Those Americans who dare to challenge the strangle-hold that Israel and its friends have over US foreign policy will likely find themselves targeted even more aggressively in the upcoming year. Two weeks ago the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), widely reckoned to be the largest and most powerful component of the Jewish state’s lobby, declared that it will now begin directly funding political candidates who are perceived as pro-Israel. Up until now, AIPAC has preferred to operate somewhat in the shadows, representing itself as a organization that is in part “educational” to justify its 501(c)3 tax exempt status which it uses to send all new congressmen on propaganda trips to Israel.

Of course, that has always been a bit of a fiction enabled by a Justice Department that is inclined to ignore all Israeli misbehavior. There are a number of reasons why AIPAC should be regarded for what it is, i.e. an organization that has as a priority the promotion of Israeli interests without any concern for the damage being done to the United States and its institutions. Under US law, specifically the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1937, AIPAC should be compelled to forfeit its special tax status and register, which would permit the government to have full access to its finances and also require a record of its frequent meetings with the Israeli Embassy in Washington as well as with senior Israeli officials in Israel. It would also have to report its significant and unparalleled lobbying efforts on Capitol Hill. AIPAC would deny that it is actually directed or possibly funded in part by the Israeli government, but its website somewhat puts the lie to that conceit where it describes itself as “America’s Pro-Israel Lobby” before elaborating how “We are proud to be a diverse movement of passionate pro-Israel Americans.”

The other lie promoted by AIPAC is that, up until now, it has not funded the political campaigns of its many friends both in Congress and in state and local governments. The reality is that AIPAC and some of its associated groups have aggressively vetted candidates for office at all levels. During its annual summit in Washington, politicians in attendance have routinely held fundraisers at hotels and restaurants not at the AIPAC event but often at hotels within walking distance. It is known that AIPAC publishes for-internal-use-only a candidates’ “scoring card” prior to elections reflective of views on Israel. As AIPAC is itself funded by Jewish billionaires and is in regular contact with them, the exchange of information on who is a “friend” and deserving of campaign money would be easily accomplished without having to use AIPAC as a conduit.

The new structure will consist of a regular political action committee (PAC) able to contribute $5,000 maximum donations to identified candidates per race, and a super PAC, which can raise unlimited money for an individual candidate. AIPAC PAC will be the name of the regular PAC, while the super PAC has not yet received a label.

AIPAC spokesman Marshall Wittman sent out an email explaining the changes. In perhaps one of the most chilling statements that I have read recently, Wittman asserts that “The creation of a PAC and a super PAC is an opportunity to significantly deepen and strengthen the involvement of the pro-Israel community in politics.” Given Israel’s current dominance of Congress, the White House and the mainstream media one fears what might come next if stronger “involvement of the pro-Israel community in politics” becomes a reality. Jews constitute less than 2% of the US population and they already are hugely overrepresented in elite professions and politics while at the same time reserving to themselves perpetual victimhood to justify the preferential anti-democratic policies that they actually promote. Will Joe “I’m a Zionist” Biden’s cabinet be required by law to be 100% Jewish? Will Congress require a Jewish majority? Will the government be setting up gulags somewhere out west for people like me who oppose such dominance and the “Israel Project”? Where does this ever end to satisfy the Jewish lobby?

One might well ask why AIPAC is changing its platform to make itself even more accessible since it would seem that the shift to PACs does not much change what happens behind closed doors when politicians come begging for money. The answer may lie in the perception by Jewish groups and the Israeli government that Zionism is in trouble due to the accumulation of egregious human rights violations and war crime attacks on neighbors. The world view of Israel is increasingly negative. So the response is to open the door a bit to visibly dangle more money, which the Israeli Lobby has plenty of, to take on critics.

Israel and its friends are particularly concerned over the handful of progressives in Congress who have expressed reservations about the blind approval of Israeli crimes against humanity. The PACs will enable a more robust response by providing readily available money to run pro-Israel candidates against them to bring about their removal from Congress. The Zionists also worry about the growing support for the nonviolent Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS), which seeks to put the same kind of economic pressure on Israel that once brought about change in South Africa. Already Israel advocacy groups at the state level have succeeded in passing legislation in 27 states that in one way or another punishes anyone one who supports “boycotting” Israel. AIPAC would like that number to become 50 and it is also pushing hard on Congress for “hate legislation” that creates harsh criminal and civil penalties for anyone who questions the holocaust or criticizes Israel, which will be defined by the legislation as anti-Semitic acts.

Hand in hand with the moves at the state level, Jewish groups are rewriting text books to include more on the so-called holocaust, to sometimes include mandatory holocaust instruction at grade school and high school levels. In one bizarre incident in Washington DC, students were made to reenact “scenes” from the holocaust including mass executions and burials. One student was made to portray Adolph Hitler and instructed to include a simulated suicide at the end of the exercise.

This overreach all comes packaged together with alarming reports, put out inevitably by Jewish groups, regarding a surge in what it chooses to label as anti-Semitic crimes. Such “crimes” include numerous no-victim incidents like scrawled graffiti on walls or display of posters defending the Palestinians. The Anti-Defamation-League (ADL), which leads the pack in its constant cries of anti-Semitism, hypocritically claims blandly that it is working to “Combat Extremism and Hate.” That definition apparently does not include the treatment of the Palestinians at the hands of its co-religionists in Israel.

Indeed, the tendency of the Israel Lobby to overreach because it has become so arrogant due to its power is perhaps the key to bringing it down. A recent exchange in Florida demonstrates how the ADL, sensitive to any possible slight, actually reacted harshly to someone who was actually on its side. Five weeks ago, rabidly pro-Israeli Governor Ron DeSantis’ Press Secretary, Christina Pushaw tweeted a sarcastic comment stating that there was “no weird conspiracy theory stuff here” about press reports regarding the Republic of Georgia’s Prime Minister meeting with Rothschild & Co about investment opportunities. The ADL Florida Regional Director Sarah Emmons took offense and responded with the following:

“The belief that the Rothschilds manipulate currency and influence global events for personal enrichment and world domination is a staple of antisemitic conspiracy theorists. It’s deeply disturbing to see these kinds of conspiracies promoted by a member of Governor Ron DeSantis’ staff. Conspiracy theories, especially those with antisemitic origins, don’t belong in Florida’s highest office — or anywhere in the Sunshine State. We’ll be reaching out to the governor’s office to voice our concerns and discuss the issue.”

Jews and banking in the same sentence? Must be an anti-Semitic trope, as the expression goes. What if Pushaw had actually been bold enough to say something more to the point, like “Israel is trying to drag us into an unnecessary war with Iran”? In any event, the Zionists are preparing their offensive and we of the Israel-as-ally-agnostic community will find the upcoming year to be even more trying as the Jewish state and its friends tighten the screws to eliminate and even criminalize all criticism. Be prepared!

unz.com

By Alan MACLEOD

The Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin once said of history that there are decades that go by where nothing happens, and there are weeks where entire decades happen. In the past week, it seems as if the U.S. attitude towards Israel and Palestine has changed more than in the previous 50 years. Everybody seems to be acknowledging it, from progressive media to pillars of the establishment like The New York Times and The Washington Post. “The dam is cracking,” wrote Abier Khatib of the Open Society Foundation.

Objectively, the violence during Operation Protective Edge — the 2014 Israeli assault on Gaza — was far worse. Even as Israeli forces broke the newly adopted ceasefire just hours after they signed it, storming the Al-Aqsa Mosque again on Friday, the casualties are nothing like those of seven years ago, when well over two thousand Palestinians were killed. Yet in 2014, the reaction from the American political elite was one of total support for Israel.

As Ryan Grim from The Intercept noted, at the peak of the 2014 onslaught, Jessica Ramos, a progressive Democratic Party district leader in Queens, New York, took to Facebook simply to post the message “Palestine <3,” a statement that elicited a storm of condemnation and near hysteria from the political and media classes.

But seven years later, Ramos’ innocuous statement is nothing to the strong denunciations of Israel seen in the highest halls of power. Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI), leader of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, straightforwardly labeled Israel as the “oppressor,” condemning it for the “forced removal of people in their homes,” subjecting Palestinian children to military trials, and the “dehumanization of the lives of the Palestinians by having roads and entrances that are separate for some people which, all too often, looks like former South Africa.” This is not a both-sides issue, he concluded, insisting that “if you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”

Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), herself no radical, described Israel as an “apartheid” state. Ilhan Omar (DFL-MN), one of the first Muslim women to serve in Congress, denounced the violence. “The United States should not stand idly by while crimes against humanity are being committed with our backing,” she said.

We can’t stand idly by when the United States government sends $3.8 billion of military aid to Israel that is used to demolish Palestinian homes, imprison Palestinian children and displace Palestinian families.

Our government should not fund state violence in any form, anywhere. pic.twitter.com/9s1RCseVC5

— Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley (@RepPressley) May 14, 2021

A number of other prominent Democrats even offered a structural critique of U.S. empire, directly linking oppression abroad with oppression at home, in the style of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. when he said that the United States is “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) stood up in Congress to condemn the Biden administration’s pro-Israel vetoes at the U.N. Security Council and suggested that “we are scared to stand up to the incarceration of children in Palestine because maybe it will force us to confront the incarceration of children here on our border. By standing up to the injustices there, it will prompt us to stand up to the injustices here.”

“The ethnic cleansing continues now,” said Michigan Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib at a protest outside the State Department. “What they are doing to the Palestinian people is what they continue to do to our black brothers and sisters here; …it is all interconnected.”

“I rise today in solidarity with the Palestinian people,” began Rep. Cori Bush’s (D-MO) speech in Congress, a statement utterly unthinkable just a few years ago. Bush linked the systematic state oppression of people of color in the U.S. with that of the U.S. empire abroad. “The equipment that they used to brutalize us [at Ferguson] is the same equipment that we send to the Israeli military and police to terrorize Palestinians,” she said.

The fight for Black lives and the fight for Palestinian liberation are interconnected.

We oppose our money going to fund militarized policing, occupation, and systems of violent oppression and trauma.

We are anti-war. We are anti-occupation. And we are anti-apartheid. Period. pic.twitter.com/DO42FEre0W

— Congresswoman Cori Bush (@RepCori) May 13, 2021

Centrists quiet

Perhaps more significant than the full-throated solidarity for Palestine from progressives, the New York Times suggested, was the conspicuous silence of the establishment wing of the party. Famously pro-Israel senator Chuck Schumer, it noted, has been “largely silent” since the assault began on May 7. The Times, generally strongly pro-Israeli government, even gave Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) an article to state categorically that “Palestinian Lives Matter.”

Tlaib, a Palestinian-American, went further than most of her colleagues, very publicly accosting Joe Biden on his trip to Michigan, forcing a response from the president and showing the efficacy of inconveniencing those in positions of power.

Democrats nationwide are paying close attention to the mayoral race in New York City. Andrew Yang, who drew a great deal of his support from the left and those who wanted to see an anti-establishment figure win, has seen his numbers crash spectacularly after endorsing Israeli actions in Gaza this month. “I’m standing with the people of Israel who are coming under bombardment attacks, and condemn the Hamas terrorists. The people of NYC will always stand with our brothers and sisters in Israel who face down terrorism and persevere,” he said. As a consequence, Yang has faced a rebellion from his own supporters, and has been consistently heckled by New Yorkers to the point of canceling publicity events. In March, he was polling at 32% — the runaway favorite for mayor. Today, his support has dropped to 15% and he has fallen into third place, per findings from Polling USA.

The Taiwanese-American entrepreneur should have seen this coming. In March, he was strongly challenged by podcast hosts Krystal Ball and Kyle Kulinski — two progressives very supportive of his candidacy — on his opposition to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Yang dodged the question then but had time to see the writing on the wall.

Media moves off its square

Likewise, three years ago, CNN fired its contributor Professor Marc Lamont Hill over his speech at the United Nations, where he compared Israel to apartheid South Africa and hoped for a “free Palestine from the river to the sea.” That phrase, critics claimed, is a Hamas dog whistle calling for the destruction of Israel.

Yet last week MSNBC host Ali Velshi felt comfortable going on a long monologue lambasting Israel and calling for a complete rethink of U.S. foreign policy with respect to the Jewish state.

“The idea that it is even remotely controversial to call what Israel has imposed on Palestinians a form of apartheid is laughable. One look at a current map of Israel, Gaza, and the Occupied Territories conjures up only one other example: apartheid-era South Africa,” Velshi told his huge audience, as he highlighted how Israel systematically restricts Gazans use of electricity and free movement.

Other MSNBC contributors were equally scathing. “The latest Israel-Palestine crisis isn’t a ‘real estate dispute.’ It’s ethnic cleansing,” read one headline.

Meanwhile, political comedian John Oliver took aim at the “both sides” rhetoric of much of the media, noting that “there is a massive imbalance when it comes to the two sides’ weaponry and capabilities,” and joking that bombing an international press office building “sure seems like a war crime regardless of whether you send a courtesy heads-up text.”

Astonishingly, one could even hear accurate condemnation of the Israeli government on Fox News. Contributor Geraldo Rivera sounded almost like an anti-war activist as he told viewers that the United States had helped Israel turn Gaza into “one of the world’s largest prison camps.” “It’s outrageous that we gave Israel these hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of weapons without insisting on a ceasefire now,” he said, judging that the people of the U.S. are “complicit in an ongoing crime against humanity,” and even praising Congresswoman Tlaib for her stance.

“The ‘Unshakable’ Bonds of Friendship With Israel Are Shaking” wrote senior New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who started his column by stating “If you oppose war crimes only by your enemies, it’s not clear that you actually oppose war crimes.” Kristof condemned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government for bringing down a “rain of destruction that has killed scores of children, damaged 17 hospitals and clinics and forced 72,000 people to flee their homes,” and rejected the notion that criticism of Israel was anti-Semitic. In recent days, the Times has been full of articles about the changing attitude to Israel/Palestine, seemingly priming readers for a sudden shift in perspective.

Opening the Overton window

A key concept in sociology and political science is the Overton window: the range of ideas politically acceptable in mainstream life at any given time. Ideas inside the window are considered sensible and rational while those outside are brushed off as too radical or unthinkable. It appears that all of a sudden the Overton window on Israel/Palestine is rapidly shifting. But why is this? To understand better, MintPress spoke to a number of academics, experts and rights groups familiar with the subject.

“There’s no question that discourse about Israel and Palestine has shifted significantly since our book ‘The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy’ was published [in 2007], although U.S. policy still lags behind this shift,” said Stephen Walt of Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. When the book was published in 2007, it elicited a “furious backlash” from Jewish groups, academics and politicians that threatened to end Walt and his co-author John Mearshimer’s careers. Former CIA director James Woolsey condemned it as “stunningly deceptive,” while the National Director of the Anti-Defamation League wrote an entire book-length rebuttal attempting to prove Mearshimer and Walt were anti-Semites.

Walt maintains that much of the blame for the shift must be laid at the feet of the Israeli government itself, explaining to MintPress that:

Firstly, it became increasingly difficult to overlook the Netanyahu government’s opposition to a viable Palestinian state and its continued efforts to expand settlements and create a ‘Greater Israel.’ This problem was all-too-clear during the Obama administration, which tried very hard to promote a two-state solution, offered Israel lots of additional support, and got stiffed at every turn. Netanyahu’s open alignment with U.S. Republicans probably reinforced a growing split with many Democrats.”

In 2015, Netanyahu accepted an invitation from the GOP to speak at a Joint Session of Congress, where he harangued President Obama and attempted to scuttle the U.S.-Iran nuclear deal — thus openly interfering in American politics. His closeness to Obama successor Donald Trump only deepened this rift. Before, support for Israel was considered a bipartisan no-brainer. But today, senior Republican figures consistently paint the Democrats as Palestinian sympathizers and the GOP as Israel’s only true friend, breaking that framework. Today, polls show that Republicans are overwhelmingly pro-Israeli, but more Democrats’ sympathies lie with Palestinians.

The fact that Netanyahu himself is now tweeting out videos from far-right pseudo-university PragerU as his military offensive sputters suggests that he is aware that maintaining bipartisan support is untenable and that his administration has decided to throw their lot in with the GOP and hope for the best.

Netanyahu and the Israeli government still maintain unwavering support from the extremely large Evangelical Christian movement. Chris Hedges — an ordained minister and a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, who spent years as the New York Times’ Bureau Chief in Jerusalem — explained that the root of their support lies in right-wing prophecies about the end times. For their fulfillment, these prophecies require Israel to be under Jewish control and for the al-Aqsa Mosque to be destroyed. Only when this happens will the righteous ascend to heaven and the damned (including the Jewish people) be cast into hell. Hedges told MintPress on Thursday:

There is this bizarre alliance between the ultra right in Israel and the Christian right [in the U.S.] even though at their core the Christian right is deeply anti-Semitic because it does not recognize the legitimacy of Judaism. And that political alliance has strengthened as a new generation of American Jews no longer have the emotional ties to Israel as the older generation has and many of them have begun to question the murderous repression of the apartheid state.”

Globally, Israel has aligned itself with a new cadre of right-wing authoritarian governments, such as Narendra Modi’s India and Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil. Many far-right anti-Semitic hate groups also ironically hold the state of Israel in high regard, as they see the Jewish supremacist state as a model for their own dreams of a white nationalist nation. For example, Norwegian fascist terrorist Anders Brevik, whose manifesto is full of anti-Semitic allegations about Jews, professes to “love” the idea and implementation of Zionist Israel for precisely this reason.

For all the pinkwashing and vegan washing, it is clear Israeli society has lurched to the right, so much so that even former Prime Minister Ehud Barak has warned that the country has been infected with fascism. A 2016 poll found that 48% of Jewish Israelis wanted to see the Arab population ethnically cleansed.

MintPress also spoke to esteemed Jewish American academic Noam Chomsky, author of the classic 1983 book “Fateful Triangle: the United States, Israel and the Palestinians.” “In the 1970s, the Israeli government made a fateful decision to choose expansion over security,” Chomsky said, explaining:

There were clear options for a political settlement on the international border, a two-state settlement in which both Israel and a new Palestinian state would have ‘the right to exist in peace and security’ within secure and recognized borders — to quote the words of a UN Security Resolution supported by the main Arab states, bitterly opposed by Israel, vetoed by Washington, one of many such opportunities. It was predictable then — and predicted — that the result would be Israel’s greater resort to violence and repression, moral degeneration, and drift to the racist right.”

Israel is, therefore, playing a very dangerous game, aligning itself with far-right regimes and embracing groups that hate Jews the most, even as it attacks anti-racist movements like the British Labour Party under Jeremy Cobyn.

Jumping the shark with American Jews

The fact that it has moved steadily rightward presents serious problems for Israel, which needs the constant diplomatic, economic and military support of the world’s sole superpower to maintain itself in its current form. As a whole, Jewish Americans are distinctly liberal: 71% identify as Democrats. And while 58% still feel emotionally attached to Israel, a majority of the younger generation report no connection to the state. Today, more Jewish Americans say the U.S. is too supportive of Israel than not supportive enough, and more than twice as many rate Netanyahu as a poor leader than a good one.

Professor Walt suggested that much of the reason for this internal shift has been the tireless activism of young Jewish people themselves. “The creation of pro-peace groups such as J Street and the courageous writings of Peter Beinart and others have opened eyes even more. The work of Israeli groups such as Breaking the Silence and B’Tselem was very important too, along with international groups such as Human Rights Watch,” Walt told MintPress adding:

Generational change here in the U.S. (both within the American Jewish community and more broadly in society) has undermined the old narratives about Israel and focused attention on minority rights. And the old claim that Israel is “the only democracy in the Middle East” rings hollow when it treats its own Arab citizens as second-class and continues to repress the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.”

Both B’Tselem and Human Rights Watch came out with reports this year formally designating Israel an apartheid regime, providing many more with the framework and structure to repeat the allegation. “It was inevitable that Human Rights Watch would have to declare Israel an apartheid state and, from what I hear, Amnesty International is going to be next to say it,” Asa Winstanley of the Electronic Intifada told MintPress. “It puts Israel’s backers in a difficult spot because Human Rights Watch is really part of the establishment, so they cannot just dismiss it and it makes it impossible to ignore… It is harder for them to say Human Rights Watch is anti-Semitic, but they’re trying it anyway,” he added.

Others emphasized the work of Palestinian activists worldwide for helping shift the Overton window. “There has been positive movement in terms of how people in the U.S. talk about Palestine, and I think we can attribute this change to the work Palestinians are doing on the ground in Palestine and here in the United States,” Danaka Katovich, Middle East and Peace Collective coordinator for CODEPINK, a female-led anti war group, told MintPress:

Still, Palestinians risk a lot when they speak out against the occupation. They risk losing their jobs, educational opportunities, and more. It’s their bravery, determination, and stories that I think have caused the shift that we are seeing today. However, there is still much to be done to change the discourse.”

Another difference from the days of Operation Protective Edge in 2014 is the composition of Congress. Since 2016, a new wave of far more progressive Democrats has been elected and challenged the party hierarchy from the left on a number of issues, forcing many to, at least rhetorically, support policies like a Green New Deal, Medicare for All and higher minimum wages. Israel/Palestine is a foreign policy issue on which they have stood firm as well. Some in this new wave, such as Ilhan Omar or Rashida Tlaib, are Muslim, but other Democrats taking a new line towards Israel, such as Jon Ossoff, are Jewish. Together, there are now simply too many elected officials speaking out to effectively attack them all at once.

“After our book was published, it became easier for people to talk about the elephant in the room (i.e., the power of AIPAC and other groups in the lobby). Everybody knew that what we had said was true, but now it was easier to speak of it. What had been a taboo subject was now out in the open,” Walt concluded.

Chomsky has also noticed a difference. In the past, he said he needed police protection to speak about Israel, lest his lectures were broken up by demonstrations. But this has not been the case for some time. “Palestinian solidarity is one of the biggest issues on campus,” he stated in an interview with Democracy Now! “[There has been an] enormous change.”

The online battlefield

The rise of the internet and social media has played a big part in reshaping how the public sees the conflict. Previously, virtually all images of the Middle East Americans saw came mediated through the enormous corporate news giants. Today, however, most people have a high quality video camera in their pocket and the ability to share images with millions of people online. This has helped break the grip over communication previously held by just a few companies.

Raw images have undermined carefully crafted narrative from the Israeli government. Walt brought up the example of the 2010 Israeli attack on the Mavi Marmara aid ship as an example of social media “tarnishing” Israel’s image, stating that “it has become impossible to see Israel as a weak and vulnerable David surrounded by a menacing Arab Goliath; instead, we all see a powerful Israel using its superior military capabilities to oppress millions of innocent people and deny them political rights.”

Chomsky was of a similar opinion, that as Israeli crimes have become more egregious they have been more difficult to suppress. “By now Israel’s internal racism has come under more scrutiny as well. With the veil of intense propaganda being lifted slowly, crucial U.S. participation in Israeli crimes is also coming more clearly into view. With committed activism, that could have salutary effects,” he said.

Israel is uniquely preoccupied with trying to control its image online. The government employs professional trolls to promote their country online and defame critics. The Israeli state also has many deep connections with the social media giants. Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked boasted that she worked closely with Facebook to censor Palestinian voices, with the Silicon Valley corporation agreeing to take down around 95% of the content she asked them to. Today, former Director General of the Ministry of Justice Emi Palmor sits on Facebook’s advisory council, the board ultimately responsible for content moderation on the world’s largest news and social media platform. In her previous role in the Israeli government, Palmor directly oversaw the systematic ethnic cleansing of Palestine and the stripping of the Palestinians’ legal rights.

Palestinian advocates are constantly harrassed, and many have their accounts flagged and reported spuriously. This reached a fever pitch last week, as hundreds reported being locked out of their accounts. When asked for comment by MintPress, Facebook insisted that it was merely a “technical bug.” MintPress CEO Mnar Muhawesh Adley was locked out of both her private and public accounts.

Israel certainly has not helped itself in the way it has treated foreign journalists over the past two weeks. On May 15, Israeli airstrikes targeted the 11-story building that housed the headquarters of both Al-Jazeera and the Associated Press, levelling it to the ground. Rather than apologize, the IDF insinuated that those organizations were in league with Hamas terrorists. The IDF also roughed up veteran CNN correspondent Ben Wedeman and his team. In total Israel has destroyed the offices of at least 23 media outlets in the space of just a few days, according to Reporters Without Borders. Foreign media have also been blocked from entering Gaza for weeks.

This ould yet prove to be an own goal, seeing as Israel relies upon Western media to launder its image. But brazenly attacking your partners is simply not a good long-term strategy, and could end up being a “big mistake,” as MSNBC wrote.

A chance like no other

With the United States changing its focus from the Middle East to China and the Pacific, the signs are there that the taboo around criticizing the Israeli occupation can be broken and that the Overton window is rapidly shifting. Although Joe Biden is nothing if not a committed Zionist, he has also proven to be willing to change his views to suit the prevailing current. There has been no serious change yet; the U.S. government is still supporting Israel, but there appears to be a serious rebellion both from inside the Democratic Party and among many in the corporate media. The task for those who support the end to the occupation is to expand the Overton window and put radical change on the agenda. The times are a-changin’.

mintpressnews.com

I am, of course, referring to Israel. It does not require a brilliant observer to note how Israel and its allies inside the U.S. have become very skilled at milking the government in the United States at all levels for every bit of financial aid, trade concessions, military hardware and political cover that is possible to obtain. The flow of dollars, goods, and protection is never actually debated in any serious way and is often, in fact, negotiated directly by Congress or state legislatures directly with the Israeli lobbyists. This corruption and manipulation of the U.S. governmental system by people who are basically foreign agents is something like a criminal enterprise and one can only imagine the screams of outrage coming from the New York Times if there were a similar arrangement with any other country.

The latest revelation about Israel’s cheating involves subsidies that were paid covertly by Israeli government agencies to groups in the United States which in turn took direction from the Jewish state, often inter alia damaging genuine American interests. The groups involved failed to disclose the payments, which is a felony. They also failed to register under the terms of the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, which mandates penalties for groups and individuals acting on behalf of foreign governments. In particular, FARA mandates that the finances and relationships of the foreign affiliated organization be open to Department of the Justice inspection. It states that “any person who acts as an agent, representative, employee, or servant, or otherwise acts at the order, request, or under the direction or control of a foreign principal.” Those who fail to disclose might be penalized by up to five years in prison and fines up to $250,000.

Israel’s various friends and proxies, uniquely, have been de facto exempt from any regulation by the U.S. government. The last serious attempt to register a major lobbying entity was made by John F. Kennedy, who sought to have the predecessor organization to today’s American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) comply with FARA. Kennedy was killed before he could complete the process.

To be sure, the U.S. government has recently been aggressive in demanding FARA registration for other nations as well as for Americans working for foreign powers. There have been several prominent FARA cases in the news. Major Russian news agencies operating in the U.S. were compelled to register in 2017 because they were funded largely or in part by the Kremlin. Also, as part of their plea deals, the former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn both conceded that they had failed to comply with FARA when working as consultants with foreign governments.

A leading recipient of the Israeli government’s largesse has been the Israel Allies Foundation (IAF), which has a presence in 43 countries worldwide, though it is registered in the U.S. as a non-profit. It received a grant of $100,000 from Israel’s Strategic Affairs Ministry in 2019, part of the $6.6 million that was doled out to eleven American organizations in 2018-9. Israel Allies particularly uses Lawfare to target the non-violent Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS), which has a large and growing presence on university campuses. Effective lobbying by IAF in the U.S. has resulted in more than half of all states passing legislation that bans or limits the BDS activity while legislation that would criminalize organizations working against Israel has also been moving through congress. IAF has been directly involved in drafting such legislation and has more recently been pushing for new laws that would legally define criticism of Israel as anti-Semitism.

The Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs initially, in 2015-7, tried to give money openly to diaspora organizations but found that many American Jewish groups, to their credit, would not take it due to concerns over FARA and being accused of “dual loyalty.” So, the Ministry created an ostensibly non-government “public benefit company” cut-out to distribute the cash in a more secretive fashion. The mechanism was given the operational name Concert.

Concert’s sole purpose was to provide money to diaspora advocacy groups that would work primarily against BDS and other efforts to delegitimize the Jewish state. Concert had an independent board, but its activity of directed by the Strategic Affairs Ministry’s director-general.

Concert’s internal documents are predictably vague in describing the activities that it was funding, and one might assume that they are purposely misleading. They refer to “defensive and offensive” actions, on “corporate responsibility,” “the digital battlefield,” and regarding “amplification units” that would provide “support for organizations in a pro-Israeli network.” The intention was to improve Israel’s image due to the widespread and completely accurate perception that its human rights record is among the worst in the world. Concert was created to serve as a mechanism to be exploited where situations prevailed that “require an ‘outside the government’ discussion with the different target audiences… [and] provide a rapid and coordinated response against the attempts to tarnish the image of Israel around the world.”

Interestingly, one of the most recognizable recipients of Concert funds was Christians United for Israel (CUFI), America’s largest pro-Israel group, which received nearly $1.3 million in February 2019 to pay for several 10 week-long “pilgrimages” to the Holy Land. Each pilgrimage involved thirty “influential Christian clerics from the U.S.” who were clearly propagandized while they were in the Middle East. Other large disbursements went to predominantly Jewish student groups, presumably to provide them with both resources and necessary training to oppose campus critics of Israel.

The simple way to deal with the massive and illegal Israeli influencing operations that are being directed against the United States would be first of all to deduct every identifiable dollar that is being spent by the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to empower supporters in America from the $3.8 billion plus that Israel receives each year directly from the U.S. Treasury. Israel would not be concerned if the United States were to recover a paltry $10 million or so, but it would definitely send a message.

And then one might follow-up by requiring all the Israeli proxies that together make up the Israel Lobby to register under FARA. One might start with AIPAC, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) but there will be many, many more before the work is done. And CUFI, for sure. The fundamentalist Christian head cases that place Israel’s interests ahead of those of their own country finally need to have their bell rung.

She is ‘woke’ on social issues, yet has been notably zealous in incarcerating pot-smoking LA youths, and paradoxically, drew “very little black support in the primaries”. However, in this era of mass protest, Harris will plausibly gild Biden’s ticket –  as a Law and Order Vice-President. That counts. And the ‘woke’ contingent on Wall Street, they love her. That counts too.

But down to ‘brass tacks’: Does this tell us anything about Biden’s probable foreign policy, were he to prevail in November? Harris indeed has not adopted war and militarism as her platform –  however she hasn’t offered a major foreign policy speech, either. Nonetheless, hers, is no blank page –  she has very discernible stances.

Her ‘signature stance’ has been a strong commitment to Israel and to AIPAC: In March 2017, she told the AIPAC Policy Conference: “Let me be clear about what I believe: I stand with Israel –  because of our shared values, which are so fundamental to the founding of both our nations.” At the 2018 AIPAC conference, Harris gave an off-the-record speech in which she recounted how, “As a child, I never sold Girl Scout cookies, I went around with a JNFUSA (The Jewish National Fund) box, collecting funds to plant trees in Israel”. And her husband is Jewish. (She skipped the 2019 conference, along with several other Presidential candidates.)

Apart from unwavering support for Israel (which the more panglossian amongst us may see simply as the entry-price to office in the U.S.), Harris has been noted for bellicose rhetoric toward North Korea and Russia, and for her reluctance to co-sponsor legislation aimed at preventing war with Venezuela and North Korea. In short, on such military intervention issues, she’s in line with—and sometimes to the right of—a hawkish Democratic establishment.

‘Move along: Nothing to see here!’ might seem the appropriate riposte: She’s just ‘boilerplate’ Democrat. Maybe that’s right. But to focus on this would be to miss the wood for the trees –  for the foreign policy real action is happening almost unnoticed elsewhere.

Executive editor of The American Conservative, Kelly Beaucar Vlahos, warns that we might miss noticing the Neo-con “wolves, dressed in NeverTrumper clothing, sniffing around Joe Biden’s foreign policy circle, bent on influencing his China policy – and more” (emphasis added):

“Never-Trumper Republicans have been worming their way into the Biden campaign, offering to flesh out his “coalition” ahead of the election and pushing their way into the foreign policy discussions, particularly on China. Given their shared history with liberal interventionists already in the campaign, don’t for a second think that there aren’t hungry neoconservatives among them trying to get a seat at the table.

“Some hawkish Democrats may see the neocons as convenient allies in preserving an outdated interventionist mindset,” offers Matt Duss, who is Sen. Bernie Sanders’ longtime foreign policy advisor, who maintains close ties with the Democratic campaign to replace President Trump. “And of course, neocons are desperate for any opportunity to salvage their own relevance.””

A Daily Beast report at the end of last month quoted unnamed “individuals who work for conservative think tanks in Washington” acknowledging that they were “informally speaking with members of the Biden team in recent weeks”.

Their focus is said to be on the ‘failing China trade deal’, and Trump’s supposedly ‘weak posture’. Reportedly, they are “so frustrated with the U.S-China trade deal, and the Administration’s efforts to hold Beijing accountable, that they are willing to offer counsel to the Democratic nominee”. And moreover, are proposing not just support to the Democratic candidate, but also to provide guidance on ways to formulate a tough economic posture toward Beijing, (in order to undermine Trump).

In a later update, the Daily Beast says that with the election less than 100 days away, some members of Trump’s own inner circle are pushing him too in the hawkish direction –  urging him to make a new bet: Rather than to put his chips on the trade deal, Trump would hit the electoral jackpot (they counsel) were he just to ‘blow it up’.

Four people knowledgeable about the issue told The Daily Beast that in the past three weeks, an internal campaign has intensified within the Trump administration to convince the president ‘to nuke’ the China trade deal.

The ‘back-story’ here is Biden’s campaign to expand its months of back-channel outreach to Republicans –  with the goal of hitting President Trump on his signature campaign issue: China.

Interviews with several of the most prominent NeverTrump Republicans reveal that for now, the nascent effort to mobilise a ‘Republicans for Biden’ movement –  alongside the extant Lincoln Project –  is loosely defined, and could ultimately take a variety of forms. Essentially, however, Team Biden is being pressed by the Republican strategists to ‘out-Hawk’ Trump on China policy by taking a tougher line than the President. In other words, the campaign is setting up to be about who will be tougher – and will be fought out on the President’s key platform.

Kelley Beaucar Vlahos opines that: “It’s hard to think that real hardline conservative hawks on China, like Steve Bannon and the folks at the Committee on the Present Danger: China [see here] are involved in the Biden collusion. Some of them are certainly neoconservative … They’d be pushing for cold –  if not hot –  war from Trump’s Right – [and therefore would] not be hedging bets with Biden”. Vlahos continues:

“No, it can only be the establishment Republican types, perched at places like Brookings and AEI, who now see some sort of opening on the D-team. But if they seem like the mushy end of the Right flank, think again. These guys are charter members of the Washington foreign policy consensus, mixed in with neoconservative NeverTrumpers, like Eliot Cohen and Robert Kagan (his wife Victoria Nuland was a top neo-con official in the Clinton State Department) and who have despised Trump from the beginning. They think his America First foreign policy is “deeply misguided” and leading the country to “crisis.””

Ah –  It is precisely here where the link back to the choice of Kamala Harris becomes more obvious. She is not likely to bring the Progressive Dems constituency to the Biden campaign (It would take Elizabeth Warren as VP to do that), and she has not had an impressive record of attracting the Black vote in LA. But, she would mesh-in seamlessly with the ‘Washington foreign policy consensus’, whilst still giving ‘the ticket’ a veneer of wokeness.

She thus could be an effective point person for NeverTrumper Republicans. This is a path down which Biden, it seems, is already embarked –  at least as far as China is concerned. On domestic issues – such as energy – Biden tilts more towards Sanders, and even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (the latter sits on his advisory panel).

And Biden – if elected in November – may not last (or, at least, not attempt a second term). In which case, Harris could theoretically be front-runner for 2024 Presidential contest. And here is the point: If there is one area where these neo-con entryists despise ‘policy weakness’ as much as they do on China, it is Iran. On that issue, Harris is clear. She is an unreserved Israeli partisan.

Anyone therefore hoping for a softening of U.S. policy towards Iran, should Biden win, may be pinning too much hope on Bernie Saunders or ‘The Squad’ being able to ‘round off the sharp edges from U.S. foreign policy stances’ –  they may be being overly-optimistic. It is just too obvious: As China veers towards Iran and the Middle East in search of energy-supply security, the temptation of any success with forcing a hawkish stance on China will be to link the two (Iran and China), and to try to push for a ‘kill-two-birds-with-one-stone’ policy stance.

Keep the eyes fixed on the neo-con ‘wolves’, not on Harris.

So what to do? To whom to turn now, for future patronage and subvention (since self-sufficiency is nigh impossible)? It is not easy. Real root-and-branch reform – though universally acknowledged as essential – is effectively blocked by one élite, or sectarian ‘capo’, or another. Hence the desire to do what has always been done before: to try to find a way to hold the ‘stick by its middle’ and solicit patronage from all the differing political poles.

But this ignores something essential: Trump ‘politics’, and his undisguised contempt for the ‘liberal middle’, leaves no middle to the ‘stick’ on which Mid-East States may seize. Trump intentionally polarises issues into binary extremes.

The cumulative effect of this Trumpian, max-pressure, binary approach – against the backdrop of decades of US underpinning for Israel’s security hegemony – may well end: not with the so-called ‘jungle’, but an extended desert, with the region’s few independent means of production devastated by endless ‘hot’ wars; Treasury wars, and harsh ubiquitous sanctions. (The formerly productive olive trees of Syria’s Idlib are stumps, and the agricultural lands of al-Hasakah face ruination, as but one example.)

In other words, we are postulating a collapsed economic model – not just for Jordan and Lebanon, who already face that prospect – but for wealthy Gulf States, too. For, without decisive reforms (which likely will be blocked by one corrupt élite, or another), the richest Middle Eastern states could exhaust their net financial wealth by 2027 and 2034, as the region becomes a net debtor, according to IMF projections out this month. Within another decade, their total non-oil wealth would also be exhausted, the IMF predicts. And ‘this’ prospect – faces an oversized, young, unemployed, and angry youth population, ready to explode.

Here is another Trumpian vanished ‘Liberal Middle’ (taken from the Israeli daily, Haaretz). Jonathan Tobin notes that the problem facing the pro-Israel lobby, AIPAC, is that the political climate simply is no longer conducive to the way it has carried out its mission for the last several decades. In earlier political times, it was easy for the group to act as an umbrella group, uniting supporters of Israel from the right, left and centre behind a common agenda of support for Israel’s government and the Jewish state’s security, the article observes:

The first obstacle to AIPAC’s ability to maintain at least a façade of bipartisanship rests on the fact that the Trump administration has given both Israel and its American friends more or less everything it has been demanding of every White House for the last 40 years. Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal put him in sync with the lobby’s desperate battle to defeat President Barack Obama’s signature foreign policy accomplishment.

But with Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, support for its sovereignty on the Golan Heights, demands for the Palestinian Authority to halt its subsidies for terrorists and their families and now a peace plan that is heavily tilted toward the Jewish state, he’s left no room for the Democrats to compete with him for the title of Israel’s friend.

Worse – there is no ‘middle to the stick’ in the Democratic Party either, (or for the region’s Arab ‘Democratic’ diaspora) – for, as Max Blumenthal, explains in conversation with Robert Scheer, the Clinton Machine will do anything to stop Bernie Sanders (the title of the interview that is focused on the rightward shift of the Clintonite Democratic Party, and of Israeli politics). The discussion converges on Bernie Sanders, the man who possibly might become the first Jewish president of the United States (if the Democratic machine does not succeed in destroying Sanders first, as Blumenthal suggests). Financial markets seem to think that Sanders may win the nomination, only subsequently to lose to Trump in November (which would be fine by US market investors).

“It seems to me [there is] a real contradiction [in] the Democratic Party, which you know quite a bit about,” when it comes to Israel, says Scheer. “There’s this great loathsome feeling about Donald Trump. And many of these people don’t really like [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu. You know, the polling data shows that Jews are, you know, just about as open to the concern for the Palestinians as any other group. And Bernie Sanders, the one Jewish candidate, is the one who dared to bring up the Palestinians — that they have rights also, that they’re human beings. He’s being attacked for it, like you [Blumenthal], as a self-hating Jew.”

So, hoping for a more accommodating Democratic President after 2020 may prove a wistful dream: the expectation is that Sanders either will be stopped before nomination, or else defeated, after, at elections. Either way, the “Deal of the Century” stays.

Here lies the dilemma: Netanyahu, working closely with Jarred Kushner, has – piece by piece – taken the middle ground – the two-state solution – off the table, by insisting on conditions to it, intended never to be met. More than that, they have undercut the ‘moderates’ of the region by demonstrating that the Oslo ‘Peace Process’ could be suffocated with no adverse consequences for Israel; the ‘deal of the century’ could be launched to international silence; the US Embassy moved to Jerusalem, to zero adverse reaction; Jerusalem ‘made’ Israel’s undivided capital, and the Golan ‘given’ to Israel – all without any of the damage to Israel that the Israeli and regional ‘moderates’ insisted would result from such actions. Rather, contrary to the moderates’ expectations of Israeli isolation, world leaders flocked to Jerusalem (for the recent Holocaust summit).

Back to Jordan: just as the political climate for AIPAC, after Trump’s Israeli radical polarisation, has become ‘no longer conducive to the way the lobby has carried out its mission for the last several decades’ – so, too, is it for Jordan. And for the same reason.

Once the Jordan valley has been annexed (it probably won’t be long in coming), Jordan will lose relevance for Israel, except as a recipient for Palestinian refugees. (The CIA, already tightly embedded into the Jordanian Intelligence Service, will act for Israeli interests there.) And the writing already is on the wall: Lebanon will be told that it must assimilate its Palestinians with full rights (this is already happening); and Jordan is likely to be next.

It is a commonplace today that Jordan is caught between a rock and a hard place. But even that comfortless expression implies that Jordan has options – whereas effectively it has none. What can Jordan offer the Gulf (beyond being a monarchy, and therefore being a ‘bird of the feather’, with other regional monarchs)? Would Jordan’s future stipends be assured by a more overtly hostile attitude to Iran? Possibly, but already Saudi funding to Jordan is curtailed, and the Gulf States are facing their own financial stringencies. The main import of escalating further King Abdallah’s Shi’a Axis ‘threat’ might simply be to complicate the Kingdom’s economic relations with its neighbours, who all enjoy better relations with Iran, than does Jordan.

This is not intended to pick unfairly on Jordan or Lebanon. In reality, Trump’s deliberate slashing away of ‘the liberal middle’ is to make the key dynamics, and power distribution between the parties, stand out – starkly. In short, to attenuate any negotiation down to a binary ‘take my offer’ or be crushed financially, alternative. This is the New York real-estate way. When a tenant stands in the way of a big development, weaken him; take away his electricity; turn off the water, and finally infest him with rats. That is the binary choice: get out of my way, or stay – and your life will be made miserable.

The Palestinians are being made unwanted tenants (within an actualized Greater Israel real-estate ‘development’). Eventually they will tire of being miserable, (Kushner’s team may presume), and find accommodation elsewhere (i.e. in Jordan and Lebanon, inter alia). Insisting limply on the (now defunct) two-state solution, or any other initiative, probably will not help Jordan – that’s the whole point of binary politics – to brush aside compromise proposals.

No doubt about it. Trump’s binary Middle East policies – in a profound way – threaten Arab States. Some states may not survive the experience intact. Indeed, the editor of Al-AkhbarLebanese daily, Ibrahim Al-Amine, wrote this week: “It seems that the American decision to let Lebanon collapse is being implemented. The Saudis have endorsed the same idea … [and] for the rest of the regional sides: these seem to be standing in a state of major confusion…”.

It may not be so apparent now, but the nature of this threat soon will be. Don’t the Americans understand the implications of creating a desperate, unemployed and radicalised constituency across the entire Middle East? Of course, some do. They are not stupid. But for those who don’t, policy is just process: the long term process of establishing Greater Israel. As the American novelist, Upton Sinclair, said (for those who do have an inkling): “It is [nonetheless] difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it”.

There is nothing morally or legally questionable in any of these aims.  But the United States Congress does not concern itself with morality or legality if these are inconsistent with its policy concerning Israel, which, as enunciated by Representative Lee Zeldin of New York, is based on the conviction that “Israel is our best ally in the Mid East; a beacon of hope, freedom & liberty, surrounded by existential threats.”  Fox News reported that the condemnatory resolution “has been pushed by AIPAC, the influential Israel lobby in Washington,” which explains a great deal, as AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee is a very powerful organisation, with deep pockets and wide-spreading hands.

In February 2019 The Intercept noted  that “AIPAC, on its own website, recruits members to join its ‘Congressional Club,’ and commit to give at least $5,000 per election cycle.” In a film called The Lobby “Eric Gallagher, a top official at AIPAC from 2010 to 2015, tells an Al Jazeera reporter that AIPAC gets results.”  A secret recording revealed that “Getting $38 billion in security aid to Israel matters, which is what AIPAC just did. Everything AIPAC does is focused on influencing Congress.”

And AIPAC influences Congress and other agencies extremely efficiently, even to the extent of managing to have Al Jazeera refrain from broadcasting the US-focused version of The Lobby. The Director of Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit, Clayton Swisher, said that pressure included “pro-Israel lobbyists in Washington threatening to convince Congress to register the network as ‘foreign agents,’ and false accusations of anti-Semitism against the producers of the documentary.”  That’s all you need:  the mere mention of anti-Semitism makes everyone suck their teeth, roll their eyes, and leap out of the way.

It so happened that the day before Congress condemned an initiative aimed at having Israel recognise the rights of Palestinians and abide by international law, the Israelis carried out an operation of destruction that was specifically aimed against the rights of Palestinians and was contrary to international law.  As the BBC reported, it involved 200 Israeli soldiers and 700 police, weapons at the ready, deploying to the Palestinian village of Wadi Hummus at 4 in the morning of July 22, along with bulldozers and excavators that proceeded to destroy Palestinian homes.

There wasn’t a word of objection from the US Administration whose Tweeter-in-Chief had made his views on Israel crystal-clear on 16 July when he announced that the four non-white female Members of Congress whom he loathes to the point of psychosis are “a bunch of Communists [who] hate Israel.”  Moreover, they “talk about Israel like they’re a bunch of   thugs, not victims of the entire region.”  On the other hand, the European Union stated that “Israel’s settlement policy, including actions taken in that context, such as forced transfers, evictions, demolitions and confiscations of homes, is illegal under international law. In line with the EU’s long-standing position, we expect the Israeli authorities to immediately halt the ongoing demolitions.”  Fat chance of that — just as there is no possibility that the United states or the United Kingdom will support pursuit of international law when it is violated by Israel.

Britain is on its way out of the European Union, so has no say in EU policy, but in any case it wouldn’t agree about criticism of Israel because the governing Conservative Party fosters an organisation called ‘Conservative Friends of Israel’ (CFI) whose members constitute some eighty per cent of Conservative Members of Parliament.

Boris Johnson, Britain’s Trump-loving new prime minister, is a fervid supporter of CFI which supported him in his bid to be head of the Conservative party. On 23 July, after his selection to be leader and thus prime minister, the CFI’s Chairmen, Stephen Crabb MP and Lord Pickles, and Honorary President Lord Polak declared that “From his refusal to boycott Israeli goods in his time as Mayor of London through to his instrumental role as Foreign Secretary…  Boris has a long history of standing shoulder to shoulder with Israel and the Jewish community. Mr Johnson continued to display his resolute support… reiterating his deep support for Israel and pledging to be a champion for Jews in Britain and around the world.”

One of Johnson’s first ministerial appointments was of Ms Priti Patel to be Home Secretary. She had resigned from the Cabinet of PM Theresa May in November 2017 because it had been discovered that she had been telling lies, which wasn’t in itself unusual, but the circumstances were intriguing.  As the BBC headlined about the then head of International Development :  “Priti Patel quits cabinet over Israel meetings row” which involved her apologising to the prime minister “after unauthorised meetings in August with Israeli politicians — including prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu — came to light. But it later emerged she had two further meetings without government officials present in September.”  Not only that, but in a media interview “she gave the false impression that the foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, and the Foreign Office knew about her meetings in Israel.”

It’s one of these irregular verbs which were met with much laughter during the marvellous BBC series ‘Yes Minister’ and ‘Yes, Prime Minister’ — ‘I make a misstatement;  she gives a false impression;  he is in prison for telling lies.’

And it was decidedly strange that the egregious Lord Polak, he of the statement that Boris Johnson stands “shoulder to shoulder with Israel” accompanied Patel at 13 of her 14 meetings with Israeli officials during August and September. What on earth could have been going on?

Of course she had no reason to worry about having to resign for telling lies, because at the time of her disgrace Boris Johnson told the BBC that “Priti Patel has been a very good colleague and friend for a long time and a first class secretary of state for international development. It’s been a real pleasure working with her and I’m sure she has a great future ahead of her.”  The man has the gift of prophecy.

Then Johnson appointed Michael Gove to his Cabinet as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, which is a weird appointment that gives a lot of power and very little responsibility. Gove had been demonstrably disloyal to Johnson during the first leadership struggle, in what the Daily Telegraph called a “spectacular act of treachery” but all was forgiven because, as recorded approvingly by the Conservative Friends of Israel he believes that anti-Zionism and antisemitism are “two sides of the same coin”, which means that anybody who criticises Israel’s nationalistic persecution of Palestinians is an anti-Semite. He believes that “the test for any civilised society is whether it stands with the Jewish people, and whether it stands with Israel. It is a pleasure to stand with the Jewish people. It is a duty to stand with Israel.”

The Palestinians are not going to get one tiny bit of support from either the United States or Britain when their houses are bulldozed to rubble.  They can expect no criticism from Washington or London when their children are killed in Gaza by Israeli soldiers.

The West Bank of the Jordan River, between Israel and Jordan, was captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war. Then it annexed East Jerusalem. Both areas are defined in international law as occupied territory.  Although this is ignored by the US and Britain it was intriguing that in a minor but telling legal finding in Canada on 30 July, a judge ruled that wines made in Jewish settlements in the West Bank should not carry labels that say “Product of Israel” because of course the settlements are built on Palestinian land.

But there’s no point in telling that to the Israeli-supporting wine connoisseur Donald Trump or the US Congress or any member of Britain’s governing Conservative party, because international law means nothing when there are other priorities.

Whitney WEBB

he largest pro-Israel organization in the United States is not composed of Jews, but of Christian evangelicals, with a total membership of 7 million, more than 2 million more members than the entirety of the American Jewish community.

Members of this organization, Christians United for Israel (CUFI), met in Washington on Monday, attracting thousands of attendees and featuring speeches from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Secretary of State and former CIA Director Mike Pompeo, Vice President Mike Pence, and National Security Advisor John Bolton. CUFI’s leader, controversial evangelical preacher John Hagee, has met with President Donald Trump several times and was recently part of an exclusive White House meeting in March on the administration’s upcoming “peace plan” for Israel and Palestine.

CUFI is but one of many organizations throughout American history that have promoted the state of Israel and Zionism on the grounds that a Jewish ethnostate in Palestine is a requirement for the fulfillment of end-times prophecy and necessary for Jesus Christ to return to Earth — an event Christians often refer to as “the Second Coming.”

While organizations like CUFI and its predecessors have long seen the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, and the later Israeli victory and conquest of Jerusalem in 1967, as the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy, there is one prophecy that this sect of evangelical Christians believes is the only thing standing between them and the Second Coming. There are estimated to be more than 20 million of these Christians, often referred to as Christian Zionists, in the United States and they are a key voting bloc and source of political donations for the Republican Party.

As was explored in previous installments of this series, these Christian Zionists, much like religious Zionist extremists in Israel, believe that the Al Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock must be replaced with a Third Jewish Temple in order to usher in the end times.

These two groups of different faiths, since the 19th century, have repeatedly formed an opportunistic alliance in order to ensure the fulfillment of their respective prophecies, despite the fact that members of the other faith are rarely if ever on the same page in their interpretations of what occurs after the temple’s construction.

This alliance, based on a mutual obsession with hastening the coming of the Apocalypse, continues to this day and now, more than at any other time in history, these groups have reached the heights of power in both Israel and the United States. Parts I and II of this exclusive series explored how this branch of religious Zionism has come to dominate the current right-wing government of Israel and has led Israel’s current government to take definitive steps towards the destruction of the Al Aqsa mosque and the imminent construction of a Third Temple.

Now this installment (Part III) will show how this movement’s Christian counterpart in the United States, Christian Zionism, has likewise become a dominant force in American politics, particularly following the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, where this apocalyptic vision is a major driver behind his administration’s Middle East policy.

Yet, this fire-and-brimstone vision of the end times has long been a guide for prominent figures in American history and the American elite, even predating Zionism’s founding as a political movement. Thus, Christian Zionism’s influence on Trump administration policy is merely the latest of a long list of examples where prophecy and politics have mixed in American history, often with world-altering results.

Puritans, Prophecy and Palestine

Accounts of the role of European and North American Christians in the creation of the state of Israel often begin with the Balfour Declaration of 1917, but the efforts of certain Christian groups in England and the United States to create a Jewish state in Palestine actually date back centuries earlier and significantly predate Zionism’s official founding by Theodore Herzl.

Among the first advocates for the physical immigration of European Jews to Palestine were the Puritans, an offshoot of Christian Protestantism that emerged in the late 16th century and became influential in England and, later, in the American colonies. Influential Puritans devoted considerable interest to the role of Jews in eschatology, or end-times theology, with many — such as John Owen, a 17th-century theologian, member of parliament, and administrator at Oxford — believing that the physical return of Jews to Palestine was necessary for the fulfillment of end-time prophecy.

While the Puritan roots of what would later become known as Christian Zionism are often overlooked in modern accounts of where and why American evangelical support for Israel began, its adherents still clearly acknowledge its legacy. For instance, on Monday at the CUFI conference, Pompeo, himself a Christian Zionist known for his obsession with the end times, told the group the following:

Christian support in America for Zion — for a Jewish homeland — runs back to the early Puritan settlers, and it has endured for centuries. Indeed, our second president [John Adams], a couple years back, said… ‘I really wish the Jews again in Judea an independent nation.’

These Puritan beliefs, which persist today and have only grown in popularity, became more entrenched in England and colonial America with time, especially among the monied political class, and led to a variety of interpretations regarding exactly what the Bible says about the end times. Among the most influential was the development of Christian “dispensationalism,” an interpretive framework that uses the Bible to divide history into different periods of “dispensations” and sees the Bible’s prophetic references to “Israel” as signifying an ethnically Jewish nation established in Palestine.

Dispensationalism was largely developed by English-Irish preacher John Nelson Darby, who believed that the God-ordained fates of Israel and the Christian church were completely separate, with the latter to be physically removed from the Earth by God prior to a foretold period of earthly suffering known as the Tribulation.

In Darby’s view, the Tribulation would begin following the construction of a Third Jewish Temple on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. This belief in the physical removal of Christians from the Earth prior to the Tribulation, widely known as “the rapture,” was invented by Darby in the 1820s and its lack of scriptural support has been widely noted by theologians of various denominations as well as biblical scholars. However, it is important to point that there are differences among dispensationalist Christians as to whether the rapture will occur before, during or after the Tribulation period.

Yet, despite its relatively short existence as an idea and lack of support in the Bible, the rapture was enthusiastically adopted by some churches in England and the United States, particularly the latter. This was largely thanks to the work of highly controversial theologian Cyrus Scofield.

Notably, Darby’s brand of Christian eschatology coincides with similar developments in Jewish eschatology, namely the ideas of Rabbi Zvi Hirsh Kalisher and the creation of a new branch of Jewish messianism that believed that Jews must proactively work to hasten the coming of their messiah by immigrating to Israel and building a Third Temple on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Darby’s beliefs, and those he inspired promoted something similar in the sense that Christians could hasten the coming of the rapture and the Tribulation by promoting the immigration of Jews to Israel as well as the construction of a Third Jewish Temple.

Christian Zionists pave the way for Theodore Herzl

Darby traveled to North America and several other countries to popularize his ideas, meeting several influential pastors throughout the English speaking world, including James Brookes, the future mentor of Cyrus Scofield. His travels and the spread of his written works popularized his eschatological views among certain circles of American and English Christians during the religious revival of the 19th century. Darby’s beliefs were particularly attractive to the elite of both countries, with some English noblemen placing newspaper advertisements urging Jews to immigrate to Palestine as early as the 1840s.

Another prominent figure influenced by Darby’s end-times doctrine was the American preacher Charles Taze Russell, whose church later gave rise to several different churches, including the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Decades before the founding of modern political Zionism, Russell began preaching — not just to Christians, but to Jews in the United States and elsewhere — about the need for mass Jewish immigration to Palestine.

As Rabbi Kalisher had done a few decades prior, Russell penned a letter in 1891 to a wealthy member of the Rothschild banking family, Edmond de Rothschild, as well as Maurice von Hirsch, a wealthy German financier, about his plan for the Jewish settlement of Palestine. Russell described his plan as follows:

My suggestion is that the wealthy Hebrews purchase from Turkey, at a fair valuation, all of her property interest in these lands: i.e., all of the Government lands (lands not held by private owners), under the provision that Syria and Palestine shall be constituted a free state.”

The same plan was to resurface a few years later in arguably the most influential Zionist book of all time, Theodore Herzl’s The Jewish State, which was published in 1896.

Russell addresses an audience of American Jews in New York in 1910. Photo | Public Domain

It is unknown whether Rothschild or Hirsch was influenced at all by Russell’s letter, though Russell’s ideas did have a lasting impact on some prominent American Jews and American Christians with regard to his promotion of Jewish immigration to Palestine.

The same year that Russell wrote his letter to de Rothschild and von Hirsch, another influential dispensationalist preacher wrote another document that is often overlooked in exploring the role of American Christians in the development and popularization of Zionism. William E. Blackstone, an American preacher who was greatly influenced by Darby and other dispensationalists of the era, had spent decades promoting with great fervor the immigration of Jews to Palestine as a means of fulfilling Biblical prophecy.

The culmination of Blackstone’s efforts came in the form of the Blackstone Memorial, a petition that pleaded that then-President of the United States Benjamin Harrison and his secretary of state, James Blaine, take action “in favor of the restoration of Palestine to the Jews.” The largely forgotten petition asked Harrison and Blaine to use their influence to “secure the holding at an early date, of an international conference to consider the condition of the Israelites and their claims to Palestine as their ancient home, and to promote, in all other just and proper ways, the alleviation of their suffering condition.”

As with Russell’s letter to de Rothschild and von Hirsch, it is unknown exactly how influential the Blackstone Memorial was in influencing the views or policies of Harrison or Blaine. However, the Blackstone Memorial petition is highly significant because of its signatories, which included the most influential and wealthiest Americans of the era, the majority of whom were Christians.

Signatories of the Blackstone Memorial included J.D. Rockefeller, the country’s first billionaire; J.P. Morgan, the wealthy banker; William McKinley, future president of the United States; Thomas Brackett Reed, then speaker of the House; Melville Fuller, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court; the mayors of New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Boston and Chicago; the editors of the Boston Globe, New York Times, Washington Post, and Chicago Tribune, among others; and numerous other members of Congress, as well as influential businessmen and clergymen. Though some rabbis were included as signatories, the petition’s content was opposed by most American Jewish communities. In other words, the primary goal of Zionism, before it even became a movement, was widely supported by the American Christian elite, but opposed by American Jews.

The Blackstone Memorial would later attract the attention of Louis Brandeis, one of the most prominent American Jewish Zionists, who would later refer to Blackstone as the real “founding father of Zionism,” according to Brandeis’ close friend Nathan Straus. Brandeis would eventually succeed in convincing an elderly Blackstone to petition then-President Woodrow Wilson with a second Blackstone Memorial in 1916 that was presented in private to Wilson nearly a year later.

Instead of gathering signatures from prominent members of America’s elite class, Blackstone this time focused on shoring up support from Protestant organizations, namely the Presbyterian Church, in keeping with Wilson’s Presbyterian faith. According to historian Jerry Klinger, president of the Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation, this change in focus had been Brandeis’, not Blackstone’s, idea.

Alison Weir, author of Against Our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create Israel, described Brandeis as “one of the most influential” American Zionists and a key figure in the efforts to push Wilson to support the formation of a Jewish state in Palestine, of which Blackstone’s second petition was part. However, Weir asserted that Blackstone’s second petition was secondary to a so-called “gentleman’s agreement” whereby English officials promised to support a Jewish state in Palestine if American Zionists, led by Brandeis, were able to secure the United States’ entry into World War I.

Wilson ultimately supported Blackstone’s new document, which was never presented publicly to the president, but privately by Rabbi Stephen Wise. This second Blackstone Memorial was a key component of the Brandeis-led campaign that eventually guaranteed American support — i.e., private support — for the Balfour Declaration, which established British intentions to support a Jewish ethnostate in Palestine. Notably, the Balfour Declaration is named for the then-English Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour, himself a Christian dispensationalist, though Weir told MintPress that Balfour was more likely influenced by political imperatives than religious motives. The only person in the British cabinet to oppose the Balfour Declaration was its only Jewish member, Edwin Montagu.

The Balfour Declaration was addressed to a member of the Rothschild banking family, Lionel Walter Rothschild, the last in a series of letters written to members of the Rothschild family urging them to use their wealth and political influence to favor the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine: from Rabbi Kalisher, who wrote to Baron Amschel Rothschild in 1836; to Charles Taze Russell, who wrote to Edmond de Rothschild in 1891; and finally to the Balfour Declaration, written to Lionel Walter Rothschild in 1917.

Weir told MintPress that the Rothschilds figure so prominently in these early efforts to establish a Jewish state in Palestine owing to “their wealth and the power that goes with it,” making them very sought after by those who felt that a Jewish state could be formed in Palestine by the purchase of the territory by wealthy European Jews, as both Kalisher and Russell had proposed. However, the Balfour Declaration was addressed to the Rothschilds because, at that time, members of the Rothschild family, Edmond de Rothschild in particular, had become among the strongest supporters of the Zionist cause.

Though the declaration carries his name, it is unclear whether Balfour himself actually authored the document. Some historians — such as Michael Rubinstein, former president of the Jewish Historical Society of England — have made the case that the declaration itself was written by Leopold Amery, then-political secretary of England’s War Cabinet and a Zionist who, despite his commitment to the Zionist cause, obfuscated his Jewish roots for much of his career for reasons that are still the source of speculation.

As shown by the Balfour Declaration and the lobbying efforts that led to its creation, support for what would soon become known as Zionism among the nobility of England and the United States was already formidable before Herzl even began work on The Jewish State. It is worth considering that the power and influence of this religiously-motivated class of Christian elites had an influence on Herzl and his ideas, particularly given the fact that dispensationalist Christians had been promoting a Jewish ethnostate in Palestine at a time when the idea was unpopular among many prominent Jews in Europe and the United States.

Furthermore, the role of Christian Zionists, as they would later become known, continued well after Herzl began his Zionist activities, and resulted in many of the most influential acts that led to the establishment of the State of Israel, including the Balfour Declaration.

Notably, Herzl’s own success in promoting his views following the publication of The Jewish State was largely due to English dispensationalist pastor William Hechler. Hechler, while serving as chaplain at the British Embassy in Vienna,forged an alliance and later close friendship with Herzl and was critical to negotiating meetings between Herzl and prominent members of the German government, including Kaiser Wilhelm II, which lent necessary political legitimacy to Herzl’s Zionist movement.

A largely overlooked figure in the rise of Zionism, Hechler is mentioned in Herzl’s diary more than any other person and passionately felt that the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine would bring about the end times. Hechler is also known to have been extremely interested in the construction of a Third Jewish Temple on the Temple Mount, having devotedconsiderable time to creating models of that Temple, some of which he prominently displayed in his office and showed to Herzl with great enthusiasm during their first meeting.

Herzl gives Kaiser Wilhelm II a tour of an early Jewish settlement near Jaffa, Palestine in 1898. Photo | Israel GPO

The Hechler-Herzl alliance is one early example of how Christian Zionists and Jewish Zionists each used the motivations of the other for political gain despite the fact that Christian Zionists often hold anti-Semitic views and secular Zionists, as well as religious Zionists, do not hold Christianity in high regard. This opportunism on the parts of both Christian and Jewish Zionists has been a key feature in the rise of Zionism, particularly in the United States, and the case of Cyrus Scofield, the man more responsible than any for popularizing Christian Zionism among American evangelicals, offers another important example.

The surprising story of Cyrus Scofield

There is perhaps no other book that has been more influential in the dissemination of Christian Zionism in the United States than the Scofield Reference Bible, a version of the King James Bible whose annotations were written by Cyrus Scofield. Scofield — who had no formal theological training, though he later claimed to have a D.D. (doctor of divinity degree) — originally worked as a lawyer and political operative in the state of Kansas and eventually became the district attorney of that state.

Soon after his appointment to the position, he was forced to resign as a result of numerous allegations of corruption, including bribery, forging signatures on banknotes and stealing political donations from then-Senator of Kansas James Ingalls. During this time, Scofield abandoned his wife and two daughters, an action since blamed on the burgeoning scandals he was facing as well as his self-admitted heavy drinking habits.

Amid this backdrop, Scofield is said to have become an evangelical around the year 1879 and soon became associated with prominent dispensationalist preachers of the era, including Dwight Moody and James Brookes. Local papers at the time, such as the Atchison Patriot, regarded Scofield’s conversion and career change with great skepticism, referring to Scofield as the “late lawyer, politician and shyster generally” who had disgraced himself by committing “many malicious acts.”

Scofield went on to pastor relatively small churches, moving from Kansas to Dallas, Texas, and later Massachusetts. Yet, despite his lack of renown and  his troubled history, by 1901 Scofield had managed to gain entrance to an exclusive men’s club in New York, the Lotos Club, whose members at the time included steel magnate and multi-millionaire Andrew Carnegie, members of the Vanderbilt family, and famous American writer Samuel Clemens, better known by his pen name, Mark Twain.

Pastor Scofield, center, with the Deacons of the First Congregational Church of Dallas, circa 1880s

Scofield’s membership in this exclusive club — as well as the club’s patronage of his activities, which granted him lodging and financing to produce what would become the Scofield Reference Bible — has been the subject of considerable speculation. Indeed, many have noted that the presence of a fundamentalist, dispensationalist small-town preacher with a disgraced political past in a club stuffed with some of the country’s most elite academics, writers and robber barons just doesn’t add up.

Joseph M. Canfield, in his book The Incredible Scofield and his Book, asserted that “the admission of Scofield to the Lotus Club, which could not have been sought by Scofield, strengthens the suspicion that has cropped up before, that someone was directing the career of C.I. Scofield.”

Canfield puts forth the theory in his book that the person “directing” Scofield’s career was connected to New York lawyer and Zionist activist Samuel Untermeyer, who was on the club’s executive committee and was a close associate of Louis Brandeis and influential in the administration of Woodrow Wilson. He then notes that Scofield’s annotated bible was later “most helpful in getting Fundamentalist Christians to back the international interest in one of Untermeyer’s pet projects — the Zionist Movement.”

Other scholars, such as David Lutz, have been more explicit than Canfield in linking Untermeyer’s Zionist activism to his role in financially backing Scofield and his work on his annotated Bible. Ultimately, like the Blackstone Memorial before it, the Lotos Club’s patronage of Scofield’s work again reveals the interest of the American elite of the era, Christian and Jewish alike, in promoting Christian Zionism.

Untermeyer and the Lotos Club notably also funded Scofield’s numerous travels to Europe, including one fateful trip to England where Scofield met with Henry Frowde, publisher of Oxford University Press. Frowde was taken with Scofield’s work, largely owing to the fact that Frowde was a member of the “Exclusive Brethren,” a religious group founded by John Nelson Darby, the father of dispensationalism. Oxford University Press subsequently published the Scofield Reference Bible in 1909. Twenty years after its publication, it became the first-ever Oxford publication to generate over a million dollars in sales.

Scofield’s Bible became spectacularly popular among American fundamentalists soon after its publication, partly because it was the first annotated bible that sought to interpret the text for the reader as well as because it became the central text of several influential seminaries that were set up after its 1909 publication. Among Scofield’s many annotations are claims that have since become central to Christian Zionism, such as Scofield’s annotation of Genesis 12:3 that those who curse Israel (interpreted by Christian Zionists to mean the state of Israel since its founding in 1948) will be cursed by God and those that bless Israel will similarly be blessed.

Modern Christian Zionists, like Pastor John Hagee of Christians United for Israel (CUFI), have frequently cited this interpretation that originated with Scofield in defending extreme pro-Israel stances. For instance, Hagee made the following statement in 2014:

You have to go back to basics, with the fact that in Genesis (chapter 1), God created the world and made a very solemn promise (brought in Gen. 12:3), ‘I will bless those who bless you and I will curse those who curse you.’ From that moment on, every nation that ever blessed Israel has been blessed by God. And every nation that has ever persecuted the Jewish people, God crushed. And so He will continue.”

Falwell and Likud: a friendship or something else?

Despite the widespread dissemination of the Scofield Reference Bible and its popularization among American evangelical churches and seminaries, the public influence of dispensationalist eschatology and Christian Zionism on American politics was relatively limited for much of the 20th century. However, the private influence of Christian dispensationalists was nonetheless present, as seen through the role of dispensationalist preacher and Third Temple advocate Billy Graham and his close relationships to several presidents including Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.

Then the political power of dispensationalist theology dramatically moved from the private quarters of the halls of power into the mainstream American political discourse with the founding of the Moral Majority by evangelical preacher Jerry Falwell in 1979.

In the early 1970s, Falwell’s growing ministry was bringing in millions of dollars annually, especially his nationally broadcast program “The Old Time Gospel Hour,” which ran on several major cable networks at the time. Despite — or perhaps because of — the spike in donations, Falwell was soon targeted by the federal government, specifically the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), for “fraud and deceit” and “gross insolvency” in the financial management of his ministry, particularly the ministry’s sale of $6.6 million in church bonds. The SEC lawsuit was eventually settled when a group of businessmen in Lynchburg, Virginia — where Falwell’s ministry was based — took over the ministry’s finances for the next several years, until 1977. Falwell blamed his ministry’s financial problems on his “financial ignorance.”

Jerry Falwell travels with his son Jonathan, right, aboard his private jet in 2004. Todd Hunley | Thomas Road Baptist Church

One year after his ministry appeared to be on a better financial footing, Falwell received an invitation to visit the state of Israel and was personally invited on the all-expenses-paid trip by Menachem Begin, then the prime minister of Israel and leader of the Likud Party. The trip would mark the beginning of a long friendship and close relationship between Falwell and Begin and, more broadly, a relationship between American evangelical leaders and Israel’s Likud Party. As Israeli historian Gershom Gorenberg notes in his book The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount, the Begin administration “was the first to tap evangelical enthusiasm for Israel and turn it into political and economic support.”

Soon after returning from Israel, Falwell’s finances again came under federal scrutiny after a federal investigation found that Falwell had transferred the health insurance policies of his employees to an unlicensed shell company with just $128 in assets and hundreds of thousands in dollars in unpaid claims. Just as Falwell’s financial troubles began to mount yet again, he received a generous gift from none other than Begin in the form of a private Learjet valued at $4 million. Shortly thereafter, Falwell went on to found the Moral Majority organization, “after consultations with theologians and political strategists.”

The Moral Majority is widely credited with turning the Christian evangelical right into a major political force in the United States, promoting extremely pro-Israel policies, increased defense spending, a Reaganite approach to the challenges of the Cold War, as well as conservative domestic policies. Falwell frequently utilized his gift from Begin in traveling and promoting the new organization, as well as himself as a major public figure.

The Moral Majority marks a clear turning point in the Israel-U.S. evangelical relationship, as it made fervent support for Israel an area of major importance to evangelical voters and also led many evangelical voters to pay closer attention to events going on in the Middle East. Yet, given Falwell’s strong promotion of Christian Zionism, many evangelicals who became increasingly politically active following the organization’s founding not only supported Israel’s policies of the era but also supported many of the future ambitions of Begin and the Likud Party. This support was solidified by the beginning of the Israeli Ministry of Tourism’s ongoing practice of offering U.S. evangelical leaders free “familiarization” tours to Israel in the early 1980s.

Begin’s vision of “Greater Israel” — the complete annexation of Palestine as well as large parts of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Egypt by Israel — was also shared and promoted by Falwell. In 1983, Falwell stated that “Begin will quickly tell you, ‘We don’t have all the land yet we’re going to have,’” and further predicted that Israel would never relinquish control over the occupied West Bank because Begin was determined to keep the land “which has been delivered to them (the Israelis).”

Falwell framed Begin’s expansionist ambitions as a religious belief in “the inerrancy of the Old Testament,” a sentiment Falwell shared. Falwell also pushed for a U.S. recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and felt that construction of a Third Temple on the Temple Mount was necessary to usher in the end times and the second coming of Christ.

As Falwell helped turn Christian Zionism into a major political force in the United States, he also made himself a key political figure in the Reagan era and an important go-between for U.S.-Israel relations. In 1981 Begin informed Falwell of his plans to bomb an Iraqi nuclear facility before he informed the Reagan administration with the hopes that Falwell would “explain to the Christian public the reasons for the bombing.” According to Canadian academic David S. New, Begin told Falwell during that phone call: “Get to work for me.”

In addition, Falwell frequently met with Begin, whom he later called a personal friend, and these meetings often overlapped with Begin’s official meetings with Reagan. A year later, Begin gave Falwell Israel’s Jabotinsky award, making Falwell the first non-Jew to receive the honor for his advocacy on behalf of Israel and, more specifically, Likud policies and ambitions.

Though the Moral Majority officially shuttered its doors in 1989, its political legacy persisted long after, as did Falwell’s political clout. Indeed, following Begin’s model, Benjamin Netanyahu, during his first term as prime minister, also made a habit of visiting Falwell, meeting with the controversial pastor even before he met with political officials in his visits to Washington.

Netanyahu, left, meets Falwell at a hotel in Washington, Jan. 19, 1998. Greg Gibson | AP

During one trip to D.C. in 1998, Netanyahu’s first visit was to an event co-hosted by Falwell, where the pastor praised Netanyahu as “the Ronald Reagan of Israel.” The New York Times described the purpose of Netanyahu’s U.S. visit not as a visit aimed at meeting with government officials, but rather one intended “to shore up his base of traditional support in the United States. Conservative Christian groups have long been ardent supporters of Israel because of its religious importance to Christianity.”

However, this relationship between Christian Zionists like Falwell and prominent right-wing Israeli politicians has not been without its controversy, especially given that pro-Israel evangelicals like Falwell have a history of making anti-semitic statements.

For example, during a 1999 sermon, Falwell discussed his interpretation of end-times prophecy, widely shared by Christian Zionist evangelicals, that the Second Coming would follow not just the creation of the state of Israel but the construction of a Third Temple on the Temple Mount, from which a figure known to Christians as the “Antichrist” would reign. In responding to his own rhetorical question as to whether the Antichrist is “alive and well today,” Falwell stated that “Probably because when he appears during the tribulation period he will be a full-grown counterfeit of Christ. Of course, he’ll be Jewish.”

Falwell’s comments were immediately condemned by a variety of Jewish groups, including the pro-Israel Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Rabbi Leon Klenicki, then-director of interfaith affairs for the ADL, noted that Falwell’s view is a “common theological position” among American evangelicals and that Falwell was “an influential voice among evangelical and charismatic Christians” who “only supports Israel for his own Christological ends.” “He sees us only as the ones who prepare the coming of Jesus,” Klenicki stated at the time. “It is a great disappointment after more than 30 years of dialogue; he’s still in the Middle Ages.”

Another prominent dispensationalist with great political and literary influence is Hal Lindsey, the author and co-author of several books, including The Late Great Planet Earth. Lindsey’s work greatly influenced many prominent U.S. politicians like Ronald Reagan, who was so moved by Lindsey’s books that he invited Lindsey to address a National Security Council meeting on nuclear war plans and helped make Lindsey an influential consultant with several members of Congress and the Pentagon.

As noted by Israeli historian Gershom Gorenberg, Lindsey sees Jews as serving “two central roles” in Christian dispensationalist eschatology:

[T]he first — despite his insistence of love for Jews — is the classic one of Christian anti-Jewish polemic: They are ‘the Jewish people who crucified Jesus’ and the archetype of those who ignore the truth of prophecy. The second role is to fulfill prophecy despite themselves.”

Gorenberg further notes that Lindsey believes that Jews have fulfilled two of the three crucial prophecies that will usher in the end times, with the first being the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 and the second being the Israeli conquest and occupation of Jerusalem after the Six Day War in 1967. According to Lindsey: “There remains but one more event to completely set the stage for Israel’s part in the last great act of her historical drama. That is to rebuild the ancient Temple…”

As Falwell’s and Lindsey’s comments reveal, the eschatological views of dispensationalism frequently perceive the Jewish people as little more than pawns that must fulfill certain requirements — e.g., establishing the state of Israel, conquering Jerusalem, building a Third Temple — in order to hasten the salvation and “rapture” of evangelical Christians. Meanwhile, Jews in Israel who do not convert to Christianity are expected to die horrible deaths, though some Christian Zionists in recent years, as will be seen shortly, have sought to adjust this still common theological position.

Despite the anti-semitic motivations underlying evangelical support for the state of Israel and the Likud-supported vision of “Greater Israel,” the politically active Christian Zionist movement that Falwell helped create translated into a strong support base for Israel and right-wing Likud policy that has made it crucial to prominent Israeli politicians.

For instance, significantly more American Christians (55 percent) than American Jews (40 percent) believe that God gave Israel to the Jews while that sentiment is shared by only 19 percent of Israeli Christians. In addition, with regards to the Trump administration’s pro-Israel policies, only 15 percent of evangelical Christians believe that President Trump favors Israel too strongly while 42 percent of American Jews hold the view that Trump is biased in favor of Israel.

In a video recorded in the early 2000s — later broadcast on Israeli TV —  Netanyahu, speaking to a family of Jewish settlers, described the mass support among Americans, particularly evangelicals, for Israel as “absurd,” saying:

America is something that can be easily moved. Moved in the right direction. They won’t get in our way; 80 percent of the Americans supprt us. It’s absurd.”

In a 2017 speech to the Christian Zionist group CUFI, Netanyahu made it clear that much of this “absurd” support came from American evangelicals, stating that “America has no better friend than Israel and Israel has no better friend than America, and Israel has no better friend in America than you.”

Richard Silverstein — an academic and journalist whose work has been published in Haaretz and MintPress, among other outlets — has argued that Israeli politicians, particularly Netanyahu, have sought out support from evangelical groups despite their anti-Semitic undertones and the fact they the act out of self-interest in pursuing their political objectives.

In a 2017 article, Silverstein stated that for Israel’s nationalist right-wing:

Judaism is not a spiritual value, it is a physical manifestation of power in the world. These Israelis understand that not all Jews are their “brothers.” Some Jews are too effete, too liberal, too humane, too universalist. These Jews are the detritus which will be washed away by the tide of history. Israeli nationalists need to replace these traditional Jewish allies and have done so by finding new ones: Christian evangelicals, African dictators, European neo-Nazis. Zionism as they define it is less a movement dedicated to ethics and more one dedicated to self-interest.”

A “vital part of Israel’s national security”

As Falwell began to fade from public view in the early 2000s, his legacy has largely fallen to a handful of preachers now at the forefront of Christian Zionism and Christian Zionist political activism, with Falwell’s son, Jerry Falwell Jr., ranking prominently among them. However, of the preachers that followed in Falwell’s footsteps, one stands out: John Hagee.

Hagee is the pastor of Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas, which has an active membership of over 22,000. A charismatic Christian who believes in dispensationalist eschatology and thinks that Christians are biblically required to support Israel, Hagee has long been a major advocate for Israel within evangelical and charismatic Christianity circles and has raised over $80 million for Israel since he first began hosting “A Night to Honor Israel” events in the early 1980s.

In 2006, Hagee sought to create the “Christian AIPAC” and revived a then-defunct organization previously founded in 1975 known as Christians United for Israel, or CUFI, mentioned at the beginning of this installment. Since its re-founding, CUFI has grown exponentially, now counting 7 million members, a figure that exceeds the Jewish population of the United States, which stands at around 5.7 million. Hagee chairs its executive board, which included Jerry Falwell up until Falwell’s death in 2007.

Vice President Pence, left, greets Hagee at CUFI’s annual summit, July 8, 2019, in Washington. Patrick Semansky | AP

CUFI is exempt from paying U.S. taxes and from publicly disclosing its finances because it is officially registered as a church, though it is often likened to an arm of the pro-Israel lobby in the United States and actively promotes and funds illegal West Bank settlements. CUFI also advocates for Israeli sovereignty over all of Jerusalem and the Temple Mount and the construction of a Third Temple.

Much has been written about CUFI’s influence in the Republican Party, which began under the George W. Bush administration soon after its founding. As journalist Max Blumenthal noted in a 2006 article for The Nation: “Over the past months, the White House has convened a series of off-the-record meetings about its policies in the Middle East with leaders of Christians United for Israel (CUFI).”

As a result of these meetings, CUFI aligned itself tightly with the neoconservatives that were well represented in the Bush administration, even appointing neoconservative and Christian Zionist Gary Bauer to its board and naming Bauer the first director of its lobbying arm, the CUFI Action Fund. Bauer is a founding member of the highly controversial and now-defunct neoconservative group, Project for a New American Century (PNAC), and has also served on the executive board of the neoconservative group Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD).

CUFI has since won powerful allies and counts neoconservative Elliott Abrams; former CIA director James Woosley; neoconservative archon Bill Kristol; former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee; Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Ted Cruz (R-TX); Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; and U.S. Vice President Mike Pence among its staunchest supporters. At a CUFI summit last year, Netanyahu described CUFI as a “vital part of Israel’s national security.”

In addition, CUFI has close ties to casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, the top donor to President Trump and the entire Republican Party. Adelson even received a special award from Hagee at a 2014 CUFI event. “I’ve never had a greater warm feeling than being honored by Pastor Hagee,” said a beaming Sheldon Adelson at the time.

At the most recent CUFI summit, held on Monday, the Trump administration sent Pence, Pompeo, U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, Assistant to the President and Special Representative for International Negotiations Jason Greenblatt, and National Security Advisor John Bolton, all of whom spoke at the summit.

CUFI’s 2019 Washington Summit is days away and includes speakers @VP @Mike_Pence, @SecPompeo, @USAmbIsrael David Friedman, NSA @AmbJohnBolton, Assistant to President Trump @JdGreenblatt45, @DennisPrager, and @PastorJohnHagee.

Register at https://t.co/q1hsRMLNnA. pic.twitter.com/EO1Bi11llR

— Pastor John Hagee (@PastorJohnHagee) 4 июля 2019 г.

In addition to its own influence as an organization, the group has made Hagee himself a major political player. In 2007, then-Senator Joseph Lieberman (D-CT) compared Hagee to Moses, stating:

I want to take to opportunity to describe Pastor Hagee in the terms the Torah used to describe Moses. He is an Ish Elohim. A man of God. And those words really do fit him. And I have something else. Like Moses, he’s become the leader of a mighty multitude. Even greater than the multitude that Moses led from Egypt to the Promised Land.”

Efforts by prominent politicians to court Hagee were once numerous, until evidence of Hagee making remarks about the Holocaust that were widely considered anti-semitic surfaced during the 2008 presidential campaign. In those remarks, Hagee asserted that Adolf Hitler had been sent by God to act as a “hunter,” and force Jews by means of the Holocaust to resettle in Palestine as a means of fulfilling Biblical prophecy. Then-Republican presidential candidate John McCain, who had aggressively courted Hagee’s endorsement, was forced to distance himself from Hagee after those comments resurfaced.

Yet, the stigma around Hagee has since worn off and his influence is again on the rise following Trump’s election to the presidency, as evidenced by the attendance of numerous top Trump officials to the 2019 CUFI Washington Summit earlier this week.

Though he was not included on the official board of Trump’s evangelical advisers early in Trump’s presidency, several slightly less controversial allies and associates of Hagee were, including Tom Mullins, Jerry Falwell Jr., and Kenneth Copeland. Then, a few months after Trump’s inauguration, Hagee “dropped by” the White House unannounced and met with Trump in the Oval Office to discuss U.S. support for Israel. He also met with Trump a few weeks before Trump announced plans to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, a meeting at which Trump had reportedly promisedHagee that the embassy would soon be moved and told the pastor “I will not disappoint you.” Hagee described Trump’s announcement on Jerusalem as having “biblical timing of absolute precision.”

More recently, Hagee was part of an exclusive group of evangelical leaders who met with White House officials this past March prior to the partial release of the so-called “Deal of the Century,” aimed at bringing “peace” to the Israel-Palestine conflict, which is widely viewed as greatly favoring Israel and is expected to be rejected outright by Palestinian leadership.

After the meeting, Hagee issued an urgent prayer request. ”Our topic of discussion was discussing the forthcoming peace plan concerning Israel. Israel and the Jewish people need our prayers and our advocacy like never before,” Hagee said in a video posted to the CUFI Twitter page soon after the meeting. “The Bible gives the command, ‘For Zion’s sake, I will not keep silent, and for Jerusalem’s sake, I will not keep my peace.’ I urge you tonight to pray for the peace of Jerusalem.”

As the final installment of this series will show, the shared apocalyptic visions of extremist religious Zionists and Christian Zionists regarding a Third Jewish Temple on the Temple Mount is a major driver behind the Deal of the Century and was also a major factor in the Trump administration’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, despite Palestinian hopes that East Jerusalem would serve as the capital of their future state. Notably, Christian Zionists believe that Palestinians must be expelled from the state of Israel. In addition, these end-times beliefs are also a factor in the administration’s push for war with Iran, which Christian Zionists like Hagee and Pompeo believe is also a requisite for the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy.

While Hagee’s influence and the influence of his organization CUFI are stronger than ever with Trump in the White House, his political clout with the Trump administration is, at least partially, due to the presence of staunch Christian Zionists in two of the top offices in the executive branch: vice president and secretary of state.

Pence and Pompeo push “holy war”

Though several Trump officials spoke at the recent CUFI summit, two stand out — not just for their high-ranking positions but also for their open admissions that their Christian Zionist beliefs guide their policies. These officials are Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State and former CIA Director Mike Pompeo.

After Trump chose his running mate, Pence’s religious fervor came under media scrutiny, with several outlets noting that he was known to be an ardent Christian Zionist. Pence’s faith gained particular attention owing to his past statements on Israel, which he has often described in prophetic terms.

Though raised Catholic, Pence gradually transitioned to an “evangelical Catholic” and then to an evangelical Protestant and has since become a key political figure representing the fundamentalist Christian movement that promotes “dominionism,” an ideology that varies in its interpretations but ultimately seeks to see the secular nature of the U.S. government shift towards one governed by “Biblical law.” Pence’s association with this movement has led prominent voices in the media to accuse him of supporting a theocratic form of government.

Though many of the initial concerns about Pence revolved around his likely effects on domestic policy, much of his influence has instead been seen in foreign policy, including the administration’s Middle East policy. His public identification as a Christian Zionist and his speech to the 2017 CUFI summit, the first vice president to ever speak at the annual event, have led some to worry that the Christian Zionist view of prophecy is guiding Pence’s political actions.

Pence visits the Western Wall, Judaism’s holiest site in Jerusalem’s Old City, Jan. 23, 2018. Oded Balilty | AP

Following Pence’s first speech at CUFI, Daniel Hummel, a scholar and fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School, told the Washington Post:

Christian Zionism has a long history in American politics, but it has never captured the bully pulpit of the White House. Past administrations often used general biblical language in reference to Israel, but never has the evangelical theology of Christian Zionism been so close to the policymaking apparatus of the executive branch.

By identifying with Christian Zionism while in office, Pence risks the Trump administration’s ongoing search for an ‘ultimate deal’ to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and erodes the U.S.’ claim that it can be an ‘honest broker’ in the Middle East.”

Concerns that the U.S. is under the influence of extremist religious Zionism and Christian Zionism that would prevent the country from acting as an “honest broker” in the Israel-Palestine conflict have, unsurprisingly, been proven true. In fact, Pence’s religious beliefs are believed to have been a major factor in Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and to move the U.S. Embassy to the contested city.

Though Mike Pence is the highest-ranking member of the Trump administration who is openly a Christian Zionist, it is Pompeo that is the most overt and open about how his religious beliefs regarding the end times guide his decision-making as head of the U.S. State Department.

For uch of his political career, Pompeo has framed U.S. counterterrorism policy as a “holy war” between Christianity and Islam, which he believes is the earthly equivalent of a cosmic battle between good and evil. In 2017, as CIA director, Pompeo claimed:

Radical Islamic terror [will] continue to press against us until we make sure that we pray and stand and fight and make sure that we know that Jesus Christ is our savior [and] truly the only solution for our world.”

That same year, Pompeo created a new CIA “mission center” targeting Iran headed by Michael D’Andrea, whose CIA nickname is “The Prince of Darkness.” Pompeo, like many Christian Zionists, believes that war between the United States and Iran is part of the end times, a belief that is outright alarming given his prior control over CIA covert operations and his focus on Iran, as well as his current role as the U.S.’ chief diplomat, in which he has also been laser-focused on promoting an aggressive policy towards Iran.

In addition to his views on “holy war,” Pompeo also frequently discussed his views on the rapture while serving as CIA director. TYT reported last year that Pompeo had spoken about the rapture so frequently that it had reportedly frightened top CIA officials.

According to Michael Weinstein — founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, a watchdog group on issues of religious freedom in the military and intelligence community — who was quoted in the TYT report:

He [Pompeo] is intolerant of anyone who isn’t a fundamentalist Christian. The people that worked under him at the CIA that came to us were never confused — they never had time to be confused. They were shocked and then they were scared shitless.”

A 2015 video of Pompeo that surfaced while he was CIA director also shows the former congressman describing politicsas “a never-ending struggle … until the rapture.”

More recently, a New York Times article published in March again brought Pompeo’s obsession with the end times back into public view. Titled “The Rapture and the Real World: Mike Pompeo Blends Beliefs and Policy,” the article detailed how Pompeo has made it standard operating procedure to mix his Christian Zionist views with his approach to foreign policy. That article also referenced the statement Pompeo made earlier this year, in which he opined that it was “certainly possible” that President Trump had been sent by God to “save the Jewish people from the Iranian menace.”

Pompeo made those statements during an official trip to Jerusalem that was also controversial for other reasons. Indeed, in a state department video shared on social media and meant to publicize Pompeo’s trip, footage of a model of the Third Jewish Temple was included while footage of the Al Aqsa mosque was notably excluded, despite it being the most iconic building in Jerusalem.

Given that Pompeo had also visited the tunnels that have worn away the historic mosque’s foundations, many Palestinians took the video as a sign that the Trump administration was colluding with the Temple Activist movement in Israel, which was discussed in detail in Part II of this series.

Joining forces to target Jerusalem

Well before Theodore Herzl founded political Zionism and published The Jewish State, Christian Zionists in the United States and England were already seeking to direct and influence the foreign policy of both nations in service of a religious obsession with ushering in the end times. The historical record clearly shows how Christian Zionists have influenced events throughout history, particularly in regard to the founding of the state of Israel and subsequent developments in the Israel-Palestine conflict.

In the pursuit of these dispensationalist end-times prophecies, Christian Zionists have forged alliances with Jewish Zionists and each has opportunistically used the other in order to usher in the common events that are believed to facilitate the coming of their respective apocalypses or to aid more secular, political goals. From Hechler and Herzl, to Scofield and Untermeyer, to Begin and Falwell, these alliances have shaped the policy of Western governments, particularly the U.S. and England, for over a century.

Today, only one such prophecy has yet to be fulfilled, the construction of a Third Jewish Temple on the Temple Mount, which is currently occupied by the Al Aqsa mosque compound. Now, more than ever before, Israel’s government, as shown in Part II, is filled with high-ranking officials who openly call for Al Aqsa’s destruction and seek to hastily construct a Third Temple. Similarly, as this report has shown, the Trump administration is greatly influenced by Christian Zionists who also seek the mosque’s destruction, in hopes that the Third Temple will soon be built.

Yet, the Trump administration’s ties to this apocalyptic ideology go even deeper than has been discussed in this article, as many other influential members in the Trump administration — especially top Trump advisers Jared Kushner and Jason Greenblatt, and U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman — also share and actively promote this extremist religious Zionist ideology that seeks to rebuild a Third Temple. As will be seen in the next installment of this series, this ideology is also a driving factor for top Trump and Republican Party donors such as Sheldon Adelson.

The end result is that the hold of this apocalyptic ideology on both the governments of Israel and the United States appears to be stronger now than ever, meaning that the danger currently facing Al Aqsa mosque, and with it world peace, looms large.

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Christian Zionism is not a religion per se, but rather a set of beliefs based on interpretations of specific parts of the Bible – notably the book of Revelations and parts of Ezekiel, Daniel, and Isaiah – that has made the return of the Jews to the Holy Land a precondition for the Second Coming of Christ. The belief that Israel is essential to the process has led to the fusion of Christianity with Zionism, hence the name of the movement. The political significance of this viewpoint is enormous, meaning that a large block of Christians promotes and votes for a non-reality based foreign policy based on a controversial interpretation of the Bible that it embraces with considerable passion.

It would be a mistake to dismiss CUFI as just another group of bible-thumpers whose brains have long since ceased to function when the subject is Israel. It claims to have seven million members and it serves as a mechanism for uniting evangelicals around the issue of Israel. Given its numbers alone and concentration is certain states, it therefore constitutes a formidable voting bloc that can be counted on to cast its ballots nearly 100% Republican, as long as the Republican in question is reliably pro-Israel. Beyond that, there are an estimated 60 million evangelical voters throughout the country and they will likely follow the lead of groups like CUFI and vote reflecting their religious beliefs, to include Trump’s highly visible support for the Jewish state.

Trump’s reelection campaign is reported to be already “…developing an aggressive, state-by-state plan to mobilize even more evangelical voters than supported him last time.” This will include, “voter registration drives at churches in battleground states such as Ohio, Nevada and Florida.” Without overwhelming evangelical support, Trump reelection in 2020 is unlikely, hence the dispatch of all available White House heavyweights to CUFI’s annual summit at the Washington Convention Center.

Though it is an organization that defines itself as Christian, CUFI makes no effort to support surviving Christian communities in the Middle East as most of them are hostile to Israel. The group also supports war against Iran as a precursor to total global conflict. Hagee has explained that “The United States must join Israel in a pre-emptive military strike against Iran to fulfill God’s plan for both Israel and the West… a biblically prophesied end-time confrontation with Iran, which will lead to the Rapture, Tribulation, and Second Coming of Christ.”

CUFI operates out of the Cornerstone Church in San Antonio Texas. It was founded at the church in 2006 and is headed by John Hagee, a leading evangelical who has been courted both by the Trump Administration and by Israel itself, which presented him with a a Lear business yet complete with a crew so he would be able to do his proselytizing in some comfort. He frequently appears at commemorations in Israel, is a regular at the annual AIPAC meeting and has been a guest at the White House. He was present at the Trump administration’s ceremony last year when it moved the US Embassy to Jerusalem and gave a speech. He has said that “there has never been a more pro-Israeli president than Donald Trump.”

Present at the CUFI summit were Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, National Security Advisor John Bolton, US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, and US negotiator in the Middle East Jason Greenblatt. Lest there be any confusion, the White House was represented by two Christian Zionists, two Jewish Zionists and John Bolton, who has been variously described. All five have been urging a military response against Iran for its alleged “aggression” in the Middle East. Israeli Prime Minister also addressed the conference via videolink, with his similar “analysis” of the Iranian threat. There were also a number of Republican Senators present, to include Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Roy Blunt and Tim Scott.

The speeches were all pretty much the same but perhaps the most suggestive was the 2,000 word plus exhortation delivered by Pompeo. His presentation was entitled “The US and Israel: a Friendship for Freedom.” He asked, in a speech full of religious metaphors and biblical references, his audience to “compare Israel’s reverence for liberty with the restrictions on religious freedom facing Christians and people of all faiths throughout the rest of the Middle East,” where “if a Muslim leaves Islam it is considered an apostasy, and it is punishable indeed by death.”

Pompeo was more interested in stirring up his audience than he was in historical fact. He said “In Iraq, Syria, and other countries in the region, the last remnants of ancient Christian communities are at near-extinction because of persecution from ISIS and other malign actors. And just one example: before 2003, there were an estimated 1.5 million Christians living in Iraq. Today, sadly, almost a quarter of a million.”

Pompeo, whose grasp of current events appears to be a bit shaky, did not mention two of the principal reasons that Christianity has been declining in the region. First and foremost is the Iraq War, started by the United States for no good reason, which unleashed forces that led to the destruction of religious minorities. Second, he did not note the constant punishment delivered by Israel on the Palestinians, which has led to the departure of many Christians in that community. Nor did he say anything about the reverse of the coin, Syria, where Christians are well integrated and protected by the al-Assad government which Pompeo and Bolton are seeking to destroy to benefit Israel.

The Secretary of State also delivered the expected pitch for four more years of Donald Trump, saying “But thank God. Thank God we have a leader in President Trump – an immovable friend of Israel. His commitment, his commitment – President Trump’s commitment is the strongest in history, and it’s been one of the best parts of my job to turn that commitment into real action.”

But it has to be Pompeo’s conclusion that perhaps should be regarded as a joke, though it appears that no one in the audience was laughing. He said “Our country is intended to do all it can, in cooperating with other nations, to help create peace and preserve peace [throughout] the world. It is given to defend the spiritual values – the moral code – against the vast forces of evil that seek to destroy them.”

It was a reiteration of Pompeo’s earlier “America is a force for good” speech delivered in Cairo in January. Nobody believed it then and nobody believes it now, given what has been actually occurring over the past 18 years. It would be interesting to know if Pompeo himself actually thinks it to be true. If he does, he should be selling hot dogs from a food truck rather than presiding as Secretary of State.

So, the bottom line is that the Trump Administration pandering to Hagee and company is shameful. Christian Zionist involvement in American politics on behalf of the Washington’s relationship with Israel does not serve any conceivable US national interests unless one assumes that Israel and the United States are essentially the same polity, which is unsustainable. On the contrary, the Christian Zionist politicizing has been a major element in supporting the generally obtuse US foreign policy in the Middle East region and vis-à-vis other Muslim countries, a policy that has contributed to at least four wars while making the world a more dangerous place for all Americans. Christian Zionist promoted foreign policy serves a particularly narrowly construed parochial interest that, ironically, is intended to do whatever it takes to bring about the end of the world, possibly a victory for gentlemen like Pastor John Hagee if his interpretation of the bible is correct, but undeniably a disaster for the rest of us.

During a bookstore event hosted by Busboys and Poets, Omar told the assembled guests: “I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is okay for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country. I want to ask why it is okay for me to talk about the influence of the NRA, fossil fuel industries, or Big Pharma, and not talk about a powerful lobby that is influencing policy.”

Judging how she prefaced the remark, with a lengthy discussion about “the stories of Palestinians” and how she was being regularly accused of ‘anti-Semitism’ to end all debate on the decades-old standoff, it was clear what lobbying group Omar was referring to.

It was the second time in as many weeks that Ilhan Omar, one of the first two Muslims to serve in Congress, was accused of allegedly espousing anti-Semitic comments.

In early February, Omar had responded to a tweet by journalist Glenn Greenwald who said it was “stunning how much time US political leaders spend defending a foreign nation even if it means attacking free speech rights of Americans."

Omar responded, "It's all about the Benjamins baby," followed by a musical emoji.

When pushed by another Twitter user to say who she thinks is paying American politicians to be pro-Israel, Omar responded simply, "AIPAC!"

In fact, Omar was wrong. AIPAC does not raise funds for candidates. But its members do, with the group’s powerful endorsement.

On March 3, Omar tweeted to her fellow Congresswoman, Nita Lowey, that she should “not be expected to have allegiance/pledge support to a foreign country in order to serve my country in Congress or serve on committee…”

Such complaints have been heard before.

In 2014, former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney told Press TV that her campaign funding suddenly went “kaput” after she refused to sign a “pledge of allegiance” to Israel while she was in office.

“I refused to toe the line on US policy for Israel,” she said.

On another occasion, in 2006, academics John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt published a paper in the London Review of Books, entitled “The Israeli Lobby and US Foreign Policy.” In it, the authors discussed the influence of pro-Israel organizations in the United States, with primary emphasis on AIPAC, which they described as “the most powerful and well-known.”

Omar’s string of remarks quickly sparked similar debate, but this time inside of the Democratic Party. This demonstrated the potential future impact of a new generation of multiethnic lawmakers, many of whom, as Muslims, are increasingly frustrated by the Israeli-Palestinian crisis and their inability to discuss it.

Omar, however, was quickly upbraided by senior Democrats.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) called out the freshman lawmaker, saying her “use of anti-Semitic tropes and prejudicial accusations about Israel’s supporters is deeply offensive… and we call upon Congresswoman Omar to immediately apologize for these hurtful comments.”

Although Omar did offer contrition, she refused to budge on “the problematic role of lobbyists in our politics,” mentioning the NRA, fossil fuel industry and AIPAC. It seems like a fair criticism, all things considered.

Following the high-profile fallout, the House Democrats passed, with remarkable alacrity, a House Resolution that condemns anti-Semitism as “hateful expressions of intolerance…and anti-Muslim discrimination and bigotry against minorities.”

The resolution, while intended to tamp down messages of hate, conspicuously failed to mention Omar’s purportedly anti-Semitic remarks, focusing its attention instead on “white supremacists” and “white nationalists,” who were not even remotely mentioned by Omar during her bookstore comments, thus prompting 23 Republican lawmakers to reject the resolution.

The partisan smashup helped to deflect attention away from the main point of contention with regards to Omar’s claim, which on the face of it does not sound radical: Does the American Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC), as well as the other powerful lobbying groups, hold too much sway over US foreign policy? Should AIPAC be ranked as an agent of a foreign power working on behalf of Israeli interests in the US?

Mearsheimer and Walt certainly thought so. In their paper, they quoted a 1997 article in Fortune magazine, which asked members of Congress to name the most powerful lobbies in Washington. AIPAC was ranked second behind only the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), but ahead of the AFL-CIO and the National Rifle Association (NRA). The authors were quick to point out, however, that there was nothing inherently wrong about the way AIPAC operates. “For the most part, the individuals and groups that comprise the Lobby are doing what other special interest groups do, just much better.”

How much better? Well, consider that in 2016, during a breakdown in relations between the Obama White House and Israel over the question of nuclear talks with Iran, AIPAC helped persuade the Republicans to let Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu address a joint session of Congress – without the foreknowledge of then President Barack Obama. As a thought experiment, try and imagine the same privilege being extended to any other leader in the world. The reason it is difficult to imagine is because it’s never been done before precisely because it’s unconstitutional.

“Democrats accuse Boehner of ambushing the president as the Republicans push – with the backing of the pro-Israel lobby in Washington – to strengthen sanctions against Iran,” as the Guardian reported.

Another example came with the push for war against Iraq following the terrorist attacks of 9/11 against the United States. An article in the Forward admitted that as “President Bush attempted to sell the … war in Iraq, America’s most important Jewish organizations rallied as one to his defense.” As Mearsheimer and Walt pointed out, this lobbying influence on behalf of war did not flush with the opinion of the US Jewish population.

“Samuel Freedman reported just after the war started that a compilation of nationwide opinion polls by the Pew Research Center shows that Jews are less supportive of the Iraq war than the population at large, 52% to 62%. Thus it would be wrong to blame the war in Iraq on “Jewish influence,” the academics argued.

Indeed, as Paul Waldman argued in The Washington Post, in the United States today, “a ‘supporter of Israel’ is much more likely to be an evangelical Christian Republican than a Jew.”

Whatever the case may be, the essence of the question remains the same: Does AIPAC, as well as many other lobbying groups, wield too much power in the US political system? The question cannot be casually brushed aside as ‘anti-Semitic,’ any more than questioning the power of Big Pharma, for example, could be dismissed as ‘anti-Doctor,’ or the power of the NRA as ‘anti-Cowboy.’ It makes no sense, and unfairly accuses people who are asking legitimate questions of the most loathsome charges.

With the face of the American political system changing along ethnic and religious lines, it is critical that such issues with regards to political influence get a fair hearing.