Should the US Go to War for Israel?

If the US is led by Israel to participate in another war in the Middle East, these McClatchy findings suggest that this war could be one of the biggest sales promotion successes in modern political history.

by James M. Wall

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke to the annual AIPAC conference earlier this week. He also held a private meeting with US President Barack Obama.

In his AIPAC speech, Netanyahu evoked the Holocaust as the source of  Israel’s special privileged status that permits Netanyahu to do whatever he decides to do to “control Israel’s fate”.

That, of course, includes bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Netanyahu drew a parallel between the exchange of letters between  the US War department and the World Jewish Congress in 1944.

The Wall Street Journal described the scene at the AIPAC conference:

Netanyahu got out copies of two letters he said he keeps in his desk, between the World Jewish Congress and the War Department in 1944, when the WJC called on the United States to bomb the extermination camp at Auschwitz, and the War Department refused.

The refusal included the argument that attacking the camp might unleash even more “vindictive” behavior.

“Think about that,” Netanyahu said. “Even more vindictive than the Holocaust!”

During his meeting with Obama, Netanyahu elaborated further:

“Israel must reserve the right to defend itself. After all, that’s the very purpose of the Jewish state, to restore to the Jewish people control over our destiny.

That’s why my supreme responsibility as prime minister of Israel is to ensure that Israel remains master of its fate.”

In an editorial comment, the British Economist responded:

News flash: Israel is not master of its fate. It’s not terribly surprising that a country with less than 8 million inhabitants is not master of its fate. Switzerland, Sweden, Serbia and Portugal are not masters of their fates.

These days, many countries with populations of 100 million or more can hardly be said to be masters of their fates. Britain and China aren’t masters of their fates, and even the world’s overwhelmingly largest economy, the United States, isn’t really master of its fate.

What gives this leader of a foreign nation the license to speak in Washington with such confidence that he expects the US to join him in an attack on Iran, a nation that poses absolutely no threat to the US or its citizens?

Indeed, US intelligence agencies report that they have found no reason to believe that Iran poses an immediate threat to Israel.

So why should the US go to war for Israel over an issue that poses no more immediate danger to Israel than Iraq’s non-existent WMDs threatened its neighbors? That non-existent threat led to a disastrous and costly war for the US, a war that was strongly encouraged by Israel and its US allies in Congress.

Why is there even any serious discussion with a foreign nation over what the US should do regarding an attack against yet another Muslim nation that has made no threats against us?

There are two reasons why;  first, there is the US Congress, and second, there is AIPAC.

After Obama delivered his required obescient speech to AIPAC, the Wall Street Journal reported:

Rep. Eric Cantor, the No. 2 Republican in the House of Representatives, said the speech was “a step in the right direction,” but  ”we need to make sure that this president is also going to stand by Israel and not allow his administration to somehow speak contrary to what our ally thinks is in its best interest.”

No one in the US administration shall speak contrary to what our ally thinks is its best interest?  Where would Rep. Cantor hear such a thing? Surely not in a Tea Party rally where loyalty to God and country are paramount.

We must look to AIPAC as the source of Rep. Cantor’s courage to denigrate the President of the United States.

President George Washington warned the new American nation in his 1796  farewell address that a “passionate atachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils”. He explained why:

“Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification.”

The US has usually managed to adhere to Washington’s advice, until, that is, AIPAC was established.

On the Anti-War website,  Grant Smith described how, in 1948, AIPAC began to seize control of US foreign policy.

Recently declassified FBI files reveal how Israeli government officials first orchestrated public relations and policies through the US lobby. Counter-espionage investigations of proto-AIPAC’s first coordinating meetings with the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the head of Mossad provide a timely and useful framework for understanding how AIPAC continues to localize and market Israeli government policies in America.

Although AIPAC claims it rose “from a small pro-Israel public affairs boutique in the 1950s,” its true origin can be traced to Oct. 16, 1948. This is the date AIPAC’s founder Isaiah L. Kenen and four others established the Israel Office of Information under Israel’s UN mission. It was later moved under the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

AIPAC controls the US Congress through its network of Political Action Committees that follow AIPAC’s instructions on which candidates to politically and financially support, and which candidates to jettison.

The incumbent Israeli Prime Minister travels to Washington to personally lobby members of Congress. He also hosts visiting congressional delegations on their regular trips to Israel.  An annual address to AIPAC is an essential part of that lobbying campaign.

This year, Prime Minister Netanyahu had Iran at the top of his agenda.  He wants, and he fully expects, President Obama and the Congress to support Israel in its military assault against Iran’s nuclear installations.

There is no guarantee that Iran is even close to developing a nuclear capability, but in Netanyahu’s mind, even the possibility that Iran might one day develop an operational nuclear arms capability is sufficient cause for Israel, backed by the  US, to destroy Iranian nuclear sites.

In short, the prime minister is ready for war against Iran, and he expects the US to fall in line behind him.

The irony of this arrogance is that Israel may well be at its lowest point of support from the world community.

David Remnick describes the extent to which Israel has become isolated from the world community. He writes in a Talk of the Town essay in the February issue of the New Yorker:

Israel has reached an impasse. An intensifying conflict of values has put its democratic nature under tremendous stress. When the government speaks daily about the existential threat from Iran, and urges an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, it ignores the existential threat that looms within. . . .

The political corrosion begins, of course, with the occupation of the Palestinian territories–the subjugation of Palestinian men, women and children–that has lasted for forty years.

Peter Beinart, in a forthcoming and passionately urged polemic, The Crisis of Zionism, is just the latest critic to point out that a profoundly anti-democratic, even racist, political culture has become endemic among much of the Jewish population in the West Bank, and threatens Israel proper. . . .

In 1980, twelve thousand Jews lived in the West Bank, “east of democracy,” Beinart writes; now they number more than three hundred thousand, and include Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s wildly xenophobic Foreign Minister. .  .  .

To [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, the proper kind of ally is exemplified by AIPAC and Sheldon Adelson–the long-time casino tycoon and recent bankroller of Newt Gingrich–who owns a newspaper in Israel devoted to supporting him.

David Remnick. Editor, The New Yorker.

Remnick correctly takes note of the degree to which support for Israel affects the current US presidential campaign.

We know pretty much all we need to know about Netanyahu’s feelings toward Obama. The Prime Minister orders the President about like he might order a lowly member of his Israeli cabinet.  He would be very happy to see the White House back in Republican hands.

No doubt, he is following the Republican presidential nomination fight as it unfolds state by state. He cannot be unhappy over the strong link between the Republican candidates and the Christian evangelical conservatives, a segment of the American population already safely ensconced within the Republican base.

The latest victory for the pro-Israel/Christian evangelical base came this weekend when Republican Candidate Rick Santorum won, as reported by The Wichita Eagle, an impressive caucus victory, two to one, over Mitt Romney.

Santorum won with the strong support of that state’s governor, Sam Brownback, a former two-two term member of the US Senate. Governor Brownback is both a conservative evangelical Christian, and a strong supporter of Israel.

Salon describes Kansas as “ground zero for the takeover of the GOP by Christian-infused movement conservatism and the extinction of middle-of-the-road Republicanism.”

Southern primaries Tuesday in Alabama and Mississippi should go to either Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum, a political development that will force Romney to veer even deeper into the ”Christian-infused movement conservatism”/pro-Israel zealotry of his Republican base.

Israel’s media campaign about Iran as a threat was examined by Sheera Frenkel of McClatchy Newspapers. Among her conclusions:

Israeli officials acknowledge that the widespread acceptance in the West that Iran is on the verge of building a nuclear weapon isn’t based just on the findings of Israeli intelligence operatives, but relies in no small part on a steady media campaign that the Israelis have undertaken to persuade the world that Iran is bent on building a nuclear warhead.

“The intelligence was half the battle in convincing the world,” an Israeli Foreign Ministry official told McClatchy, speaking anonymously because he was not authorized to discuss the inner workings of Israel’s outreach on the topic. “The other half was Israel’s persistent approach and attitude that this was not something the world could continue to ignore.”

The official had recently returned from a trip to Washington and marveled at how the topic has become a major one in the United States. “U.S. politicians were falling over each other to talk about Iran,” he said. “In some ways, that is a huge success for Israel.”

If the US is led by Israel to participate in another war in the Middle East, these McClatchy findings suggest that this war could be one of the biggest sales promotion successes in modern political history.

As Prime Minister Netanyahu has said, in another context, “Think about that.”

The picture at top is of Prime Minister Netanyahu holding letters exchanged between the World Jewish Congress and the US War Department in 1944. The picture is by Cliff Owen, of the Associated Press.

James M. Wall is currently a Contributing Editor of The Christian Century magazine, based in Chicago, Illinois. From 1972 through 1999, he was editor and publisher of the Christian Century magazine. He has made more than 20 trips to that region as a journalist, during which he covered such events as Anwar Sadat’s 1977 trip to Jerusalem, and the 2006 Palestinian legislative election. He has interviewed, and written about, journalists, religious leaders, political leaders and private citizens in the region. Jim served for two years on active duty in the US Air Force, and three additional years in the USAF (inactive) reserve. His website: Wall Writings