Why Not a
Probe of ‘Israel-gate’?
April 20,
2017
By Robert Parry consortiumnews.com
The other day, I asked a longtime Democratic Party insider who is
working on the Russia-gate investigation which country interfered more in U.S.
politics, Russia or Israel. Without a moment’s hesitation, he replied, “Israel,
of course.”
Which underscores my concern about the hysteria raging across Official
Washington about “Russian meddling” in the 2016 presidential campaign: There is
no proportionality applied to the question of foreign interference in U.S.
politics. If there were, we would have a far more substantive investigation of
Israel-gate.
The problem is that if anyone mentions the truth about Israel’s clout,
the person is immediately smeared as “anti-Semitic” and targeted by Israel’s
extraordinarily sophisticated lobby and its many media/political allies for
vilification and marginalization.
So, the open secret of Israeli influence is studiously ignored, even as
presidential candidates prostrate themselves before the annual conference of
the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Hillary Clinton
and Donald Trump both appearedbefore AIPAC in 2016, with Clinton
promising to take the U.S.-Israeli relationship “to the next level” – whatever
that meant – and Trump vowing not to “pander” and then pandering like crazy.
Congress is no different. It has given Israel’s controversial Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a record-tying
three invitations to address joint sessions of Congress
(matching the number of times British Prime Minister Winston Churchill
appeared). We then witnessed the Republicans and Democrats competing to see how
often their members could bounce up and down and who could cheer Netanyahu the
loudest, even when the Israeli prime minister was instructing the Congress to
follow his position on Iran rather than President Obama’s.
Israeli officials and AIPAC also coordinate their strategies to maximize
political influence, which is derived in large part by who gets the lobby’s
largesse and who doesn’t. On the rare occasion when members of Congress step
out of line – and take a stand that offends Israeli leaders – they can expect a
well-funded opponent in their next race, a tactic that dates back decades.
Well-respected members, such as Rep. Paul Findley and Sen. Charles Percy
(both Republicans from Illinois), were early victims of the Israeli lobby’s
wrath when they opened channels of communication with the Palestine Liberation
Organization in the cause of seeking peace. Findley was targeted and defeated
in 1982; Percy in 1984.
Findley recounted his experience in a 1985 book, They Dare to
Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel’s Lobby, in which
Findley called the lobby “the 700-pound gorilla in Washington.” The book was
harshly criticized in a New York Times review by Adam Clymer, who called it “an
angry, one-sided book that seems often to be little more than a stringing
together of stray incidents.”
Enforced Silence
Since then, there have been fewer and fewer members of Congress or other
American politicians who have dared to speak out, judging that – when it comes
to the Israeli lobby – discretion is the better part of valor. Today, many U.S.
pols grovel before the Israeli government seeking a sign of favor from Prime
Minister Netanyahu, almost like Medieval kings courting the blessings of the
Pope at the Vatican.
During the 2008 campaign, then-Sen. Barack Obama, whom Netanyahu viewed
with suspicion, traveled to Israel to demonstrate sympathy for Israelis within
rocket-range of Gaza while steering clear of showing much empathy for the
Palestinians.
In 2012, Republican nominee Mitt Romney tried to exploit the tense
Obama-Netanyahu relationship by stopping in Israel to win a tacit endorsement
from Netanyahu. The 2016 campaign was no exception with both Clinton and Trump
stressing their love of Israel in their appearances before AIPAC.
Money, of course, has become the lifeblood of American politics – and
American supporters of Israel have been particularly strategic in how they have
exploited that reality.
One of Israel’s most devoted advocates, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson,
has poured millions of dollars in “dark money” into political candidates and
groups that support Israel’s interests. Adelson, who has advocated dropping a
nuclear bomb inside Iran to coerce its government, is a Trump
favorite having donated a record $5
million to Trump’s inaugural celebration.
Of course, many Israel-connected political donations are much smaller
but no less influential. A quarter century ago, I was told how an aide to a
Democratic foreign policy chairman, who faced a surprisingly tough race after
redistricting, turned to the head of AIPAC for help and, almost overnight,
donations were pouring in from all over the country. The chairman was most
thankful.
The October Surprise Mystery
Israel’s involvement in U.S. politics also can be covert. For instance,
the evidence is now overwhelming that the Israeli government of right-wing
Prime Minister Menachem Begin played a key role in helping Ronald Reagan’s
campaign in 1980 strike a deal with Iran to frustrate President Jimmy Carter’s efforts
to free 52 American hostages before Election Day.
Begin despised Carter for the Camp David Accords that forced Israel to
give back the Sinai to Egypt. Begin also believed that Carter was too
sympathetic to the Palestinians and – if he won a second term – would conspire
with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to impose a two-state solution on Israel.
Begin’s contempt for Carter was not even a secret. In a 1991 book, The
Last Option, senior Israeli intelligence and foreign policy official David
Kimche explained Begin’s motive for dreading Carter’s reelection. Kimche said
Israeli officials had gotten wind of “collusion” between Carter and Sadat “to
force Israel to abandon her refusal to withdraw from territories occupied in
1967, including Jerusalem, and to agree to the establishment of a Palestinian
state.”
Kimche continued, “This plan prepared behind Israel’s back and without
her knowledge must rank as a unique attempt in United States’s diplomatic
history of short-changing a friend and ally by deceit and manipulation.”
But Begin recognized that the scheme required Carter winning a second
term in 1980 when, Kimche wrote, “he would be free to compel Israel to accept a
settlement of the Palestinian problem on his and Egyptian terms, without having
to fear the backlash of the American Jewish lobby.”
In a 1992 memoir, Profits of War, former Israeli
intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe also noted that Begin and other Likud
leaders held Carter in contempt.
“Begin loathed Carter for the peace agreement forced upon him at Camp
David,” Ben-Menashe wrote. “As Begin saw it, the agreement took away Sinai from
Israel, did not create a comprehensive peace, and left the Palestinian issue
hanging on Israel’s back.”
So, in order to buy time for Israel to “change the facts on the ground”
by moving Jewish settlers into the West Bank, Begin felt Carter’s reelection
had to be prevented. A different president also presumably would give Israel a
freer hand to deal with problems on its northern border with Lebanon.
Ben-Menashe was among a couple of dozen government officials and
intelligence operatives who described how Reagan’s campaign, mostly through future
CIA Director William Casey and past CIA Director George H.W. Bush, struck a deal in
1980 with senior Iranians who got promises of arms via Israel in exchange for
keeping the hostages through the election and thus humiliating Carter. (The
hostages were finally released on Jan. 20, 1981, after Reagan was sworn in as
President.)
Discrediting History
Though the evidence of the so-called October Surprise deal is far
stronger than the current case for believing that Russia colluded with the
Trump campaign, Official Washington and the mainstream U.S. media have refused
to accept it, deeming it a “conspiracy theory.”
One of the reasons for the hostility directed against the 1980 case was
the link to Israel, which did not want its hand in manipulating the election of
a U.S. president to become an accepted part of American history. So, for
instance, the Israeli government went to great lengths to discredit Ben-Menashe
after he began to speak with reporters and to give testimony to the U.S.
Congress.
When I was a Newsweek correspondent and first interviewed Ben-Menashe in
1990, the Israeli government initially insisted that he was an impostor, that
he had no connection to Israeli intelligence.
However, when I obtained documentary evidence of Ben-Menashe’s work for
a military intelligence unit, the Israelis admitted that they had lied but then
insisted that he was just a low-level translator, a claim that was further
contradicted by other documents showing that he had traveled widely around the
world on missions to obtain weapons for the Israel-to-Iran arms pipeline.
Much as Begin and Shamir engaged in terror attacks on British officials
and Palestinian civilians during Israel’s founding era, the Likudniks who held
power in 1980 believed that the Zionist cause trumped normal restraints on
their actions. In other words, the ends justified the means.
In the 1980s, Israel also mounted spying operations aimed at the U.S.
government, including those of intelligence analyst Jonathan Pollard,
who fed highly sensitive documents to Israel and – after being caught and
spending almost three decades in prison – was paroled and welcomed as a hero
inside Israel.
A History of Interference
But it is true that foreign interference in U.S. politics is as old as
the American Republic. In the 1790s, French agents – working with the
Jeffersonians – tried to rally Americans behind France’s cause in its conflict
with Great Britain. In part to frustrate the French operation, the Federalists
passed the Alien and Sedition Acts.
In the Twentieth Century, Great Britain undertook covert influence operations
to ensure U.S. support in its conflicts with Germany, while German agents
unsuccessfully sought the opposite.
So, the attempts by erstwhile allies and sometimes adversaries to move
U.S. foreign policy in one direction or another is nothing new, and the U.S.
government engages in similar operations in countries all over the world, both
overtly and covertly.
It was the CIA’s job for decades to use propaganda and dirty tricks to
ensure that pro-U.S. politicians were elected or put in power in Europe, Latin
America, Asia and Africa, pretty much everywhere the U.S. government perceived
some interest. After the U.S. intelligence scandals of the 1970s, however, some
of that responsibility was passed to other organizations, such as the U.S.-funded
National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the U.S. Agency for
International Development (USAID).
NED, USAID and various “non-governmental organizations” (NGOs) finance
activists, journalists and other operatives to undermine political leaders who
are deemed to be obstacles to U.S. foreign policy desires.
In particular, NED has been at the center of efforts to flip elections
to U.S.-backed candidates, such as in Nicaragua in 1990, or to sponsor “color
revolutions,” which typically organize around some color as the symbol for mass
demonstrations. Ukraine – on Russia’s border – has been the target of two such
operations, the Orange Revolution in 2004, which helped install anti-Russian
President Viktor Yushchenko, and the Maidan ouster of elected pro-Russian
President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014.
NED president Carl Gershman, a neoconservative who has run NED since its
founding in 1983, openly declared that Ukraine was “the
biggest prize” in September 2013 — just months before the
Maidan protests — as well as calling it an important step toward ousting
Russian President Vladimir Putin. In 2016, Gershman called directly
for regime change in Russia.
The Neoconservatives
Another key issue related to Israeli influence inside the United States
is the role of the neocons, a political movement that emerged in the 1970s as a
number of hawkish Democrats migrated to the Republican Party as a home for more
aggressive policies to protect Israel and take on the Soviet Union and Arab
states.
In some European circles, the neocons are described as “Israel’s
American agents,” which may somewhat overstate the direct linkage between
Israel and the neocons although a central tenet of neocon thinking is that
there must be no daylight between the U.S. and Israel. The neocons say U.S.
politicians must stand shoulder to shoulder with Israel even if that means the
Americans sidling up to the Israelis rather than any movement the other way.
Since the mid-1990s, American neocons have worked closely with Benjamin
Netanyahu. Several prominent neocons (including former Assistant Defense Secretary
Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, David Wurmser, Meyrav Wurmser and Robert
Loewenberg) advised Netanyahu’s 1996 campaign and urged a new strategy for
“securing the realm.” Essentially, the idea was to replace negotiations with
the Palestinians and Arab states with “regime change” for governments that were
viewed as troublesome to Israel, including Iraq and Syria.
By 1998, the Project for the New American Century (led by neocons
William Kristol and Robert Kagan) was pressuring President Bill Clinton to invade
Iraq, a plan that was finally put in motion in 2003 under President George W.
Bush.
But the follow-on plans to go after Syria and Iran were delayed because
the Iraq War turned into a bloody mess, killing some 4,500 American soldiers
and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. Bush could not turn to phase two until
near the end of his presidency and then was frustrated by a U.S. intelligence
estimate concluding that Iran was not working on a nuclear bomb (which was to
be the pretext for a bombing campaign).
Bush also could pursue “regime change” in Syria only as a proxy effort
of subversion, rather than a full-scale U.S. invasion. President Barack Obama
escalated the Syrian proxy war in 2011 with the support of Israel and its strange-bedfellow
allies in Saudi Arabia and the other Sunni-ruled Gulf States,
which hated Syria’s government because it was allied with Shiite-ruled Iran —
and Sunnis and Shiites have been enemies since the Seventh Century. Israel
insists that the U.S. take the Sunni side, even if that puts the U.S. in
bed with Al Qaeda.
But Obama dragged his heels on a larger U.S. military intervention in
Syria and angered Netanyahu further by negotiating with Iran over its nuclear
program rather than bomb-bomb-bombing Iran.
Showing the Love
Obama’s perceived half-hearted commitment to Israeli interests explained
Romney’s campaign 2012 trip to seek Netanyahu’s blessings. Even after winning a
second term, Obama sought to appease Netanyahu by undertaking a three-day trip
to Israel in 2013 to show his love.
Still, in 2015, when Obama pressed ahead with the Iran nuclear
agreement, Netanyahu went over the President’s head directly to Congress where
he was warmly received, although the Israeli prime minister ultimately failed
to sink the Iran deal.
In Campaign 2016, both Clinton and Trump wore their love for Israel on
their sleeves, Clinton promising to take the relationship to “the next level”
(a phrase that young couples often use when deciding to go from heavy petting
to intercourse). Trump reminded AIPAC that he had a Jewish grandchild and vowed
to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
Both also bristled with hatred toward Iran, repeating the popular
falsehood that “Iran is the principal source of terrorism” when it is Saudi
Arabia and other Sunni sheikdoms that have been the financial and military
supporters of Al Qaeda and Islamic State, the terror groups most threatening to
Europe and the United States.
By contrast to Israel’s long history of playing games with U.S.
politics, the Russian government stands accused of trying to undermine the U.S.
political process recently by hacking into emails of the Democratic National
Committee — revealing the DNC’s improper opposition to Sen. Bernie Sanders’s
campaign — and of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta — disclosing the
contents of Clinton’s paid speeches to Wall Street and pay-to-play aspects of
the Clinton Foundation — and sharing that information with the American people
via WikiLeaks.
Although WikiLeaks denies getting the two batches of emails from the
Russians, the U.S. intelligence community says it has high confidence in its
conclusions about Russian meddling and the mainstream U.S. media treats the
allegations as flat-fact.
The U.S. intelligence community also has accused the Russian government
of raising doubts
in the minds of Americans about their political system by
having RT, the Russian-sponsored news network, hold debates for third-party
candidates (who were excluded from the two-party Republican-Democratic debates)
and by having RT report on protests such as Occupy Wall Street and issues such
as “fracking.”
The major U.S. news media and Congress seem to agree that the only
remaining question is whether evidence can be adduced showing that the Trump campaign
colluded in this Russian operation. For that purpose, a number of people
associated with the Trump campaign are to be hauled before Congress and made to
testify on whether or not they are Russian agents.
Meanwhile, The Washington Post, The New York Times and other
establishment-approved outlets are working with major technology companies on
how to marginalize
independent news sources and to purge “Russian propaganda”
(often conflated with “fake news”) from the Internet.
It seems that no extreme is too extreme to protect the American people
from the insidious Russians and their Russia-gate schemes to sow doubt about
the U.S. political process. But God forbid if anyone were to suggest an
investigation of Israel-gate.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry
broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in
the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either
in print here or
as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).
Al igual que en 1940,
cuando los británicos no tuvieron otra opción que acoger a De Gaulle
en Londres, los rusos de hoy apoyarán a la señora Le Pen.