualms about Hagee and his associates.

[See israelinsider: Views: Should Jews fear Christian Zionists?,[450] Support of Christian Zionists makes some Jews uneasy - Cleveland ...,[451] Christian Zionists lobby for US attack on Iran,[452] Standing with Israel,[453] In Praise of Christian Zionists,[454] URJ - Christian Zionism? Is it good for North American Jews and ...,[455] Bibi: Christian Zionists our top friends | Jerusalem Post,[456] and Christians, Jews in Holy Land alliance - CNN.com.[457]]

Creating a New Permanent Islamophobic Consensus

The argument for inclusion focuses on the benefits that Christian Zionist bring in terms of lobbying Congress at a time when progressive Jews are aiding anti-Israel and anti-Semitic forces and an attempt to render permanent the opportunistic temporary scare-mongering that Neocons and their allies have been using to manipulate American and Jewish politics. (See Updating "The AJC attacks"[458] or AJC Attack on Progressive Jews.[459])

Neocons and Judonia in general incited hysteria after 9/11 to create an exacerbation of the temporary shock and trauma in order to facilitate changes in the US legal system and tax code, but the Neocons following Strauss’s political philosophy[lxxi] sought and still seek a permanent remake of American and American (and American Jewish) society to create a new shared moral and political perception that would embrace Israel and exclude Arabs, Muslims, and any critics of Israel with the fervor of Hagee’s Christian Zionism and with the strength of moral conviction that possessed Israel in the first decades of its existence.

Such an America would have the strength to defend itself from Arab and Islamic infiltration in the form of Arab and Muslim American citizens just as Israel did right after the “War of Independence” when the Israeli Army shot a lot of desperately poor and unarmed Arabs as infiltrators for trying to return to reclaim their property, to tend their flocks, or to harvest their fields.

The Failure of Friedmanism and Bernanke’s Panic

In the course of the Neoconservative remaking of American society, the USA has begun to look like Islamophobia central with the legal attack on Islamic charities, Arab investments, persecution of Palestinian activists, efforts to expel Islamic scholars, the political campaign to demonize Barak Obama as a Muslim, (Obama versus the Israel Lobby [460] and Followup: Obama vs. Israel Lobby [461]), and the attempt of Jewish leaders to impose a test of loyalty to Israel before American Muslims can fully participate in American politics.

Because of Judonian and Israeli government manipulation of the US economy, this Islamophobia has now become a threat to all Americans.

Lowering taxes and printing money to wage the “War on Terror” created economic conditions that threatened rampant inflation, to which Greenspan and Bernanke responded by gradually raising interest rates.

If the Neocon Friedmanite plan of privatizing the Iraqi economy, then the Lebanese, the Sudanese, and Iranian economies after a sequence of wars, interventions and regime changes, the new neocolonial revenue streams could have generated real growth that would have raised housing values. Instead the program went awry in each country, and Bernanke raised the prime while housing values stagnated. As a result Bernanke triggered the collapse of the subprime market and has plunged the USA into recession or possibly even into depression at the same time the dollar’s value has steadily eroded.

To save the economy the USA needs genuine growth, which is practically impossible to achieve as long as the USA is burning money in the Iraq occupation. Bailouts of Wall Street Banks like Bear Stearns help three nondisjoint groups consisting of

some members of Judonia,
the more power participants in the ethnic Jewish networks in the finance industry and
friends of the President.

Not only do such monetary giveaways to the rich and powerful provide no benefit for the vast majority of Americans, but they also represent a reprise of the aforementioned financial rescues of members of the German aristocracy during the Long Depression that started in 1873.

At this point, Gulf Arabs and the Chinese government have as much interest in saving the US economy as ordinary Americans because the Arabs are dollar rich while the Chinese hold a tremendous amount of US debt. Yet because of

the attempts of Summers and friends to keep Jews dominant on Wall Street (Zionist Control: Sovereign Wealth Funds?[462]),
Muslim-baiting by organizations like the David Project,
the security-obsessed xenophobia that scorched the Unocal acquisition of Chinese Drop Bid To Buy U.S. Oil Firm,[463] and
the effort of the organized Jewish community to distract attention from Israeli and Neocon crimes in Palestine, Iraq, and Lebanon by defaming the Sudan and China,

Arab investors and the Chinese government are reluctant to put up the necessary money and make the needed efforts to save the US economy even though they would almost certainly come out ahead and protect the value of their current holdings.

The Context of Jewish Violence and Subversion

Is the foregoing analysis credible or simply yet another conspiracy theory on the model of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion?

Figure 11 First London English Edition (1920)

Conspiracy theories are social political phenomenologies comparable to the Bohr theory of the atom. They are usually wrong in many details but are used to understand connections among people and events when important information is missing or when the proper framework is not available for analysis.

Imperial Judonia does not result from a conspiracy even if at times members and staff may act conspiratorially. It has come into being as a result of social and political evolution over a long time period, and in many regards does not look all that different from sixteenth or seventeenth century Eastern European Ethnic Ashkenazi society, which was dominated by a wealthy often not particularly learned or philosophically deep merchant elite that was supported by and intermarried with a rabbinical intellectual class that maintained the continuity and ethos of the community.

Of all the separate intellectual currents into which the nineteenth century Russia Jewish intelligentsia divided itself, only the Zionists had an intrinsic role for Jewish wealth to play, and the key difference between the Zionist intelligentsia and the medieval Rabbinic elite lay in the conceptualization of the yetzer hara` (the inclination to evil), which the Rabbis considered extremely dangerous and only controllable as long as the Rabbis imposed strict control over the community. In contrast, the Zionists viewed Jews as perfectable under a Zionist regime just as Soviet Jews and non-Jews viewed man as perfectable under a Soviet regime. The Zionists sought the New Man of the Zionist revolution while the Soviets wanted to create the New Soviet Man and the Jewish Section of the Soviet Communist Party worked particularly hard to make sure that Soviet Jews would meet the definition. (See האדם החדש של המהפכה הציונית: השומר הצעיר ושורשיו האירופיים by Rina Peled, [464] רינה פלד, Attacking Shohat: Falsifying Jewish History,[465] and Jewish, Zionist War Against Salvation.[466])

To achieve their ends, the Medieval Rabbis tried to train themselves and the Jewish communities in self-control while the Zionists and the generally very Jewish Soviet intelligentsia sought to aggrandize themselves, their leaders, and their states. The Labor Zionist and the Soviet elite did not prove flexible and adaptable enough to keep power. Jabotinskian and Occult Zionists not only adapted their ideologies but also managed to achieve transnational capabilities of the sort that the Soviets only dreamed.

Are Jews really capable of the sort of brutal force, subversion, and dishonesty necessary to create and sustain Imperial Judonia?

To believe that Jews could not be mass murderers, genocidaires, or ethnic cleansers is itself a form of racism that assumes Jews are superior to other people. (See Stalin's Jews [467] by Sever Plocker.) Any Jew or supporter of the State of Israel that refuses to admit the possibility that Jews could develop their own Nazism as brutal as German Nazism is simply a bigot with whom rational discussion is simply not impossible.

A more correct question would ask whether the historical conditions arose that could lead Jews to undertake the sort of brutal force, subversion, and dishonesty necessary to create and sustain Imperial Judonia.

Indeed, there was a tremendous amount of anger among nineteenth century Eastern European ethnic Ashkenazim. (See Arun Gandhi and Sholem Aleichem.[468]) It may have resulted from the policies of Czar Nicholas I. Yet, because Jewish accounts of the Chmielnicki Rebellion contain ever more inflated Jewish casualty figures as the Rebellion recedes into history, there is reason to speculate that disappointment with the failure of Commonwealth Poland to crush the rebels successfully is probably the real source of the anger. In any case, the existence of the anger and the associated willingness to commit violent acts is more important than identifying the origin of the modern Jewish propensity to violence.

From the middle of the nineteenth century, Russian ethnic Ashkenazim become more and more involved in radicalism, terrorism, and assassination.

Yale University Professor Benjamin Harshav writes in Language in Time of Revolution,[469] p. 42-46. (1993):

Jews were prominent in the ranks of the early Soviet governments, and the anti-Semitic expression “Judeo-Bolshevism” is not without foundation. When the Pale of Settlement was suddenly opened, masses of Jews left the obsolete and class-negative shtetl (only the classes of proletarians and peasants had voting rights) and went inside Central Russia, studied in the universities, and filled the new governmental network, which needed a loyal intelligentsia. Many of them changed their names, intermarried with Russians, or behaved like Russians in every respect. Solzhenitsyn blamed the Jews for organizing soviet concentration camps (the “Gulag”) and identified several Jews among the leaders of the Soviet secret police in the early years. But Jews were equally prominent in the top echelons of many other areas of the young soviet regime: the administration, the party, education, medicine, Russian literature, physics, the sciences, the collectivization of the villages and the industrialization of Russia, and also – with particular vengeance – among those purges and liquidated by the regime. Even in World War II, their prominent position as industrial engineers and factory managers was visible (as witnessed by the Jewish names in Stalin’s “Decrees” commending heroes of the rear in the war effort). The same is true of the leftist movement in the world, including the leadership of the Soviet revolutions in Bavaria[[lxxii]] and Hungary in 1919; such figures as Joffe (1883-1927; conducted the peace talks at Brest) and Borodin (Gruzenberg, 1884 – 1951; advisor to Sun Yat-Sen); or Karl Radek (Sobelson, 1885-1939), who carried out Stalin’s policies in Germany, helping Hitler’s rise to power. All were liquidated by Stalin.

Harshav’s passage is subtly dishonest. It suggests that Soviet Jews did well until Stalin started to liquidate them. In fact, Stalin had lots of people killed, who were in the vast majority non-Jews.

After the purges of the 1930s, the upper ranks of the Soviet Communist Party were probably more not less Jewish. After the Soviet recognition of the State of Israel, doubts appear to have increased at the highest level of the party about the true loyalties of many Soviet Jews and many Jews were purged, but the most reliable Soviet Jews remained in leadership positions in lesser but disproportionate numbers, and until the execution of the Rosenberg’s the Soviet Union like the State of Israel to this day seems to have had little difficulty in recruiting foreign Jews for subversion or espionage. (See The Americans' Vanunu.[473]^,
[lxxiii])

Reliable Soviet Jews did quite well after the fall of the Soviet Union, and six of the original seven top Russian oligarchs have Jewish ancestry. (See Oligarchs.[474])

I asked IAS Mathematics Professor and former Harvard Fellow Vladimir Voevodsky about discrimination against Soviet Jews. He laughed at me and then told me that his division at Moscow State University had about 200 hundred members of whom only two truly had no Jewish ancestry. Of the rest, only two were Jewish by nationality on their Soviet papers, and Voevodsky seems to have been reporting hardly an unusual situation in Soviet Union.

Lies have been part of the genetics of Jewish politics, activism, and self-defense organizations for over a century.

For the record, while individual Soviet officials may have been hostile to Jews, the Soviets collectively were not anti-Jewish even if they were anti-Judaism in the context of general hostility to religion and even if they were exceptionally anti-Zionist possibly as a result of the historical competition between Communists and Zionists for membership in Czarist times. In addition the Soviet government had real problems with any sort of nationalist activities that strayed from strict Soviet parameters.

The Refusenik Movement was just one of the many scams associated with Judonia.

Fighting the Dystopic Future

Imperial Judonia represents a grave threat to America and to the whole human race. It has the ability to manipulate the governments of the USA, Canada, the UK, and most of Europe. By manipulating the US economy, the World Bank, and the IMF, it has developed tremendous wealth.

The staff of Judonia is willing to use any form of violence, any form of subversion, and any lie to increase Judonian wealth and power for the good of the Jewish people and to make the world safe for Israel. Israeli security effectively requires the subjugation of the human race, which started with the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, continued with the impoverishment of the populations of the southern cone of Latin America as well as the looting of SE Asian and the former Soviet States all in the name of freedom. Then the depredations of Judonia became even worse to include the immurement of Palestinians as well as the incineration, dismantlement, and cluster-bombing of Arab and Muslim countries (Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, and Somalia), along with support for a coup in Venezuela (Venezuela coup linked to Bush team | World news | The Observer [475]) likewise in the name of freedom and with incitement to attack other Arab and Muslim countries (the Sudan, Pakistan, and Iran) also in the name of freedom.

NEU Professor M. Shahid Alam writes (M. Shahid Alam: The Clash Thesis: a Failing Ideology?[476]):

Americans are also asking, the President informs us, "why do they hate us?" His answer is clearly stated. "They hate what we see right here in this chamber a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other." It is not clear anymore if 'they' points to al-Qaida, the Arabs or all Muslims.

It is hardly surprising that Arabs, Muslims and increasing numbers of other peoples hate American freedoms that amount to free fire zones and free market exploitation, and as long as Judonia controls the US government, we Americans have no genuine freedom.

Because Judonia was unable to loot the Arab world under the cover of free markets, the American taxpayer is already being exploited to bailout Wall Street Banks. Once Judonian assets are fully and securely globalized, the staff and members of Judonia would probably welcome the collapse of the US economy because it would hurt the Chinese and the Gulf Arabs.

The section Fighting Back to Save America in Judonia Rising Working Paper Part 1 (pdf)[477] or Judonia Rising Working Paper Part 1 [478] provides some suggestions for actions against Judonia, and there are some exploitable fault lines within Judonia as this document has indicated, but so much of the US government has been compromised – including the executive and practically the entire Congress – that Judonia may have achieved permanent domination over the USA.

Judonia’s only real weakness comes from the system that Judonia has constructed

in the security and anti-terrorism laws that have become part of US criminal code since 9/11 and
in the humanitarian and anti-genocide discourse that the staff of Judonia has created to use against the Sudan and Iran.

Only Americans deny to any significant degree that Israel is a murderous terrorist state that is founded in genocide and that casually commits crimes against humanity as a matter of state policy.

As gas prices rise over the summer, Americans may become more open to hearing the truth, and then the members, staff and organizations of Judonia will become vulnerable to accusations of giving material support to terrorism and of inciting genocide.

If Jews and Jewish organizations do not receive exactly the same treatment as Muslims and Muslim organizations accused of giving material support to terrorism, Jewish officials like Mukasey and Chertoff will be vulnerable to accusations of enforcing one set of laws for Jews and another for non-Jews.[lxxiv]

Generally, unequal prosecution amounts to obstruction of justice or to some other related form of official malfeasance. Jewish officials and collaborators engaging in obstruction of justice and related official malfeasance in the service of Judonia will themselves become prosecutable or at least summarily dismissible.

A public discussion of Jewish racism and conspiracy should make it possible to ask whether non-Jews can suggest the sort of treatment for the Jewish state that Jewish officials are willing to recommend for non-Jewish states.

Because the State of Israel is the keystone of the subversive influence that the Zionist intelligentsia of Judonia have over America,

forcing regime change in Israel as it was forced in Iraq or

· abolishing the Jewish state as the Iraqi state has been effectively dismantled by the occupation

would almost certainly improve the security of the USA, give Americans their country back, and make it possible to take Judonia apart and seize assets to serve

as compensation for the damage that Judonia has caused to America and
as relief for the suffering that Judonia has caused Middle Eastern and other populations throughout the world since the founding of the modern Zionist movement.

If Americans do not take action to neutralize Judonia very soon, the next generation of security technology may give Judonia permanent unassailable domination over the USA.

Appendix

Timeline of Zionist Crimes [479]

Historiography of Pre-State Zionism [480]

AJC Attack on Progressive Jews [481]

5th Question: Darfur [482]

Devorah's Two Weddings [483]

Two Weeks in September [484]

[i] Finkelstein has pointed out that supporting Israel is justifiable as a matter of foreign policy because Israel provides a stable base from which the USA can project its power, but the Zionist state is not obviously so much more stable than its neighbors, whose major internal threats to stability often in any case relate to the existence of the State of Israel. Since the stability of the oil-producing states is a major interest of the USA, the benefits of the possibly slightly greater stability of Israel as a US base vis-à-vis Jordan or Egypt are negligible if they even really exist.

[ii] Jewish cliques in Interfaith Action groups that undertake genuine charity work are less likely to misuse the forum, but the organized Jewish community has used international interfaith action in the Sudan as a vehicle to control genocide discourse and to defame Arabs or Muslims. Mohammad Abu-Nimer has studied dialogue and conflict resolution between Arabs and Jews in the Israeli context. (See Dialogue, Conflict Resolution, and Change: Arab-Jewish Encounters in Israel by Mohammad Abu-Nimer). As in American dialogues between Christians and Jews or between Muslims or Arabs and Jews there rarely is a meeting of minds, and Jewish participants tend to attempt to establish personal relations to impede any serious discussion or action on genuine injustices. From the standpoint of non-Jewish participants such interactions rarely seem to produce much in the way of change in the Jewish participants. (See Followup: Natalie Portman's Genocidal Racism ... or http://eaazi.blogspot.com/2008/01/followup-natalie-portmans-genocidal.html.)

[iii] Lots of Jewish doctors in the Boston area are important participants in Zionist activities or contributors therein. HMS instructor Dr. Kenneth Levin, to whose extra-curricular activities former President Summers did not object, often works with the David Project and helps facilitate Zionist projects in the Harvard Medical School area. (See http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=%7BF66256B6-688A-45AE-9252-CF9758750035%7D.)

[iv] Just consider the sequence of films, Goodbye, Columbus, Elaine May’s original version of The Heartbreak Kid, Desperately Seeking Susan, The Farrelly Brothers’ remake of The Heartbreak Kid, and Waitress.

The book Goodbye, Columbus was a rather acerbic investigation of Jewish assimilation and cultural norms in sexual relationships. The movie toned down the Jewishness (Yiddishkeyt) of the story (part of the assimilation project), but hints of Jewish difference and discomfort were still there. [Nowadays Rabbi Cooper of the Wiesenthal Center certifies movies for Jewish acceptability, but in the past some sort of informal consensus mechanism was probably operative.]

The Heartbreak Kid (EM) pokes some fun at stereotypes as it depicts a Jewish invasion of the gentile elite.

In Desperately Seeking Susan the Jewish suburbanites, who are fairly casually but blandly promiscuous, are clearly wealthier than the gentile Susan and her friends, who express the goyish animalistic passion for which the Jewish Roberta longs.

Today, Gentile-Jewish tensions are passé. Even though Eddy Kantrow, who is the male protagonist of The Heartbreak Kid (FB) is still Jewish albeit less obviously than Lenny Kantrow of the EM version, the Farrelly Brothers and Spielberg wrote out the Jewish-Gentile conflict theme. Eddy is no longer a young shlep selling sporting goods but is the established 40-something proprietor of a sporting goods store.

The story, which now begins in San Francisco instead of New York, is on the whole gayer and more misogynistic than the original. One could sympathize much more with the younger Lenny Kantrow even when he is lying at a mile at minute because he is a fool for love. In the same situation, Eddy Kantrow seems at best a shmuck and more often simply predatory.

Miranda, who replaces Kelly Corcoran of the original, and her family are offended that Eddy tried to pick up Miranda during his honeymoon, but eventually Miranda dumps her husband to seek out Eddy, who responds and apparently intends to dump his second wife. It is a fairly nasty reprise of the sort of serial polygamy that characterized Eastern European ethnic Ashkenazi culture with none of the mitigating circumstances associated with early marriage and a high level of family pressure.

In Adrienne Shelly’s Waitress, which is exceptionally hostile to men, there are no Jewish characters, but the Southern gentiles now have the New York Jewish morality associated with Sex and the City, and after an affair that gives her self-confidence, the heroine dumps her husband to start her own business. The movie represented the final assimilation of American non-Jews to Jewish norms, and it received rave reviews.

It was interesting that the movie had the triple Goddess subtheme that was present in the movie Enemies, A Love Story, which was adapted from Sonim, A Geshikht fun a Lieb by Isaac Bashevis Singer. (See http://eaazi.blogspot.com/2008/01/connecting-hanukkah-christmas-and-idu-l.html.) Probably accidentally, Waitress is a sort of inversion of Judah Leon Gordon’s poem Kozo shel yod, which is loosely translated as “The Dot on the ‘I.’” This poetic satire tells the story of a Jewish woman and her inadequate husband. Her problem results from the strictures of Rabbinical law (Halakhah), which can be quite barbaric in some marital situations.

[v] I grew up with the story that the first Chabad Rebbe Shneur Zalman of Liadi chose to support the Russian Czar over Napoleon, who would have brought ideas from the Enlightenment to the Czarist Empire.

[vi] In the case of the Harvard Wexner Israel Fellowship, Wexner is the culprit that set up Harvard and its donors to commit tax fraud. He should be culpable for tax code infractions and conspiracy. His Wexner Heritage Foundation has been instrumental in providing fellowships at American universities to Israelis that have routinely engaged in war crimes and terrorism against Palestinians. The Foundation should be shut down and its assets seized for providing material assistance to terrorism. As supporting Zionist terrorism was the purpose of the Foundation, all of Wexner’s assets should also be seized and Wexner should be arrested and sent to Guantanamo or a similar facility where he can be interrogated according to Dershowitzian principles to discover the extent of his conspiracy against the American legal and Constitutional system.

[vii] Here is article 2 from the international Convention on Genocide (http://www.hrweb.org/legal/genocide.html)

Article 2

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Items a, b, and c have applied to Palestine since racist Eastern European Ashkenazim began to invade Palestine for the purpose of stealing it from the native population at the end of the 19th century. Genocidal Zionist intent against the native population of Palestine can be traced back as far as 1882 as the following citation from Professor Joel Kovel on page 45 of Overcoming Zionism demonstrates.

Thus Vladimir Dubnow, in 1882: "The ultimate goal is, in time, to take over the Land of Israel and to restore to the Jews the political independence they have been deprived of for these two thousand years ... The Jews will yet arise and, arms in hand (if need be), declare that they are the masters of their ancient homeland."

[viii] Real estate dealing seems to play a role in David Project and StandWithUs activities as well as in the Summers debacle at Harvard. Israeli real estate development has provided a vehicle to siphon US aid to Israel directly into the pockets of transnational Zionist elites.

[ix] U.S. Diplomat's Letter of Resignation

by John Brady Kiesling

The following is the text of John Brady Kiesling's letter of resignation to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. Mr. Kiesling is a career diplomat who has served in United States embassies from Tel Aviv to Casablanca to Yerevan.

Embassy of the United States of America

Athens, Greece
February 24, 2003

The Honorable Colin Powell
Secretary of State
Washington, D.C.

Dear Mr. Secretary:

I am writing you to submit my resignation from the Foreign Service of the United States and from my position as Political Counselor in U.S. Embassy Athens, effective March 7. I do so with a heavy heart. The baggage of my upbringing included a felt obligation to give something back to my country. Service as a U.S. diplomat was a dream job. I was paid to understand foreign languages and cultures, to seek out diplomats, politicians, scholars and journalists, and to persuade them that U.S. interests and theirs fundamentally coincided. My faith in my country and its values was the most powerful weapon in my diplomatic arsenal.

It is inevitable that during twenty years with the State Department I would become more sophisticated and cynical about the narrow and selfish bureaucratic motives that sometimes shaped our policies. Human nature is what it is, and I was rewarded and promoted for understanding human nature. But until this Administration it had been possible to believe that by upholding the policies of my president I was also upholding the interests of the American people and the world. I believe it no longer.

The policies we are now asked to advance are incompatible not only with American values but also with American interests. Our fervent pursuit of war with Iraq is driving us to squander the international legitimacy that has been America’s most potent weapon of both offense and defense since the days of Woodrow Wilson. We have begun to dismantle the largest and most effective web of international relationships the world has ever known. Our current course will bring instability and danger, not security.

The sacrifice of global interests to domestic politics and to bureaucratic self-interest is nothing new, and it is certainly not a uniquely American problem. Still, we have not seen such systematic distortion of intelligence, such systematic manipulation of American opinion, since the war in Vietnam. The September 11 tragedy left us stronger than before, rallying around us a vast international coalition to cooperate for the first time in a systematic way against the threat of terrorism. But rather than take credit for those successes and build on them, this Administration has chosen to make terrorism a domestic political tool, enlisting a scattered and largely defeated Al Qaeda as its bureaucratic ally. We spread disproportionate terror and confusion in the public mind, arbitrarily linking the unrelated problems of terrorism and Iraq. The result, and perhaps the motive, is to justify a vast misallocation of shrinking public wealth to the military and to weaken the safeguards that protect American citizens from the heavy hand of government. September 11 did not do as much damage to the fabric of American society as we seem determined to so to ourselves. 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?

We should ask ourselves why we have failed to persuade more of the world that a war with Iraq is necessary. We have over the past two years done too much to assert to our world partners that narrow and mercenary U.S. interests override the cherished values of our partners. Even where our aims were not in question, our consistency is at issue. The model of Afghanistan is little comfort to allies wondering on what basis we plan to rebuild the Middle East, and in whose image and interests. Have we indeed become blind, as Russia is blind in Chechnya, as Israel is blind in the Occupied Territories, to our own advice, that overwhelming military power is not the answer to terrorism? After the shambles of post-war Iraq joins the shambles in Grozny and Ramallah, it will be a brave foreigner who forms ranks with Micronesia to follow where we lead.

We have a coalition still, a good one. The loyalty of many of our friends is impressive, a tribute to American moral capital built up over a century. But our closest allies are persuaded less that war is justified than that it would be perilous to allow the U.S. to drift into complete solipsism. Loyalty should be reciprocal. Why does our President condone the swaggering and contemptuous approach to our friends and allies this Administration is fostering, including among its most senior officials. Has “oderint dum metuant” really become our motto?

I urge you to listen to America’s friends around the world. Even here in Greece, purported hotbed of European anti-Americanism, we have more and closer friends than the American newspaper reader can possibly imagine. Even when they complain about American arrogance, Greeks know that the world is a difficult and dangerous place, and they want a strong international system, with the U.S. and EU in close partnership. When our friends are afraid of us rather than for us, it is time to worry. And now they are afraid. Who will tell them convincingly that the United States is as it was, a beacon of liberty, security, and justice for the planet?

Mr. Secretary, I have enormous respect for your character and ability. You have preserved more international credibility for us than our policy deserves, and salvaged something positive from the excesses of an ideological and self-serving Administration. But your loyalty to the President goes too far. We are straining beyond its limits an international system we built with such toil and treasure, a web of laws, treaties, organizations, and shared values that sets limits on our foes far more effectively than it ever constrained America’s ability to defend its interests.

I am resigning because I have tried and failed to reconcile my conscience with my ability to represent the current U.S. Administration. I have confidence that our democratic process is ultimately self-correcting, and hope that in a small way I can contribute from outside to shaping policies that better serve the security and prosperity of the American people and the world we share.

Sincerely,

John Brady Kiesling

U.S. Embassy Athens.

[x] In my opinion Kiesling’s harshest comment about Israel and implicitly about the Israel lobby occurs on p. 181:

A Syrian democracy project embarked on purely as a short-term tactical program to ease the president’s conscience over imaginary Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, to break the OPEC oil cartel, to wrong-foot the Democratic Party, or to eliminate any lingering military pressure on Israel from its neighbors would be disastrous to its alleged beneficiaries. Innocent democrats who trusted the United States would die painfully in the civil war that followed U.S. loss of interest. Therefore, America’s motives for ousting the Assad dynasty had better be clear, firm, and bipartisan, not (for example) a ploy to bathe Syria in fire and blood so that Israel can hang onto the Golan Heights for ever.

In point of fact, Bush probably could find bipartisan support to bathe Syria in fire and blood so that Israel can hang onto the Golan Heights forever, but Kiesling’s real point is fairly obvious.

[xi] Kiesling’s most carefully phrased criticism of the Bush administration occurs on p. 235:

But if the United States were insane enough to threaten Canada with preemptive attack in the way Vice President Cheney threatened Iran in his January 2005 MSNBC television interview, it would change Canada’s security calculation. The threat would create a powerful Canadian political movement to build a credible nuclear deterrent to U.S. aggression.

Kiesling never actually claims that Cheney or U.S. Iran policy is insane.

[xii] Jabotinsky’s family was not nearly as wealthy as Trotsky’s, but Trotsky’s father was illiterate. Both families were non-religious and spoke Russian or Ukrainian but not Yiddish. Trotsky’s father sent his son to study in Odessa where Jabotinsky’s family lived.

[xiii] All in the Neocon Family

By Jim Lobe, AlterNet
Posted on March 27, 2003, Printed on April 19, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/15481/

What do William Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Elliot Abrams, and Robert Kagan have in common? Yes, they are all die-hard hawks who have gained control of U.S. foreign policy since the 9/11 attacks. But they are also part of one big neoconservative family -- an extended clan of spouses, children, and friends who have known each other for generations.

Neoconservatives are former liberals (which explains the "neo" prefix) who advocate an aggressive unilateralist vision of U.S. global supremacy, which includes a close strategic alliance with Israel. Let's start with one of the founding fathers of the extended neocon clan: Irving Kristol. His extensive resume includes waging culture wars for the CIA against the Soviet Union in the early years of the Cold War and calling for an American "imperial" role during the Vietnam War. Papa Kristol, who has been credited with defining the major themes of neoconservative thought, is married to Gertrude Himmelfarb, a neoconservative powerhouse on her own. Her studies of the Victorian era in Britain helped inspire the men who sold Bush on the idea of "compassionate conservatism."

The son of this proud couple is none other that William Kristol, the crown prince of the neoconservative clique and editor of the Rupert Murdoch-owned Weekly Standard. In 1997, he founded the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a front group which cemented the powerful alliance between right-wing Republicans like Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, Christian and Catholic Right leaders like Gary Bauer and William Bennett, and the neocons behind a platform of global U.S. military dominance.

Irving Kristol's most prominent disciple is Richard Perle, who was until Thursday the Defense Policy Board chairman, is also a "resident scholar" at the American Enterprise Institute, which is housed in the same building as PNAC. Perle himself married into neocon royalty when he wed the daughter of his professor at the University of Chicago, the late Alfred Wohlstetter -- the man who helped both his son-in-law and his fellow student Paul Wolfowitz get their start in Washington more than 30 years ago.

Perle's own protege is Douglas Feith, who is now Wolfowitz's deputy for policy and is widely known for his right-wing Likud position. And why not? His father, Philadelphia businessman and philanthropist Dalck Feith, was once a follower of the great revisionist Zionist leader, Vladimir Jabotinsky, in his native Poland back in the 1930s. The two Feiths were honored together in 1997 by the right-wing Zionist Organization of America (ZOA).

The AEI has long been a major nexus for such inter-familial relationships. A long-time collaborator with Perle, Michael Ledeen is married to Barbara Ledeen, a founder and director of the anti-feminist Independent Women's Forum (IWF), who is currently a major player in the Republican leadership on Capitol Hill. Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and another neo-con power couple -- David and Meyrav Wurmser -- co-authored a 1996 memorandum for Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu outlining how to break the Oslo peace process and invade Iraq as the first step to transforming the Middle East.

Though she doesn't focus much on foreign-policy issues, Lynne Cheney also hangs her hat at AEI. Her husband Dick Cheney recently chose Victoria Nuland to become his next deputy national security adviser. Nuland, as it turns out, is married to Robert Kagan, Bill Kristol's main comrade-in-arms and the co-founder of PNAC.

Bob's father, Donald Kagan, is a Yale historian who converted from a liberal Democrat to a staunch neocon in the 1970s. On the eve of the 2000 presidential elections, Donald and his other son, Frederick, published "While America Sleeps," a clarion call to increase defense spending. Since then, the three Kagan men have written reams of columns warning that the currently ballooning Pentagon budget is simply not enough to fund the much-desired vision of U.S. global supremacy.

And which infamous ex-Reaganite do the Kagans and another leading neocon family have in common? None other than Iran-contra veteran Elliott Abrams.

Now the director of Near Eastern Affairs in Bush's National Security Council, Abrams worked closely with Bob Kagan back in the Reagan era. He is also the son-in-law of Norman Podhoretz, long-time editor of the influential conservative Jewish publication Commentary, and his wife, Midge Decter, a fearsome polemicist in her own right.

Podhoretz, like Kristol Sr., helped invent neo-conservatism in the late 1960s. He and Decter created a formidable political team as leaders of the Committee on the Present Danger in 1980, when they worked with Donald Rumsfeld to pound the last nail into the coffin of detente and promote the rise of Ronald Reagan. In addition to being Abrams' father-in-law, Norman Podhoretz is also the father of John Podhoretz, a columnist for the Murdoch-owned New York Post and frequent guest on the Murdoch-owned Fox News channel.

As editor of Commentary, Norman offered writing space to rising stars of the neocon movement for more than 30 years. His proteges include former U.N. ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick and Richard Pipes, who was Ronald Reagan's top advisor on the "Evil Empire," as the president liked to call the Soviet Union. His son, Daniel Pipes, has also made a career out of battling "evil," which in his case is Islam. And to tie it all up neatly, in 2002, Podhoretz received the highest honor bestowed by the AEI: the Irving Kristol award.

This list of intricate, overlapping connections is hardly exhaustive or perhaps even surprising. But it helps reveal an important fact. Contrary to appearances, the neocons do not constitute a powerful mass political movement. They are instead a small, tightly-knit clan whose incestuous familial and personal connections, both within and outside the Bush administration, have allowed them grab control of the future of American foreign policy.

[xiv] Many senior Czarist officials were all too aware that the Empire teetered on the edge of an abyss and were desperately trying to reform the state before it was too late.

[xv] Kiesling also talks rationally about Iran (and about information supplied by the State of Israel) on pp. 232-233:

After the Iraq weapons of mass destruction fiasco it behooves the United States to be skeptical of the information and disinformation provided by Iranian exiles and Israel. In 2003, by the time I resigned, the evidence of Iranian weapons programs available at the ordinary secret level was no more specific than it had been in 1996. In 2005 the judgment of the U.S. intelligence community, at least as leaked to the press, was that it would still take Iran another five to ten years to have a bomb, unless the international community intervened one way or another. Russia (which sold Iran its nuclear reactor at Bushehr) and Pakistan (which secretly sold Iran uranium enrichment centrifuge technology) are oddly complacent about a nuclear-armed Shiite theocracy on their doorsteps.

With the Russian empire truncated and Iraq in ruins, it would be reasonable for Iranian politicians to conclude that nuclear weapons are too expensive a luxury to be justified by the security threats Iran now faces. Such rationality, however, presupposes Iranian recognition that the United States is a status-quo power as well. At the moment this requires a leap of faith.

I could quibble that Iran might also need nuclear weapons because Israel and Pakistan possess them, but Americans really need a rational voice to counter the ongoing push from Neoconservatives and from far too many members of the American Jewish elite for an attack on Iran. (See The Case for Bombing Iran or http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/The-Case-for-Bombing-Iran-10882.)

[xvi] Avnery’s speech below is careful to blame anti-Semitism, to define acceptable allies for Palestinians, and to demand that Sari Nusseibeh join in the struggle against anti-Semitism, but he is far less direct about the nature of the conflict and of the solution.

Despite Avnery’s delusion, Modern Israeli Hebrew (MIH) is fundamentally relexified Yiddish. The vocabulary has some similarity to that of Arabic, but the grammar and the meanings of words have much more affinity to Yiddish, German and Slavic than to any Semitic language including Biblical or Mishnaic Hebrew. (See Les origines des juifs actuels [http://eaazi.blogspot.com/2007/12/les-origines-des-juifs-actuels.html], The Origins of Modern Jewry [http://eaazi.blogspot.com/2007/10/origins-of-modern-jewry.html], and Two-tiered Relexification in Yiddish, Jews, Sorbs, Khazars, and the Kiev-Polessian Dialect, by Paul Wexler [http://books.google.com/books?id=JL7CY2MW63gC&printsec=frontcover].)

Uri Avnery: Lev Kopelev Prize Acceptance Speech

22.11.03

(Instead of my usual weekly article, this time I am posting my acceptance speech on receiving, together with Sari Nusseibeh, the Lev Kopelev prize. The award ceremony took place last week in Cologne, Germany.)

Ladies and Gentlemen,

The Ambassador of Palestine and the former Ambassador of Israel,

(I am sorry that I am unable to greet the present Israeli Ambassador, since he did not see fit to attend,)

Dear friends,

Every time I stand on German soil, I ask myself: What and where would I be now, if Adolf Hitler had never been?

Would I be standing here with Sari Nusseibeh? Would I be an Israeli at all?

I was born not far from here, in Beckum, Westphalia. My grandfather, Josef Ostermann, was the teacher of the small Jewish community there.

But my family originally came from the Rhineland. My mother once told me the name of the place, but I have forgotten it. Now there is no one left to ask.

My father, who attended the "humanist" high school where Latin was taught as the first foreign language, always maintained that we had come to Germany with Julius Ceasar. However, no archaeological proof of this has yet been uncovered.

The family was steeped in German culture. My father, an enthusiastic music-lover, adored Brahms and Beethoven. His favorite piece was the overture to Wagner's Meistersinger. No work of classic German literature was missing from our bookshelves, and I had read almost all of them before my 15^th birthday.

Father knew both parts of Goethe's Faust by heart. When he was engaged to my mother in 1913, he stipulated that before the wedding she must learn the first part of Faust by heart. Mother's condition was that my father must learn to play tennis. They both fulfilled the conditions, but a day after the wedding my mother forgot every word of Faust and my father never played tennis again.

What caused this family, the family Ostermann, to leave Germany in 1933 forever, and to go to a far-away, foreign country, the country of the Nusseibeh family?

One word: anti-Semitism.

It is true that my father had always been a Zionist. He was nine years old when the First Zionist Congress took place. The idea excited him. As a wedding gift he received a document confirming that a tree had been planted in Palestine in his name. But he never imagined that he himself would one day go there.

(A joke current at the time: "What is a Zionist? A Jew who takes the money of a second Jew in order to send a third Jew to Palestine.")

The Zionists were then a miniscule minority in the German Jewish communities. Among our relatives it was said that my father had become a Zionist only because he had a contrary disposition. (It seems to run in the family.)

Shortly after the Nazis' rise to power, my father decided to emigrate. The immediate cause was small. My father was a court-appointed receiver of bankrupt businesses. His honesty was proverbial, he was "straight as a die". One day, during a session of the court, a young lawyer cried out: "Jews like you are not needed here anymore!" My father was deeply offended, and from that moment Germany was finished for him. I still believe that a feeling of insult played a large part in the divorce between the Jews and Germany.

Where to? For a short while, Finland and the Philippines were considered. But Zionist romanticism decided the issue. We went to Palestine, and since then, the destiny of my family has been irrevocably intertwined with the destiny of the Nusseibeh family. I was then ten years old.

When my father went to Police headquarters to give notice of our departure, as required by law, the police officer exclaimed: "But Mr. Ostermann, what has entered your head? After all, you are a German like me!"

I tell this story frequently, in order to warn my Palestinian friends not to be tempted to consider the anti-Semites as their allies. On the surface it seems logical: the anti-Semites hate the Jews, the Jews are the majority in Israel, Israel oppresses the Palestinians, so the anti-Semites must be the friends of the Palestinians.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Without anti-Semitism, Zionism would never have been born. True, the Zionist myth asserts that in every generation the Jews were longing for Palestine, but any such longing was limited to prayers. As a matter of fact, throughout the centuries, the Jews made not the slightest effort to gather in Palestine.

A small example: 511 years ago, half a million Jews were expelled from Christian Spain. Most of them settled somewhere in the Muslim Ottoman empire, which received them graciously. They settled down in countries like Morocco, Bulgaria, Greece and Syria. But only a tiny handful of Rabbis settled in Palestine, then a remote corner of the Turkish Sultan's domains.

Muslims turn in prayer to Mecca, Jews turn in prayer to Jerusalem. But that has nothing to do with the Zionist idea of a Jewish state.

Modern political Zionism was clearly a reaction to the modern anti-Semitism of the national movements in Europe. It is no coincidence that the term "anti-Semitism", which was coined in Germany in 1879, was followed only a few years later by the word "Zionism", which was first used by a Vienna-born Jew, Nathan Birnbaum.

It was a response to the challenge. If the new national movements in Europe, practically without exception, do not want to have anything to do with the Jews, then the Jews must constitute themselves as a nation in the European sense and found their own state.

Where? In the land of the Bible, then called Palestine.

Thus started the historic conflict between our two peoples, the people of Sari Nusseibeh and my people, a conflict that is today - in 2003 - more vicious than ever. It began when the Zionists wanted to realize their aim, to save the Jews from Europe, and the Palestinian Arabs wanted to realize their aim, to achieve freedom and independence in their homeland, in the same little country, without having any idea of each other.

Theodor Herzl, the founder of the modern Zionist movement, wrote in his diary, after the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897: "In Basel I founded the Jewish State." At the time he had never been to Palestine, he had no idea who lived there. A fellow activist coined the memorable phrase: "A land without a people for a people without a land." For them, Palestine was empty, uninhabited.

But the grandfather of Sari Nusseibeh was living in Palestine at the time, together with another half million Arabs. They had no idea - and could have no idea - that somewhere in Switzerland, in a town they probably had never heard of, a meeting was taking place, whose results would change forever their own fate and the fate of their children and grandchildren, their family, their town, their village and their country.

Anti-Semitism set Zionism in motion, the Holocaust lent it tremendous moral power, even today it sends masses of Jews from Russia, Argentina and France to Israel.

The Palestinians have many enemies - but none is as dangerous as anti-Semitism. If in some Arab countries an effort is made to import this foreign anti-Semitism from Europe, it is a fateful mistake.

Sari Nusseibeh and I, two Semites who speak closely related Semitic languages, must be allies in the battle against this old-new mental disease. I believe that we are.

I want to add at once: the curse of anti-Semitism must not be abused in order to choke every criticism of my state. We Israelis want to be a people like any other people, a state like every other state, to be measured by the same moral standards as others.

Yes, here, in Germany, too.

No Sonderbehandlung, please.

The conflict has now been going on for more than a hundred years. On both sides, a fifth generation has been born into it, a generation whose whole mental world has been shaped by it. Fear, hatred, prejudices, stereotypes and distrust fill this world.

We are standing on the edge of an abyss, and in both peoples there are leaders who command: Forward, march!

We are here because we want to save our peoples from this abyss, because we want to show them another way.

The state of Israel exists, nobody can throw us into the sea. The Palestinian people, nobody can push them out into the desert. Our Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, wants to turn all of Palestine into a Jewish state. Muslim fundamentalists, like the Hamas and Jihad movements, want to include all of Palestine in a Muslim state. That is the direct route to catastrophe.

We both believe in peace and reconciliation between our two peoples. Not only do we believe in it, we work and struggle for it, each in his own way.

Together we have taken part in many actions. On New Year's eve 2001, we marched together, arm in arm, through the alleys of the Old City of Jerusalem, at the head of a large group of Muslims, Christians and Jews. But our main task is to convince our own peoples that peace and reconciliation are possible, that on both sides there is a readiness to pay the price of peace.

These are not abstract aspirations. Gush Shalom, the Israeli peace bloc to which I belong, published a peace agreement in all its details in 2001. Not long ago, Sari Nusseibeh, together with the former Israeli security service chief, Ami Ayalon, articulated the principles of a peaceful solution. Now a new group of Israeli and Palestinian politicians has worked out in Geneva the draft of a peace treaty.

The bloody confrontation that has been raging in our country for three years now is a symptom of hopelessness, frustration and despair on both sides. Of course, there can be no symmetry between occupiers and occupied, rulers and ruled. The violence of the occupation cannot be compared with the violence of the resistance. But the hopelessness and distrust on both sides is comparable, and our task is to overcome it.

We follow the age-old wisdom: Don't curse the darkness, light a candle. Together with our partners, the thousands of peace activists of both peoples, we have already lighted a lot of candles.

I am an optimist. I believe that the darkness of despair is slowly giving way to the twilight of hope, that it is getting lighter. In Israel, the conviction is gaining ground that the shedding of blood leads nowhere.

Thirty of our combat pilots refuse to follow immoral orders. The number of conscientious objectors among our soldiers is growing. The Chief-of-Staff, until recently an extreme hawk, has talked back to his superiors and declared that there is no military solution. The Geneva peace talks have had an impact, they show that there are indeed partners for peace. Parents of fallen soldiers protest publicly against the senseless sacrificing of their children.

A new wind is blowing. A new hope is emerging. We shall do everything possible to make this hope grow, in order to bring about a historic change.

As a member of Gush Shalom, I gratefully accept this award. I am especially proud that it bears the name of Lev Kopelev. All fighters for peace a human rights in Israel, Palestine and the whole world belong to an international community, for whom Lev Kopelev is a model figure.

I thank you. We shall not disappoint you.

[xvii] Some nineteenth century adventurers like Sir Richard Burton, Stamford Raffles, and White Rajah Sir James Brooke accomplished some amazing feats. Rudyard Kipling attempts to depict the mentality in The Man Who Would be King (http://books.google.com/books?id=hRnIa64n3AEC), which is loosely based on Brook.

Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton, The Secret Agent Who Made the Pilgrimage to Mecca, Discovered the Kama Sutra, and Brought the Arabian Nights to the West (http://books.google.com/books?id=8AloAAAACAAJ) by Edward Rice is worth reading to get a sense of the time period.

[xviii] Sometimes Americans confuse intellectuals with an intelligentsia. The members of an intelligentsia are intellectuals, but not all intellectuals are members of an intelligentsia.

According to Merriam-Webster (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/intelligentsia) an intelligentsia consists of “intellectuals who form an artistic, social, or political vanguard or elite.”

The Neocons are not merely intellectuals. They constitute the American branch of the transnational Jabotinskian intelligentsia, i.e., political intellectual elite.

I believe that in Polish inteligencja comes into vogue around the third partition of Poland (about the same time Polonia comes to mean Poland in exile or the spirit of Poland).

In the Polish conceptualization (probably expressed most clearly by Karol Libelt in O miłości ojczyzny) the inteligencja is the brain of the nation and creates its moral virtue.

The concept of интеллигенция in the Russian context is derivative from the Polish usage but has an oppositional connotation -- at least during the Russian imperial period.

For the Soviets the intelligentsia constituted not a class but a stratum.

[xix] France joined the coalition in the 1956 Suez War in part because Israel advocates had successfully managed to persuade the French government that France and Israel faced a common enemy in Egypt, Arab terrorism, and Arab nationalism. Israel advocates have used practically the same strategy in manipulating American policy during the Bush administration.

[xx] Surviving remnant narratives are fairly common in ancient religion. The Bible contains minor versions in the stories of Noah’s Flood and also of the flight from Sodom and Gomorrah. The Aeniad also contains a form of the surviving remnant theology. During the Middle Ages Christian thinkers often read the Aeniad as an allegory on the Bible. (See The Aeniad, [http://books.google.com/books?id=j4hlTRgO41cC&printsec=frontcover] translated by J. W. Mackail with an afterward by Coco Stevenson, p. 333)

[xxi] Rudyard Kipling’s depiction of empire does not match the negativity of Heart of Darkness - Google Book Search (http://books.google.com/books?id=KDRrdx20VbQC&printsec=frontcover) or of Lord Jim, which were both written by Joseph Conrad, who as a Pole from Russian Ukraine knew the dark side of the Czarist Empire. Yet, Kipling was quite aware of the ethical ambiguity of British rule in India. For example, “Todd's amendment” points out the inevitability of imperial misadministration even when working through local agents.

Kipling’s poem below can be read as satirizing the conceits of empire building.

The White Man's Burden

Take up the White Man's burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.

Take up the White Man's burden--
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain
To seek another's profit,
And work another's gain.

Take up the White Man's burden--
The savage wars of peace--
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to naught.

Take up the White Man's burden--
No tawdry rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper--
The tale of common things.
The ports ye shall not enter,
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go mark them with your living,
And mark them with your dead.

Take up the White Man's burden--
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard--
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light
"Why brought he us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?"

Take up the White Man's burden--
Ye dare not stoop to less--
Nor call too loud on Freedom
To cloak your weariness;
By all ye cry or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent, sullen feebles
Shall weigh your gods and you.

Take up the White Man's burden--
Have done with childish days--
The lightly proferred laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years
Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers.

[xxii] The popular Yiddish, German, English, Hebrew literature, theater, and film associated with recovering false memory of Palestine is extensive. Milton Steinberg’s A Driven Leaf is an example as is the movie Ben-Hur and the television series Masada.

[xxiii] In the seventeenth century, Leon de Molena wrote in anticipation of nineteenth century liberal humanist Jewish arguments that lending to non-Jews with interest on the basis of Deuteronomy 23:20 – “Unto a stranger thou may’st lend upon usury, but unto they brother thou shalt not lend upon usury” – is allowable only in the case of the seven [pagan] nations consisting of the Hittites, Jebusites, Amorites, etc. whose destruction God had enjoined. (See The Jew in the Medieval World: A Source Book, 315-1791, http://books.google.com/books?id=PCalmtflYtEC&printsec=frontcover, p. 439.)

[xxiv] Traditional Jewish unity has really only reestablished itself in the 1990s after wealthy Ashkenazi American Jabotinskian Zionists created a thorough indoctrination program under the cover of a new Jewish educational system to discourage intermarriage. (Some observers see this beginnings of the New Jewish Solidarity in the aftermath of the 1967 War or after the 1973 War.)

[xxv] In some sense the October Revolution of 1917 represented the revenge of the Russianized populations of the Czarist Empire.

[xxvi] Despite Rufusenik Movement claims of pervasive Soviet anti-Jewish prejudice, Soviet ethnic Ashkenazim were probably the most Soviet of all ethnic groups within the Soviet Union.

With the dissolution of the USSR, Soviet Jews more than any other soviet group outside of the leadership felt a palpable loss of homeland in a sort of reprise of Jewish feelings during the partitions of Commonwealth Poland. While the economic collapse of the former Soviet states probably provided the largest incentive for former Soviet Jews to emigrate to the State of Israel, the irretrievable loss of their Soviet homeland almost certainly facilitated the migration, and the transition from a Soviet Ashkenazi to Zionist Ashkenazi mentality was probably quite easily because the two mindsets differ little. (See The Pattern of Ethnic Ashkenazi Genocidalism: The Jewish Century by Yuri Slezkine or http://eaazi.blogspot.com/2007/02/pattern-of-ethnic-ashkenazi.html.)

[xxvii] The progressive credentials of Zionism are commonly disputed today, but that situation is relatively new.

[xxviii] Judah Leon Gordon’s poem Kozo shel yod, which is loosely translated as “The Dot on the ‘I’” criticizes Jewish law that discriminates against Jewish women in matters of divorce.

[xxix] Isaac Breuer stood in more or less the same relationship to German Orthodoxy as Franz Rosenzweig or Martin Buber played for non-Orthodox German Jews. Within the German Jewish context at the beginning of the twentieth century, he plays a role rather similar to that of Tariq Ramadan among European Muslims. Here is the full passage from Mittleman:

[Die Rechtsphilosophischen Grundlagen des Jüdischen und des Modernen Rechts (The Legal-Philosophical Fundamentals of Jewish and Modern Law, 1910) by Isaac Breuer] begins with a commentary on a sensational incident in the contemporary press. A German judge in a ruling concerning the divorce of two Jews who were Russian nationals determined that Jewish law was inadmissible in a German court because it ran counter to “good morals.” While the German civil code provided for a mutual right of divorce, Jewish law provides only for the husband’s right to divorce his wife. The German judge, in the case brought before him by the Jewish wife (who sought the divorce), ruled that the husband could not appeal to the principles of Jewish law to frustrate her because Jewish law entails unequal treatment of the sexes. This ruling, although later rescinded by the judge, touched off a wave of uneasiness in the Jewish community. An official declaration to the effect that Jewish law ran counter to good German morals sent tremors through both liberal and Orthodox Jewry.

Breuer found an opening in this sensation for a systematic study of the differences between Jewish and modern German law. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he was not daunted by the possibility that Jewish and modern law may very well embody disjunctive moralities. Breuer is at his most characteristic in this essay. He eschews any facile, apologetic harmonization between them. In exploring this discrepancy, Breuer begins to apply some general legal-philosophical concepts to an analysis of Torah.

Breuer points out that there are indeed areas in which Jewish law diverges very considerably from modern law. Modern law is grounded in the proposition that all persons are, respecting their legal status, equal. Although positive law falls short of this norm, equality before the law is nonetheless a key normative principle, an ideal of modern law. Jewish law, on the other hand, enshrines certain fundamental inequalities. In addition to the relevant disabilities for women, the slave and the Gentile are not equal to Jewish males under Jewish law. Brueuer categorically rejects an historicist explanation for these inequalities. He affirms, on the contrary, that the whole Torah is contemporary, valid law. Torah is not a museum piece invalidated in some way by history. The legal matter of the Torah is timeless or, at least not time-bound. The assertion leads Breuer to make the bold claim that although the practice of slavery has vanished from the world, the principle of slavery must still be valid! Any jurisprudential analysis of the underlying principles of Jewish law can do no less than treat the law under the assumption of atemporal validity. Appeal to historical influences is reductionistic and methodologically intolerable.

[xxx] Many accuse Weininger of anti-Semitism and misogyny. The book is highly nuanced and has some interesting things to say about Zionism. The new translation Sex and Character, an Investigation of Fundamental Principles (http://books.google.com/books?id=iTOzhZ5MElYC&printsec=frontcover) corrects deficiencies of earlier English versions.

[xxxi] In his book Professor Massad discusses the development and interconnections of the concepts of civilization, sexuality, culture and progress as well as the secondary effects, which include feelings of superiority or inferiority and which arise from the acceptance of the primary conceptualizations.

[xxxii] Sheldon Adelson alone is worth more than $20.5 billion. (See #3 Sheldon Adelson - Forbes.com [http://www.forbes.com/lists/2006/54/biz_06rich400_Sheldon-Adelson_ER9O.html])

[xxxiii] German and Austrian Jews used the term Geldjude among themselves. Geldjüd was an anti-Jewish epithet. See The History of the Family : Social structure of the Jewish quarter ... or http://tinyurl.com/4q9pmq.

[xxxiv] "Our crowd": the great Jewish families of New York (http://books.google.com/books?id=0q_z-sBJ-XwC&pgis=1) by Stephen Birmingham discusses the economic role of pre-Civil War German Jewish immigrants in a superficial sort of way.

[xxxv] This book has some problems but generally makes clear that anti-Semitism was not the motivation behind the Dreyfus Affair.

[xxxvi] Samuels’ treatment of the case is thoroughly exceptionalist. There were two or three other trials for ritual murder with no connection to Jews in Czarist Russia at this time period. Nothing indicates that the other defendants were treated much better or worse than Beylis, and ultimately a jury found Beylis innocent even though its members consisted of uneducated Ukrainians, who according to Jewish demonology represent some of the most reflexive anti-Semites on the planet.

[xxxvii] Froschprinz (frog prince) was occasionally used as an anti-Jewish reference to Jewish bankers in Franconia during the nineteenth century. Because I am probably the only person who remembers or understands the usage in the twenty-first century and because the Bush administration Neocons recently revived the usage of frog as a derogatory equivalent of French, describing the wealthy French Jewish elite as the Frog Princes (and Princesses) does not seem too horrible in the present political context. While it may be somewhat unfair to Cremieux, who by all accounts was quite charming, Bernard-Henri Lévy also know as BHV is by most accounts the prince that really is a frog. (See Bernard-Henri Lévy or http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/the_lies_of_bernard_henri_leacutevy.)

[xxxviii] From the standpoint of this paper, the issue is not really important, but Ethiopian Jews may represent a surviving community practicing a form of Hellenistic Judaism, or their traditional religion may represent an extreme Judaizing variant of Ethiopian Christianity.

[xxxix] Americans tend to perceive legal aggression as quintessentially Jewish, but such behavior may be more generally Polish in a non-ethnic sense. The epic Polish nationalist poem Pan Tadeusz, http://books.google.com/books?id=1KoRr7_4qR8C , by Adam Mickiewicz revolves around a legal feud between two noble Polish families.

[xl] Jewish News of Greater Phoenix

May 19, 2000/14 Iyar 5760, Vol. 52, No.37

Defamation row

Hefty verdict sends message of responsibility

J.J. GOLDBERG
Special to Jewish News

Anti-Defamation League director Abe Foxman likes to tell stories about people he meets while traveling. They ask him what he does. He says he runs an agency that defends Jews. Their response, typically, is astonishment: "Really? Jews need defending?"

Foxman's point is that Jews are losing their underdog image as they win increasing acceptance in America.

This is one of those good news-bad news messages, particularly for the folks charged with wielding the machinery of Jewish power. It's easier than ever to throw your weight around, but harder to elicit sympathy.

That lesson came back to bite Foxman with a vengeance last month, when a federal jury in Denver delivered an unprecedented $10.5 million verdict against the Anti-Defamation League for, of all things, defamation.

The jury found that ADL's Mountain States chapter had defamed a non-Jewish couple, William and Dorothy Quigley, by unjustly accusing them of anti-Semitism.

The Quigleys were caught up in a backyard feud with Jewish neighbors, Mitchell and Candace Aronson, in the affluent Denver suburb of Evergreen. The Aronsons produced tapes of the Quigleys' private conversations, picked off a cordless phone by police scanner, containing what they called anti-Semitic threats. The ADL backed them up.

The jury decided the alleged threats sounded more like private venting. Thanks to the tapes, though, the ADL was also found guilty of violating the Quigleys' privacy.

Altogether, the jury levied $1.5 million in compensatory damages against the ADL - $1 million for William Quigley's suffering, $500,000 for Dorothy's - plus a whopping $9 million in punitive damages, to teach the league a lesson.

Curiously, no fines were levied against the Aronsons, who initiated the anti-Semitism charges and taped the conversations, nor against the Jefferson County district attorney, who charged the Quigleys with criminal ethnic intimidation before backing down and apologizing.

Both the Aronsons and the D.A.'s office, it seems, had long since settled with the Quigleys - the D.A. for $75,000, the Aronsons for a handshake.

ADL officials say they tried to settle too, but were rebuffed.

The Aronsons first approached the ADL in October 1994, complaining of anti-Semitic harassment. They had moved to Evergreen that summer and been befriended by the Quigleys. But the friendship soured fast, going from complaints about dogs to shouting matches over who trod on whose lawn.

In October things turned ugly when Candace Aronson claimed William Quigley tried to run her over. Soon after, Mitchell Aronson picked up the Quigleys' cordless phone on his police scanner, and overheard Dorothy Quigley complaining to a friend about Aronson's wife in language he considered anti-Semitic.

In late October the Aronsons brought their fears to ADL regional director Saul Rosenthal. They also went to District Attorney David Thomas, claiming they were victims of ethnic intimidation, a felony in Colorado.

In consultation with prosecutors, sheriff's deputies and ADL lawyers, the Aronsons proceeded to tape another 100 hours of phone calls. Nobody - not the Aronsons, not the ADL, not the sheriff's deputies nor the prosecutors - realized a new federal wiretap law had just taken effect, outlawing such surveillance.

In December the Aronsons filed a federal civil suit against the Quigleys. Three days later, Thomas filed criminal charges. In between the Aronsons appeared at a press conference with ADL's Rosenthal. He accused the Quigleys of waging "a vicious anti-Semitic campaign."

Then the case began to collapse. When the district attorney learned the tapes were illegal, he dropped his intimidation charges. In a public apology, he admitted the tapes showed no evidence of "anti-Semitic conduct or harassment."

Soon after, the Quigleys sued everyone involved for ruining their reputations.

A native New Yorker, Quigley had been chief financial officer at Paramount Pictures and president of Vestron Pictures, producing such movies as "Dirty Dancing" and John Huston's "The Dead." He moved to Denver in 1993 to head up United Artists' theater chain.

After the ADL called him an anti-Semite, Quigley alleged, he found himself shunned by his mostly Jewish friends and colleagues.

ADL officials insist they did nothing wrong. They're asking the judge to set aside the jury's verdict.

Privately, some ADL officials say they were hung out to dry when the Quigleys settled with everyone but them. Their accusations of anti-Semitism simply followed the district attorney's lead. They didn't listen to the tapes first, but neither did the D.A.

A few ADL staffers suggest they've been singled out because the league's deep pockets make it an irresistible target.

ADL officials don't say so, but there's something unsettling about the relish with which the jury punished the ADL, awarding triple the damages the Quigleys had asked. The judgment carries echoes of past crusades against the ADL, which often seemed less about correcting wrongdoing and more about cutting ADL - and the Jews - down to size.

In the end, though, the ADL rebroadcast an accusation of anti-Semitism before investigating. That's foolish. More disturbing, it attacked private citizens for opinions voiced at home among friends. That's chilling.

The case's most important lesson, though, is precisely the lesson the jury intended. The accusation of anti-Semitism is an awesome weapon, because of the public revulsion it generates. The power to lodge that accusation carries grave responsibilities.

In a world where Jews are as powerful as their enemies, the Jewish community is accountable for its actions. We're all on notice.

J.J. Goldberg is a free-lance writer in New York.

[xli] The Big Ideas Series: Introducing 13 Proposals for Jewish Communal Innovation (Phase One)

(http://thenewjew.wordpress.com/2007/12/11/the-big-ideas-series-introducing-the-first-three-proposals-for-jewish-communal-innovation)

Last week I invited you to submit your Big Ideas for communal discussion a la Charles Bronfman’s Brandeis contest. Ideas on any scale and topic are welcome having to do with Jewish communal innovation.

UPDATED!

Thus far, I have received 13 great proposals (all of which were formally submitted to the contest).

The Proposals

Here’s what you can look forward to so far. (All proposals listed herein were official contest submissions.)

“Using the Internet to Fight Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism in Higher Education” by the creator of the Anti-Racist Blog
“The Jewish Community Incubator“ by Shai Litt
“Hebrew Nation: A Jewish Identity in the 21st Century” by Gary Kulwin
“The Edah: Embracing a New Definition of Am Yisrael” by Rabbi Morey Schwartz
“Covenant with the Future” by Tsvi Bisk, Director of the Center for Strategic Futurist Thinking
“Renewing the Jewish Pioneering Spirit by Volunteer Work in the Negev” by Dr. Jason Goodfriend
“Translating Judaism for the Post-Digital Age: Creative Zionism and a Renewed Jewish People” by Ariel Beery– (FINALIST)
“Life-Centered Judaism: Bringing Life Unto the Nations” by David Bar-Cohn– NEW!
“Minhag America” by Anita Diamant (FINALIST) – NEW!
“The Sacred Task of Rebuilding Jewish Memory” by Yehuda Kurtzer– WINNER
“Bringing Judaism to the Mainstream” by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach (FINALIST)– UPCOMING!
“Crossing the Threshold: Creating Peace with the Earth through Deep Theology” by Rabbi Mevorach Seidenberg– UPCOMING!
“Being There for the Other: Creating a New Jewish Community of Caring” by Nechama Liss-Levinson and Paul Marcus (SEMI-FINALIST)– UPCOMING!

We Need You!

So how can you get involved? Submit your ideas to me by e-mail (mnorton [at] thenewjew.org) or leave a comment. As important, get involved in the discussion. Take a few minutes to read people’s thoughts and weigh in on what you think: are the ideas important, how could they be implemented, do they apply to your community?

If you want to get started early, you can begin by reading my ideas here. They aren’t exactly big ideas– more of a knee jerk reaction to hearing about the contest in which I said to myself “I know, I know!”– but I do think they would change the way the Jewish community envisions its future. So, what do you think?

I can’t wait to hear what you have to say.

[xlii] I received a tremendous amount of such literature, and I keep trying to remove myself from the lists.

[xliii] Michael Harrington is typical of the American progressive left dominated by Jewish-Zionist thinking when he writes in The Twilight of Capitalism (1976, http://books.google.com/books?id=LIYYwnMVKVUC&pgis=1) on p. 340:

A generation ago, the OPEC cartel would not have been tolerated for long. It surely would have gone the way of Mossadegh in Iran. Now that is no longer possible.

That some of the powers in the Middle East exercising this new freedom are feudalist and others authoritarian, that most seek to exterminate the right of Jewish national self-determination in Israel, and that their cartel has had a fearful impact upon the masses who live in the Fourth world of starvation does not alter the basic point.

Thirty-two years the thinking of the Democratic Party still remains under Jewish-Zionist domination, if no longer because of the influence of eminent leftist Jewish intellectuals, then because of the need for Jewish dollars to fund the Democratic presidential campaign.

[xliv] Confronting War and Discussing Peace on Campus

March 19, 2003

The national debate over the war with Iraq has prompted many of us to reexamine our personal beliefs about war and peace. As Hillel professionals, we are called upon to help our students work through difficult questions of morality, tradition and public policy. The Hillel movement is grappling with our role in this debate and how we can provide students of all beliefs a safe environment in which to explore and discuss this issue.

This document will begin to answer some of these questions. We hope it will be shared with members of your staff, lay board members and student leadership.

§ Where are the students?

§ Hillel's Policy and Roles

§ Resources

§ Israel's Detractors - Stealing the Stage

§ Bibliography

Where are the students?

The 2003 Spitzer Forum offered a window on the opinions of some of our more politically active and empowered students. Hundreds of students gathered for a town hall meeting titled "Countdown to Peace or War." The panel was moderated by Wayne Firestone and included Andi Milens (JCPA), Hillel's Rabbi Avi Weinstein, University of California, Santa Cruz, Grinspoon Intern Paula Birnberg. The format is one that can easily be replicated on campus.

The audience was fairly evenly divided between those students who were in support of American intervention in Iraq and those opposed. Approximately two thirds of the audience said that they had formulated a view on intervention. An overwhelming majority of participants said that Jewish ideals of social justice and humanity should influence one's public policy decisions.

Students against the war generally expressed a feeling that the United States was setting a dangerous precedent by targeting Iraq when other countries are equally hostile. They fear that the United States will act like an imperial power, toppling one regime after another. Several students felt that the country is rushing into conflict without fully exploring all non-military options.

Many students who support the war based their arguments on a humanitarian desire to liberate the Iraqi people from an oppressive dictatorship. One Israeli spoke out in favor of the war by describing his experience ten years ago when Iraqi missiles fell on Israel. Remembering the birthday he spent wearing his gas mask, he told the audience, "I hope you never have fear like this."

One student expressed her ambivalence about the war but reminded the audience that regardless of one's opinion, as Jews our actions should always better the lives of others.

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Hillel's Policy and Roles

Values Clarification - Hillel doesn't have to provide answers, but we can provide guidelines for helping Jewish students clarify their values as they relate to conflict and war. With students coming down strongly on both sides of the debate, it is ever more critical that Hillel professionals set aside personal beliefs to support all students -- as they would with any other controversial issue. Hillel staff roles are to be listeners and community builders, not influencers of a particular political viewpoint.

While Hillel cannot take a specific position on war, many religious groups on campus may. More than ever, Jewish students will need to appreciate Hillel as "safe space" to disagree and argue - and still eat Shabbat dinner together. Hillel can also play an important role on campus as a forum for a variety of campus groups.

Here are some recommendations based on conversations with Hillel professionals across the United States:

· If you know there are many Jewish students opposed to a war, but who aren't organized, should you help them? Yes. Help them create an environment where they build community with each other, and where they create a space for Jewish students with similar interests.

· What are the limits? Especially in issues like these, our tradition honors a panoply of opinions, even those diametrically opposed. As those on the Webcast saw, it's hard to delegitimate opinions on these issues.

· Bring Jewish students with differing opinions on the war and encourage them to talk with each other. Help them understand the relevant Jewish values embedded in these issues. They may not have this opportunity outside of rallies (with lots of screaming) or op-ed duels.

· Work closely with Campus Security officials. Let them know what you are hearing on campus, and ask them to be in touch with you if there are rallies or programs planned that have the potential for inciting hateful speech or violence. They should know where Hillel is, what your hours are, and what your security procedures are.

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Resources

These texts are a summary of history's lessons. Tradition asks us to evaluate this war as urgent or optional. If we classify it as urgent, there's no problem. If we look at this war as optional, we have to decide if this is the best option, and understand whether the option is containment or conflict. Tradition speaks in discord, but these are the parameters for the arguments.

Time for War, A Time for Peace (PDF File 314kb) - compiled by Rabbi Avi Weinstein comprises Jewish sources and commentary on war and peace.
[Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader version 4.0 or higher.] "A

The Jewish Education Center of Cleveland has put together Jewish resources, discussion questions, maps and timelines in a curriculum that is easy to use and adapt for many settings and circumstances. It also includes texts on Judaism's humanitarian rules of war, and an extensive bibliography.

Hillel Professional Staff to Staff - In addition to the Web-boards, please feel free to be in touch with any member of the Charles and Lynn Schusterman International Center staff with program ideas, questions or concerns.

Your local Jewish Community Relations Council - Many of them already have community response plans in place for the myriad possibilities facing the Jewish community. Their answers may not be the same as what is required on your campus, but their strategies and decision-making processes may be a valuable tool for campus.

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Israel Detractors - Stealing the Stage

In a November 2002 report to the ICC on anti-war activities, AIPAC Leadership Development Director Jonathan Kessler documented several disturbing aspects of the anti-war movement and its potential impact on campus. He called it "a perfect storm."

Several national organizations leading anti-war movements are anti-Israel:

"National and regional organizers have long track records on behalf of the Palestinian cause and in opposition to Israel and the U.S.-Israel relationship. Organizations such as ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism), a spinoff of IAC (International Action Center) founded by Ramsey Clark; AWARE (Anti- War Anti-Racism Effort); and Not In Our Name, have long histories of involvement in anti-Israel active in the anti-war movement such as SUSTAIN (Stop US Tax Funded Aided to Israel Now), SAFE (Students Allied for Freedom and Equality), and ISM (International Solidarity Movement) helped organize a "Free Palestine" rally last April 20th, which brought over 75,000 demonstrators to DC."

The anti-war movement is politicizing the campus around a Middle East conflict:

"This large, newly politicized campus constituency will provide Israel's detractors with a huge pool of potential new recruits. Hundreds of thousands of people are being politicized around the Middle East conflict, providing the movement's radical organizers with a target-rich demographic. It is certainly possible that tens of thousands of newly politicized student activists turn from Iraq to the issue of Palestine since, on many campuses, the two are essentially sharing the same public space."

Selected examples of anti-war campus incidents:

· Rutgers University- An anti-war rally turned into an Israel-bashing demonstration.

· University of Michigan - Two speakers at a recent anti-war symposium spoke previously at the University of Michigan Divestment Conference this year.

· University of California, Davis - Weekly tabling has been cosponsored by California Students against the War and the Students for Justice in Palestine.

Exclusionary Tactics aimed at Jewish anti-war activists - Recently Michael Lerner, who signed a "Not In Our Name" anti-war pledge, was excluded from a San Francisco-based anti-war rally organized by multiple organizations, including ANSWER. Lerner was shut out in response to his criticism of ANSWER's anti-Israel antics.

Is Israel on the agenda? Essentials from the Jewish Council for Public Affairs

The organized Jewish community is not opposed to, nor does it support, the anti-war movement. American Jews have diverse views on how the United States should deal with Iraq. The organized Jewish community has spoken out about the need to vigorously address the danger to the U.S. and its allies posed by Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction, with the use of military force only as a last resort.
The Israeli-Palestinian issue is important, and the United States should continue its efforts to try to resolve that conflict. But it is unrelated to the situation in Iraq. It is inappropriate and ultimately counterproductive for groups to use the anti-war movement as a vehicle to delegitimate Israel.
Israel is not immune from criticism, but the messages being communicated at anti-war demonstrations are inaccurate, unfair and one-sided. When mentioning Palestinian suffering, one must also condemn suicide bombing and the targeting of civilians. Moreover, singling out Israel for human rights abuses, meaning holding Israel to a higher standard of behavior than other countries, borders on anti-Semitism. The effort to inject the Israeli-Palestinian issue into the anti-war message is not dissimilar from the hijacking of the UN Conference of Racism in Durban by anti-Israel forces.

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Bibliography
(excerpted from the Jewish Education Center of Cleveland)

a. Contemporary and Jewish Thought
Broyde, Rabbi Michael J. Fighting the War and the Peace: Battlefield Ethics, Peace Talks,Treaties and Pacifism in the Jewish Tradition.

Elcott, David. Power, War, and Peace in Jewish Tradition. CAJE & CLAL, 1991. This resource has learner-directed units to help students address the Jewish uses of power. To support the reading and understanding, a glossary is included in the back.

Kort. Michael. The Handbook of the Middle East. Twenty-First Century. Milbrook, 2002. Concise information about the Middle East. Countries in the region are grouped: Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon are discussed in one chapter. The writing is informative and impartial but the author, a social scientist, is quite clear in identifying the volatility, political instability, and authoritarianism of the region and the threat this is to world peace.

Rabbi Maurice Lamm, "Red or Dead: An Attempt at Formulating a Jewish Attitude," quoted in Preventing the Nuclear Holocaust: A Jewish Response. Commission on Social Action of Reform Judaism, UAHC, 1983, page 6.

While this book focuses on the issues surrounding nuclear war, it offers a very clear explanation of Judaism's laws regarding wars. Not only a narrative, this book contains essays by a large number of rabbis and experts in the field.

Albert Vorspan and David Saperstein, Jewish Dimensions of Social Justice: Tough Moral Choices of Our Time. NY: UAHC Press, 1998.

In the sections on Israel (chapter 6) and peace and international relations (chapter 7) there are right-to-the-point explanations of Judaism's views on war, especially within the context of the 1991 Gulf War's moral issues related to "just-war."

Walzer, Michael. Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations. Basic Books 1992.
A superb book originally published in 1977, which has set the stage for the discussion of just war theory for the past two decades. It contains a wealth of historical examples as well as theoretical insights.

b. Historical - Campus Protests
Gilbert, Marc Jason. The Vietnam War on Campus: Other Voices, More Distant Drums. Praeger Publisher, 2001
This book illustrates the diversity of the actors in the anti-Vietnam movement and the complexities of the movement itself. A collection of a number of historical essays, the anthology academically examines the various groups which evolved to become influential players in the movement-- Socialist, Libertarian, Conservative, Feminist, Religious groups, Southerners, and high school students. The thirteen essays and case studies ultimately point to a central theme: powerful movements, even those that appear cohesive, are highly complex and deeply nuanced.

Rosenblatt, Roger. Coming Apart: A Memoir of the Harvard Wars of 1969. Brown and Company, 1997.
Coming Apart describes the changing attitudes leading up to the anti-war riots at Harvard. It shows with a personal narrative the popular, political, and societal factors that avalanched into a violent movement against Vietnam. The progression of the riots is recorded through a professor's perspective and therefore the chronicle shows the ambivalence that many in the academic realm experienced during Vietnam.

c. Videos
Convoy from Sarajevo. UJA, 1992, 8:33 min.
Follow an Israeli rescue mission of Jews from besieged Sarajevo, through Serbian check-points to freedom in Zagreb Croatia in this intense video. This video could trigger discussion on the humanitarian aspects of helping those caught in a war.

Frontline/World: Truth and Lies in Baghdad. PBS. 2002, 60 minutes.
As the administration presses the United Nations to sanction a war to remove Saddam Hussein from power, a Frontline team journeys inside Iraq to investigate the claims and counter claims about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, its brutal record on human rights, and the real opposition an invading military force will face.

Gunning for Saddam. PBS, 2001, 60 minutes.
Confronted by bio-terrorism, powerful forces in America believe Iraqi President Saddam Hussein is to blame. This documentary examines those activities that experts believe Saddam was involved in and discusses the diplomatic problems his overthrow would present.

Jewish American Patriots. Ergo, 1993, 60 minutes.
Jewish-American soldiers have played an important role in the history of the United States from the time of the Revolutionary War up through Operation Desert Storm. Through archival photos and expert testimonials their patriotic acts are examined. In addition, the dedication and importance of the Jewish War Veterans organization is recounted.

d. Web Sites
MyJewishLearning.com's new War and Peace section covers a wealth of ancient and contemporary Jewish perspectives on issues such as weapons of mass destruction, conditions when war is and is not warranted, holy wars, and how to engage in peaceful resistance. The section offers highly relevant, thought-provoking information to individuals and groups engaged in today's active debates on warfare in the Middle East and other regions around the globe.

Jewish Law. This page is an article called, "Fighting the War and the Peace: Battlefield Ethics, Peace Talks, Treaties, and Pacifism in Jewish Tradition."

PBS. This is a full Web site from PBS with much background information on the building conflict with Iraq.

United Nations. Latest news on the UN-sponsored weapons inspections and other UN interests in terrorism around the world may be found on a page that links to information on Iraq, terrorism, and Middle East issues.

The Washington Post. - The Washington Post (as most other newspapers) have archives of information and background on Iraq, Saddam Hussein, and other pertinent issues.

Credits:
Compiled by the Hillel's Department of Jewish Student Life, Hillel's Israel Department and the Joseph Meyerhoff Center for Jewish Learning. Special thanks to Grinspoon Intern Julie Fishman of American University for selected research and reports.

[xlv] Zionist mendacity and ridiculousness reaches its pinnacle in arguments about Israelite or Judaean descent.

Yale Professor Benjamin Harshav, who himself seems to believe Zionist racial theories writes (Language in Time of Revolution, http://books.google.com/books?id=HPwR7pmx84IC&printsec=frontcover , p. 160):

On the contrary, the ultranationalist and gifted poet and writer Ze’ev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky, in his book Hebrew Pronunciation (still trying to mold the pronunciation of the new language in 1930!), opposed the Arabic pronunciation and claimed that our ancestors did not speak with an “Arabic accent” either. Canaan, he argued, was teeming with races, including the “remnants of the nations of Europe and Anatolia,” that is, Aryans (sic!), all of whom were swallowed up within Judea and Israel:

Thus the Hebrew was formed as a Mediterranean man, in whose blood and soul several aspirations and several flavors of the nations of the North and of the West were blended. […] To set the rules for the pronunciation of the renewed Hebrew, if we must seek points of support in other languages, let us look for them not in Arabic but in Western languages, especially in those which were born or developed on the shores of the Mediterranean. I am sure, for example, that the general impression of the sound, the “prosody” of ancient Hebrew was much more similar to that of Greece and Rome than to Arabic. (Jabotinsky 1930: 6-8)

[xlvi] The book is rather self-contradictory on this point because Entine also discusses the presence of non-Jewish women in ethnic Ashkenazi ancestry and rather ignorantly worries about the issue of conversion at a time period before matrilineal religious inheritance became the norm among any group practicing some form of Judaism. My web entry http://eaazi.blogspot.com/2005/07/zionazi-racial-science_03.html discusses problems with Jewish genetic science.

[xlvii] Martin Buber passed through an extreme German nationalist blood-and-soil phase, and his version of Zionism included all sorts of blood-based ideas (even though he himself was married to a German convert), and racist ideology remains pervasive in Israeli society.

Guy Grossman a representative from Ometz leSarev (Courage to Refuse) – they are leftists that refuse to serve in the occupied territories – spoke at Harvard in April 2002. After his discussion about the injustice in the OT, I pointed out that I had heard his position over and over since Yeshayhu Leibowitz visited Harvard in 1977. After each visiting speaker left, within a year conditions were always worse. I suggested that the issue was probably not the occupation but the core nature of Zionism, and he told me as well as the whole audience that he believed in Israel as a racist Jewish state. (Hilda Silverman [How the State of Israel Has Compromised Jewish Identity, http://eaazi.blogspot.com/2008/04/ghada-karmis-boston-college-talk.html] can confirm his statement.)

Here is his NPR interview from just before I talked with him: http://www.onpointradio.org/shows/2002/04/20020426_a_main.asp.

Jewish racism is not specific to Zionism. In 1872 the non-Zionist Russian Jewish academic Daniel Chwolson published a fairly racist defense of Jews from racist accusations in "Kharakteristika Semitskikh Narodov" (“Characteristics of the Semitic Nation”) in "Russki Vyestnik."

According to common wisdom Chwolson converted to Russian Orthodoxy in order to obtain an appointment at the University of St. Petersburg and then later at Dukhovnaya Akademiya. When asked whether he converted out of conviction, Chwolson is supposed to have said that he converted out of the conviction that it was better to be a professor at the University of St. Petersburg than to be a melamed (Jewish primary school teacher) in Ejszyszok. (Other versions of the joke identify other cities like Shklop.

Chwolson was important in the development of Russian Orientalism, which became an important input in Zionist ideology about Arabs and Muslims.

[xlviii] On issues related to tradition and religion, there were often serious tensions among Yiddishists. Gennay Estraikh notes in Soviet Yiddish: Language Planning and Linguistic Development (http://books.google.com/books?id=aFoOAAAAYAAJ), p. 117:

It is safe to say that the Soviet Yiddish orthographical reform – which would be widely seen as a (or even the) hallmark of denationalized and moribund Jewish culture – had been actually instigated by a group of non-communist Yiddishist. In fact, by the time of the 1917 revolution there were no real Yiddish philologists and writers in the Bolshevik party. We know (see Ch. 2) that Soviet Jewish institutions had to start working by and large through former Bundists, Poale Zionists, anarchists, and members of other political currents. For these Yiddishists-monists of every stripe, the revolution formed auspicious conditions to eclipse the power of tradition and to put their plans into practice (See Holmshtok 1932; 49-50;Beznosik 1932:76).

[xlix] Note that Isaac Breuer, who was mentioned earlier, took part in the founding of the Agudas Yisroel Movement. See World Agudath Israel or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Agudath_Israel.

[l] Some form of lingering attachment to Jewishness may explain the Soviet recognition of the State of Israel in 1948 and the sudden Zionization of the Russian Jewish population after the dismantlement of the Soviet state.

[li] While Yiddish socialism turned Zionist and Yiddish Marxism collapsed in reaction to the Rosenberg Trial, the Agudas Yisroel movement learned to cohabit with occult Zionists to a degree that would have been unimaginable in E. Europe.

Only Neturei Karta survives as a remnant of the transnational Yiddishist elite, and they would probably object to being described as Yiddishist even if somewhat ironically they tend to follow the pattern of inter bellum anti-Zionism that tried to maximize the dissemination of its message through alliance with anti-Zionist leftist groups. In the old days, the leftists were almost entirely Jewish and objected to Zionism on purely Jewish grounds. Nowadays, the leftist groups are mixed and more cognizant of Zionist harm and crimes against Palestinians.

[lii] During the Roxbury Mosque controversy, I asked Professor Sarna via email to take a stand against the David Project. He wrote back to me that David Project questions about the Islamic Society of Boston were legitimate. Professor Sarna’s wife is Ruth Langer. I have attended interfaith discussions with her. She seems to expect Christians to grovel and abase themselves to atone for anti-Semitism but had no problem with inviting Nonie Darwish to Boston College to slander Muslims, Arabs, Palestinians and Egyptians.

[liii] I have questions about the behavior of the NAACP during the early period of Jewish “guidance.” The recent release of Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas Blackmon opens up the question of the NAACP’s behavior during this time period. The effective reenslavement of African Americans after reconstruction was not really secret. There was even a popular saying to the effect that Lincoln freed the slaves and his son Robert Todd Lincoln as General Counsel and then as President of the Pullman Palace Car Company put them back in bondage. Many important Jewish philanthropists involved with fighting racism against Africans had interests in companies profiting from African American forced labor in the South.

[liv] Someone like Lewis that believes that Eastern European ethnic Ashkenazim had the right to steal Palestine from the native population on the basis of an etymological relationship between the word "Jew" and the word "Judea" would by the same reasoning argue that the Irish have the right to ethnically cleanse and steal Rome because the Irish mostly practice the Roman Catholic religion, which contains the word "Roman" in its name. Zionist ideology is so extreme that it is practically psychotic, and any Zionist or supporter of Zionism should be denaturalized and treated as a dangerous psychopath. Lewis’ judgment on issues of radicalization or perversion of tradition is not trustworthy because he himself is a dangerous radical and extremist propagandist.

[lv] The eminet German Semitologist Gotthelf Bergsträsser in Einführung in die Semitischen Sprachen, Munich, 1928 describes Modern Hebrew on p. 47 as:

… ein Hebraisch, das in Wirklichkeit eine europäische Sprache mit durchsichtiger hebräischer Verkleidung ist … mit nur ganz äusserlich hebräischem Charakter. [… a Hebrew which is in reality a European language with a transparent Hebrew disguise …with only a purely superficial Hebrew character.]

[lvi] World War II must be a typo. Palestine was a territory of the Ottoman Empire during World War I, and it was allied with Germany and Austria against the Czarist Empire.

[lvii] Felix Warburg was a member of one of the leading families of the German Geldjuden.

[lviii] The 1936 discussions between the Syrian National Bloc and Zionist leaders are also noteworthy and were prefigured in their inconclusiveness or futility by the 1934 meeting between David Ben-Gurion and Shakib Arslan. (See Syria and the French Mandate: The Politics of Arab Nationalism, 1920-1945 [http://books.google.com/books?id=QH1GHgAACAAJ] by Philip S. Khoury, pp. 548-552 and Islam Against the West: Shakib Arslan and the Campaign for Islamic Nationalism [http://books.google.com/books?id=QH1GHgAACAAJ] by William L. Cleveland, pp. 79-81.)

[lix] The playwright and screenwriter (and sometime director) Ben Hecht became a committed follower of Jabotinsky through his acquaintance with Peter Bergson (Hillel Kook).

Hecht wrote the stage version of The Front Page, which was adapted twice to screen as The Front Page, once as His Girl Friday, and once as Switching Channels.

While I have not researched in depth, Hecht’s commercial work shows little evidence of his Zionist commitments. He worked as an uncredited screenwriter in the adaptation of The Inspector General by Gogol. The Hollywood version of the story appears to have been modified in order to avoid issues that might have been sensitive to Jews.

[lx] As far as I can tell, no one has of yet truly sorted out the links (if any) in Leo Strauss’s thought to Heidegger, Schmitt, and Jabotinsky. The book review entitled THE USE AND ABUSE OF LEO STRAUSS IN THE SCHMITT REVIVAL ON THE GERMAN RIGHT—THE CASE OF HEINRICH MEIER by Robert Howse is interesting (http://faculty.law.umich.edu/rhowse/Drafts_and_Publications/Meierbookrev.pdf). At the very least they all partook of and participated in the same intellectual milieu.

[lxi] Despite common Jewish belief to the contrary, the allied policy of non-negotiation on material exchanges potentially of interest to the German government guaranteed the doom of European Jewry. Palestinian resistance was completely irrelevant.

William D. Rubinstein takes the opposite position that the German Nazis were committed to genocide of the Jews and not serious about negotiations in his book entitled The Myth of Rescue, Why the democracies could not have saved more Jews from the Nazis, [chapter 6, pp. 198-205]. Yet, he concludes that Holocaust scholar Lucy Dawidowicz is naive (p. 216) to believe: "A Jewish state would have ensured a safe have. A Jewish state would have made the difference."

The complete irrelevance of Palestinian resistance to the theft of Palestine by Zionists is also the immediate corollary of Rubinstein's analysis.

In any case, the Zionist movement generally opposed any rescue effort that did not bring Jews to Palestine under the assumption that the killing of Jews in Europe would benefit Zionism more by increasing sympathy than resettling Jews in a new Diaspora would, or as Yael Zerubavel puts it in Recovered Roots, Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition, p. 19:

"The highly negative perception of Exile often turned from shelilat hagalut (the repudiation of the state of living in exile) to shelilat hagolah (the condemnation of the people who live in exile), the product of its demeaning and regressive lifestyle.

Instead of blaming Palestinians for the magnitude of Jewish losses during the Holocaust, Jews should look a lot more critically at Jewish political leaders and Jewish behavior during the last half of the nineteenth and during the first half of the twentieth century. The official Jewish and Zionist leadership today hardly acts any better or more rationally as the ongoing effort to demonize over a billion Muslims shows.

[lxii] The anti-Jewish violence at Kishinev may have been an example of such “facilitation.”

[lxiii] According to Harvard Professor Richard Wilson (http://www.physics.harvard.edu/~wilson/publications/ppaper865.html):

The Chairman of the Board of Governors of IAEA, the late Bertrand Goldschmidt⁽¹⁶⁾, was livid [at the Israeli attack on Osirak] (as were many other experts). While as a Jew he had especial sympathy with Israel, he was concerned (as I was and am) that Israel had attacked the attempts by the world, with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), to control the genie which was let out of the bottle in 1945. I visited the nuclear research reactor in Iraq on December 29th 1982 and visually inspected the reactor (which had been only partially damaged) and its surrounding equipment⁽¹⁷⁾. To collect enough plutonium using OSIRAK would have taken decades not years. The day after the bombing, the Israeli Prime Minister Mr Begin incorrectly described OSIRAK. His description did match the Israeli DIMONA reactor about which we now know from what Mr Vanunu revealed to the Sunday Times⁽¹⁸⁾ in 1986.

Was Goldschmidt so willing in the 1950s to be critical of Zionist behavior and goals? He may have been involved so much with Labor Zionism that he was never able to reconcile himself with the Jabotinskian take-over of the Israeli State that took place when Begin became Prime Minister.

[lxiv] Solomon and Sheba (1959, MGM/UA) targets Ashkenazi Americans and superficial Zionistically-inclined biblical literalists.

Anachronism is pervasive in this film. The Star of David was completely unknown as an ancient "Israelite," Judean or even Jewish symbol until the last few hundred years. As a Jewish symbol, before Zionism the hexagram is associated mostly with Sabbatian and perhaps Frankist heresies. Yet, the troops of King David and King Solomon wear Stars of David on their uniforms, and it serves as a decoration throughout the film.

King Solomon, who is played by Yul Brynner, repeats all sorts of Zionist slogans throughout the movie, and the geopolitical situation described in the movie is obviously constructed to reflect the situation of the State of Israel in the 1950s.

Nevertheless, it is intriguing that the director, whose conceptualization of story the movie ultimately reflects, was King Vidor. King Vidor was one of the most talented of Hollywood directors. He directed the Wizard of Oz. He also had strong connection to Pre-Millennial Dispensationalist Christianity. He grew up in Vidor, Texas, which was founded by his father C. S. Vidor. This town is still noted for irredentist unreconstructed Confederate attitudes, apocalyptic evangelical fundamentalism, KKK connections and extreme racism. It is also very typical bedrock Texas community of the sort the supports George Bush.

Solomon and Sheba was not a blockbuster, but it did make money and was perhaps symptomatic of things yet to come.

[lxv] Integrating the Holocaust into Zionist propaganda seems to have been a large source of conflict for Zionists. Meyer Levin had difficulty finding a US publisher for The Diary of Anne Frank and then became involved in a long conflict over bringing it to the stage because the investors from “Our Crowd” (and Otto Frank) wanted more universalism and less Jewishness in the script. (See An Obsession with Anne Frank: Meyer Levin and the Diary [http://books.google.com/books?id=Jr9wGwAACAAJ] by Lawrence Graver.) Schindler’s List achieved the most successful integration of the Holocaust narrative into Zionist propaganda. (See Married to Another Man, Married to Another Woman, http://eaazi.blogspot.com/2007/10/married-to-another-man-married-to.html.)

[lxvi] The social effects of the Yiddish takeover of Jewish America are playing out to this day. Kriwaczek notes on pp. 20-21:

It would be wrong to detect in these developments a new interest in or dedication to the Jewish religion. The superficial trappings of ethnicity offer precisely the opposite: a Jewish identity without strings, one which doesn’t demand synagogue attendance or knowledge of, and strict adherence to, 613 commandments, now found over-burdensome by many who apply the standards of the modern western consumer society to ancient religious law. Nor does it require a style of everyday living incompatible with our age’s libertarian and egalitarian ideals. That is not to say, of course, that the seriously devout in their dark suits and trilby hats, with the white fringes of their ritual undergarments, tsitsis, hanging over their trousers, or the Chassidim decked out in the old Polish-Jewish costume, are not truly pious. But that the adoption of Yiddish ancestry, language, mores and customs by the generality of non-observant Jews – even those whose family origins lie far from authentic Yiddish territory – does serve as a social bridge. It provides a unifying force to marry the disparate sectors of the Jewish world: the ultra-orthodox, the Chassidim, conservative, reform and liberal Jews, agnostics and atheists “of Jewish origin,” and even new-age Jewish pagans, believers in astrology, transcendental meditation or with a dilettante fascination for Kabbalah, the medieval mystical Jewish tradition. Now suddenly to be Jewish and to be Yiddish are becoming the same thing. My parents would be perplexed, if not horrified.

[lxvii] In 1975 the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 3379.

Here is the text:

3379 (XXX). Elimination of all forms of racial discrimination The General Assemby, Recalling its resolution 1904 (XVIII) of 20 November 1963, proclaiming the United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, and in particular its affirmation that "any doctrine of racial differentiation or superiority is scientifically false, morally condemnable, socially unjust and dangerous" and its expression of alarm at "the manifestations of racial discrimination still in evidence in some areas in the world, some of which are imposed by certain Governments by means of legislative, administrative or other measures", Recalling also that, in its resolution 3151 G (XXVIII) of 14 December 1973, the General Assembly condemned, inter alia, the unholy alliance between South African racism and zionism, Taking note of the Declaration of Mexico on the Equality of Women and Their Contribution to Development and Peace 1975, proclaimed by the World Conference of the International Women's Year, held at Mexico City from 19 June to 2 July 1975, which promulgated the principle that "international co-operation and peace require the achievement of national liberation and independence, the elimination of colonialism and neo-colonialism, foreign occupation, zionism, apartheid and racial discrimination in all its forms, as well as the recognition of the dignity of peoples and their right to self-determination", Taking note also of resolution 77 (XII) adopted by the Assembly of Heads of State and Government of the Organization of African Unity at its twelfth ordinary session, held at Kampala from 28 July to 1 August 1975, which considered "that the racist regime in occupied Palestine and the racist regime in Zimbabwe and South Africa have a common imperialist origin, forming a whole and having the same racist structure and being organically linked in their policy aimed at repression of the dignity and integrity of the human being", Taking note also of the Political Declaration and Strategy to Strengthen International Peace and Security and to Intensify Solidarity and Mutual Assistance among Non-Aligned Countries, adopted at the Conference of Ministers for Foreign Affairs of Non-Aligned Countries held at Lima from 25 to 30 August 1975, which most severely condemned zionism as a threat to world peace and security and called upon all countries to oppose this racist and imperalist ideology, Determines that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.

[lxviii] New York Times, October 26, 2003

Neoconservatives, Then and Now

To the Editor:

In his article about neoconservatives (Week in Review, Oct. 19), James Atlas says that Nathan Glazer, Irving Kristol and I, as neoconservatives, felt that the Vietnam War had a ''persuasive rationale.'' I was not and never have been a ''neoconservative.'' Nor did I support the war.

During the war, at the suggestion of Harry McPherson at the White House, Fritz Stern and I, and half a dozen Columbia colleagues, sent a letter to President Lyndon B. Johnson questioning his policies. He sent back six pages defending them.

In 1972, I resigned as co-editor of The Public Interest, which Mr. Kristol and I founded, because Mr. Kristol decided to declare public support for Richard M. Nixon and the war, while I supported George McGovern. After talking with Harrison E. Salisbury, then The Times's Op-Ed editor, Mr. Kristol and I wrote essays on why we supported different candidates. I said I distrusted Mr. Nixon's character and manipulation of the war. Regrettably, the articles were crowded out at the last minute and did not appear.

My resignation from The Public Interest remained, because of the political differences, though I wrote then that ''friendship is more important than ideology,'' and I cherished my long friendship with Mr. Kristol.

DANIEL BELL
Cambridge, Mass., Oct. 19, 2003

[lxix] A study of the increasing Jewishness of the Justice, Human Services, Security, and State divisions of the US government before and after the founding of the State of Israel would be interesting.

[lxx] The connections of the Safran, Orebi (Gisèle [Orebi] Littman also known as Bat Ye’or), and Zayat families with each other during the 30s, 40s or 50s as well as with Jabotinsky during the 30s need to be investigated. The family of Haim Saban may also be connected with this group as well. See Shlepping to Moguldom or http://tinyurl.com/3t58o3.

The Orebis were Egyptian Italian Jews. Their original family name may have been Schinazi (Skinazi).

According to Gudrun Krämer in The Jewish in Modern Egypt, 1914-1952 (http://books.google.com/books?id=n6qjaDq1sRwC&printsec=frontcover), p. 46:

Emmanuel Misrahy Pasha as well as Moise bey Dichy and Isidore Feldman, who were among the delegation representing Egypt at the 1937 Montreux Conference, or Zaki bey Orebi, who as late as 1953 served as a member on the constitutional committee, were some of the most prominent lawyers in the country.

Krämer writes (p. 188):

One of the groups most active at the time [1933-4] was the revisionist movement, affiliated with Vladimir Jabotinsky, who in 1935 separated from the General Zionist Organization. The revisionists, led by the journalist Albert Staraselski, were particularly influential among Italian Jews in Alexandria, some of whom were moreover suspected of harboring fascist sympathies. According to a later activist, members were mostly Sephardim (i.e, Sephardi and Oriental Jews) of lower- and lower-middle class background, including many workers and a few professionals, but no students. Between 1931 and 1934, Staraselski even edited his own Zionist revisionist paper La Voix Juive.

She adds (p. 213):

The Jewish community of Port Said sent a letter [May 1948] to the governor of the Canal Zone confirming their loyalty to the state of Egypt and condemning Israel. The Jewish lawyer Zaki Orebi sent articles to the Egyptian press denouncing Zionism as a tool of imperialism. Al-Shams, which as late as March 1946 had published an article on the importance of creating a Jewish state in Palestine, did not mention the establishment of the State of Israel; and al-Kalīm, which in July 1945 was still calling for `aliya to Palestine, dissociated itself from Zionism and “vehemently” condemned the establishment of the “so-called state” of Israel.

The contrast with Gisèle [Orebi] Littman’s Zionist demonization of Islam is striking.

Littman’s husband David Gerald Littman has been particularly active in poisoning human rights discourse for the sake of Zionism. See David G. Littman or http://www.dhimmitude.org/littman-biography.html. Note that Christian Solidarity International (CSI) and International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) have been strongly associated with Charles Jacobs and the American Anti-Slavery Group or The David Project.

[lxxi] More philosophically inclined Neocons familiar with Straussian thought probably view themselves as the philosopher of Strauss’s secret teaching.

Strauss and Buber make substantial criticism of Heidegger. It is interesting that the political ideologies with which each came to be associated have not shown much genuine difference in practice.

[lxxii] The Bavarian Soviet Revolution, which was by German standards rather bloody forms the absent backstory to Das schreckliche Mädchen (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_schreckliche_M%C3%A4dchen, The Nasty Girl) (1990) directed by Michael Verhoeven, who with his wife Senta Berger (from Cast a Giant Shadow, Zionist Film: Normalizing Jewish Dual Loyalties, http://eaazi.blogspot.com/2007/10/zionist-film-normalizing-jewish-dual.html) have specialized in validating Jewish prejudices and have, as a consequence, done quite well with the Hollywood Crowd.

[lxxiii] There are still some confusions in Burg's mind, for Pollard and Vanunu are not exactly comparable. Israel spies on the US government in order to identify the means to manipulate US policy and to learn US secrets. Vanunu did serve anyone but his conscience.

[lxxiv] I wonder what will be the proper sentence an ex-President that served as Quisling to Sharon's Judeo-Hitler?

Here is Wikipedia on Quisling:

In the course of the treason trials following the war, Quisling, along with two other Nasjonal Samling leaders, Albert Viljam Hagelin and Ragnar Skancke, was convicted of high treason and executed by firing squad at Akershus Fortress on October 24, 1945.

Here is Wikipedia on Pétain:

In 1945, Pétain was tried for collaboration (or treason), convicted and sentenced to death by firing squad. Charles de Gaulle, who was briefly Prime Minister at the end of the war, commuted the sentence to life imprisonment on the grounds of his age and his Great War (World War I) contributions.

-----

Please note that Zionist punditry has no problem with flinging baseless accusations of treason and demanding imprisonment or deportation.

As far as I am concerned, turnabout is fair play.

If trying Bush for his crimes after he leaves office is not possible for political or legal reasons, the example of the Bush administration offers an alternative solution.

Not only might an extraordinary rendition of the soon-to-be former President to Iran

· provide a way to obtain information on Judonian subversion of the US government,

· demonstrate that the US really wants to be the status quo power as the Iranians must believe before they can renounce nuclear weapons (see note vii above), and

· serve as a peace offering that could finally provide the basis for good relations between the US and Iran,

but also as gas prices rise and the US economy tanks, Americans will probably be seriously looking for a scapegoat after the end of August. Because Bush really is responsible for a large part of the problem, it would be hard to identify a better choice for the role, and the USA would escape the immense costs of maintaining Bush as an ex-president.

Israel Lobbying in Comparison with Ordinary Lobbies

Fighting Back to Save America

Academia and Israel Lobbying

Mixing Israel Lobbying with Other Activities

Israel Advocates as Thought Police

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

Israel Lobbying in Comparison with Ordinary Lobbies

Struggle for America and the World

Fighting Back to Save America

Tikkun Olam and Progress

German Reform and Prussian Israel

Haskalah, the Russian Draft and Odessa

Jewish Philanthropic Politics in the USA

Judonia in Wilhelmine Germany

Judonia in the US Federal and State Judiciary

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

The United States of America

France

The United Kingdom

Camp David: Icing on the Cake

Iran Contra: The Marriage of Friedmanism and Neoconservatism

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

American Gleichschaltung,[422] Burning Arab Countries, Crashing the US Economy

[xiii] All in the Neocon Family

By Jim Lobe, AlterNet Posted on March 27, 2003, Printed on April 19, 2008 http://www.alternet.org/story/15481/

© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved. View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/15481/

Kipling’s poem below can be read as satirizing the conceits of empire building.

The White Man's Burden

Defamation row

Hefty verdict sends message of responsibility

J.J. GOLDBERG Special to Jewish News

Neoconservatives, Then and Now

By Jim Lobe, AlterNet
Posted on March 27, 2003, Printed on April 19, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/15481/

© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/15481/

J.J. GOLDBERG
Special to Jewish News