Zionism’s Lost Shine

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Netanyahu & Boehner: How Israel went from being a Democratic to a Republican Project
By Juan Cole | Jan. 29, 2015 |

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) —
The audacity of Speaker of the House John Boehner colluding with the prime minister of a foreign country to undermine a sitting president is, I think, still not entirely appreciated. And the whole point of the plot with Binyamin Netanyahu is to stop a sitting president from successfully making an opening to a former enemy, reducing the likelihood of war.
Just think what the equivalent would have been.
It would be as though Rep. Joseph William Martin, Jr., the Speaker of the House after WW II, had managed to swing a visit to Congress in 1947 from Mustafa Barzani, the Kurdish leader, to stop Harry Truman from promulgating his Truman Doctrine and including Turkey in the aid package that became the Marshall Plan.
Or, it would be as though Rep. John William McCormack, Speaker of the House in 1971, had without Nixon’s knowledge invited Spanish leader Francisco Franco to address Congress and warn against any deal with Communist China.
I think we know how Truman (a hothead) and Nixon (a sociopath) would have responded to that kind of, well, treason. And frankly I don’t think a Speaker would have dared try to treat a white president that way.
That Netanyahu gleefully joined in this naked power play for the Republican Party, moreover, signals a turning point in the partisan valence of Israel itself.
In a 2-party system, the parties are enormous big-tent conglomerations of groups. But at a certain point in the 20th century, the Democratic Party picked up as constituents, in addition to Southern Baptist rural whites, the urban working and middle classes, including religious minorities (Catholics, Eastern Orthodox and Jews were very disproportionately urban, while rural areas were largely Protestant). Among the Democrats, of course, were some wealthy traitors to their own class like FDR himself, who despite their privilege stood up for urban workers (even if they were not personally enthusiastic about Catholics and Jews). Those few middle class African Americans who could vote in mid-century tended to be Republicans, but most were excluded from the political system.
The narrative of the Democratic Party under the New Deal and after was government-backed uplift and opportunity for minorities and workers. That message resonated with the “Exodus” narrative of Israel as the creation of persecuted people reduced to the most straitened circumstances, who by forming a socialist state created the first modern industrial Middle Eastern nation– which perhaps even had the potential to modernize the feudal emirates and principalities still battening upon the oppressed Arab workers and peasants.
In contrast, the Republican Party was led by wealthy and established WASPs, who allied with upper middle class neighborhoods and some Midwestern farmers. Its message, even in the 1930s and 1940s, was that private business, if only untaxed and unregulated, could create a dynamic economy and a tide that would lift all boats. That discourse was completely unaffected by its utter failure in the Great Depression. The GOP was hostile to the kind of big government FDR championed and that the Israelis constructed in the late 40s and 1950s, and had vanishingly few Jewish or Catholic constituents.
A Republican like Eisenhower was as eager in the 1950s to have good relations with Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt as with Israel, and reacted harshly to Israel’s war of aggression, in conjunction with Britain and France, on Egypt in 1956. Eisenhower had few domestic Jewish constituents and did not care that they were disappointed when he made David Ben Gurion relinquish the Sinai Peninsula back to its lawful owner, Egypt, in 1957. He appears to have been afraid that Israel’s aggressive expansionism would drive Egypt into the arms of the Soviet Union, and with it much of the Arab world. Socialist Jews running about interfering in US Cold War aims did not exactly produce fanboy sentiments in the Presbyterian, Methodist and Lutheran businessmen and military officers at the top of the Republican Party.
In contrast, the Democratic Johnson administration was, in 1967, virtually a cheering section for Israel in that war, in which Israel also fired the first shot.
But from the late 1970s, the Israeli right wing began winning national elections. Some of it, as with the Likud Party, resembled Franco’s Spanish fascists, having a similar origin in the far right wing mass movements of the 1930s in Europe. It reached out to the Mizrahis or Jews from the Middle East who had fled or been expelled after the rise of Israel made them (quite unfairly) controversial at home. Then in the 1990s, a million immigrants came to Israel from the former Soviet Union and East Bloc, only about half of them actually what you might call Jewish. The definition of Neoconservatives, most of them wanted nothing to do with socialism or the Labor Party.
The old Central European Labor Party elite and its socialist institutions such as the Histadrut workers’ union, declined rapidly in influence. A new class of billionaires emerged, and workers began having difficulty paying rent. Class divisions increased. To deflect any backlash from downwardly mobile workers, the Right pushed the colonization of the Palestinian West Bank (socialism has always been acceptable to the European Right if deployed by imperial viceroys in the service of colonialism abroad). There, essentially subsidized housing on stolen Palestinian property kept living expenses bearable and had the further advantage of creating a new constituency that would vote for right wing pro-colonization governments.
Israel’s narrative today is much more like the grand Republican one than like that of New Deal Democrats. It is a land of capitalists and IPOs, of a handful of billionaires who buy Netanyahu his elections and increasingly poorly paid workers (who are still better off than the Palestinian underclass). A few years ago I went to a conference in Israel and they kindly put us up in a kibbutz. We got to see the communal dining halls and the exhortations to community. But the kibbutz was being sold off as vacation homes.
Republican ideology is latently about hierarchy. Older white wealthy Protestant males were at the top of the hierarchy, followed by younger white wealthy Protestant males and then by white wealthy Protestant females. More recently wealthy Jews and Mormons have been granted honorary “Protestant” status in the party, just as the Apartheid Afrikaners decided to proclaim Japanese as “white” for business purposes. For an African-American to be president deeply violates this unstated hierarchy, which is why they treat President Obama with such lack of respect; disrespecting someone in public in primate societies is a way of putting them in their place and restoring power hierarchies. Keeping African-Americans and poor Latinos from voting is not only a partisan strategy (they don’t vote Republican on the whole) but it also underlines the hierarchy, which assumes whiteness and property as connoting ‘real’ Americans. Famously, some of the white working class is attached to the Republican elite because they are told that thereby they become better than workers of the lower (as they think of it when not in public) races.
African-Americans are deployed in much Republican discourse just as Palestinians are deployed in right wing Israeli discourse, and racism functions the same way in making the Israeli working class unwilling to ally with Palestinian workers nowadays (Zachary Lockman showed that such alliances were common in the 1930s).
So for Israel to function as a Republican Trojan Horse in the debate on the Hill about Iran negotiations is an announcement that the old big-government socialist Israel of the Ashkenazi survivors of Nazism is over. Israel has about 1 million such Ashkenazis. But it has nearly 3 million Mizrahim, eastern Jews not steeped in Labor socialism. And it has a million recently arrived Eastern Europeans who were mauled by Soviet excesses and were pushed to the right, just as Hungarians have been.
The 1960s now look like the heyday of the congruence of the Democratic Great Society and the Israeli Labor Socialism of Levi Eshkol, both of them anti-Soviet but both of them standing against unregulated capitalism and in favor of using government to help people lift themselves up.
That American Jews are the religious group most enthusiastic about the Democratic Party and President Obama, yet also something like 63 percent of them are strong supporters of Israel, can only create a mammoth case of what psychologists call cognitive dissonance (mental stress from holding contradictory ideals simultaneously).
Now, with the long dominance of the Israeli Right and the attenuation of Labor and Meretz, Israel is a Republican project, and being deployed in American politics primarily for Republican purposes.
—
Related video:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8S6ZnsRhWHk

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Poll: Netanyahu Should be Investigated for Nuclear Weapons Tech Smuggling Before US Visit
Grant Smith, January 29, 2015

A majority of Americans believe Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should be investigated by the FBI for nuclear weapons technology smuggling before being allowed to enter the United States according to a new poll.


In 2012 the FBI declassified and released files (PDF archive) of its investigation into how 800 nuclear weapons triggers were illegally smuggled from the U.S. to Israel. According to the FBI, the Israeli Ministry of Defense ordered nuclear triggers (krytrons), encrypted radios, ballistic missile propellants and other export-prohibited items through a network of front companies. Smuggling ring operations leader Richard Kelly Smyth alleged that Netanyahu worked at one of the fronts – Heli Trading owned by confessed spy and Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan – and met with him frequently to execute smuggling operations.


The poll was commissioned by the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (IRmep). When informed of the incident, most Americans (54.9 percent) indicate that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should be investigated by the FBI before an upcoming U.S. visit.

Israel officially designated the smuggling operation "Project Pinto." Smyth was captured, prosecuted and incarcerated in 2002 after years on the run as an international fugitive. The krytrons were believed to be destined for Israel’s clandestine nuclear weapons program.

Only 25.8 percent of Americans polled believe Netanyahu should be allowed to freely visit the U.S. while 15.9 percent say said he should neither be investigated nor allowed to enter the U.S.

When questioned by Israeli and Russianmedia about the smuggling affair, the Israeli Foreign Ministry denied involvement.

Younger respondents (age 18-24 and 25-34) are generally more likely to want Netanyahu investigated (73.6 percent and 62.0 percent) than older Americans. Reponses vary little between income categories. However females (63.4 percent) were more likely than males (50.4 percent) to prefer Netanyahu be criminally investigated before being allowed to enter America.

Netanyahu has recently announced plans to break diplomatic protocol and address the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and Congress in March, 2015 without coordinating his state visit with the White House.

The IRmep poll, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2.5 percent, was fielded January 26-28, 2015 by Google Consumer Surveys and received 1,507 responses. The poll question, response choices and statistically significant results may be viewed online and cross-tabulated.

Grant F. Smith is the author of America’s Defense Line: The Justice Department’s Battle to Register the Israel Lobby as Agents of a Foreign Government. He currently serves as director of research at the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy in Washington (IRmep), D.C. Read other articles by Grant, or visit Grant’s website.

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RNC has a decision to make about Israel trip
01/30/15 08:00 AM

By Steve Benen
This week’s drama involving the American Family Association and Bryan Fischer was not, surprisingly enough, the result of some outrageous comment from the right-wing activist, at least not directly. Instead, the story began with an announced trip to Israel.

The AFA announced that the organization was taking Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus and dozens of RNC members on an all-expenses-paid trip to Israel. The nine-day excursion is scheduled to begin tomorrow, and at first blush, it may not seem especially controversial. After all, Americans travel to Israel all the time.

The problem, as noted by Israeli and American media alike, is the Republican National Committee’s willingness to associate itself with the American Family Association and its notorious, hateful spokesperson, Bryan Fischer. Especially in light of Fischer’s record – he’s characterized all non-Christian faiths as “false religions”; he’s said minority faiths do not have the right to exercise their religious beliefs in the United States; he’s said all immigrants to America should expect to convert to Christianity – shouldn’t the RNC keep its distance?

It was questions like these that led the American Family Association to announce this week that Fischer is no longer the group’s official spokesperson. Indeed, the Republican National Committee, after days of silence on its controversial partnership with AFA, told “The Rachel Maddow Show” yesterday:
“We don’t agree with Bryan Fischer’s comments and are glad the AFA has severed ties with him.”
That’s the whole statement in its entirety. The problem, of course, is that we also learned yesterday that the Republican National Committee’s statement isn’t true.

As Rachel explained on the show last night, the AFA may have ousted Fischer as its official spokesperson, but the far-right organization will continue to pay Fischer to host its AFA-sponsored daily radio show – the same venue in which Fischer has spent years making ugly and offensive remarks.

What’s more, this story is about more than just Fischer. The man who will personally lead the AFA/RNC trip to Israel is a man named David Lane, who works on an AFA project called the American Renewal Project. Lane is a controversial figure in his own right, having said in 2012 that he wouldn’t support Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign because of the candidate’s religion.

These are the folks the Republican National Committee is choosing to pal around with? As Rachel put it on the show last night, “I have to say, it’s kind of hard to believe that they will go ahead with this trip…. What will it mean to the Republican Party going forward if they go on a trip, to Israel, with a group that advocates that America is by Christians and for Christians only?”

It’s not too late to cancel.


THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW, 1/29/15, 8:59 PM ET
Religious bigotry haunts group hosting RNC

[seemslikeadream]

Update on Bibi-Boehner Fallout

by Jim Lobe

The Bibi-Boehner fiasco appears to be the gift that keeps on giving. At least, it continues to buoy the hopes of those who want the P5+1 and Iranian negotiators to forge a framework accord by the notional deadline of March 24 to be followed by a comprehensive deal on Tehran’s nuclear program by July 1.

John Boehner’s (R-OH) unilateral invitation has served above all to persuade some nervous Democrats to rally behind Obama and his promise to veto any sanctions legislation during the ongoing negotiations. Indeed, until Boehner’s surprise announcement— which, incidentally, was extended (apparently falsely) “on behalf of the bipartisan leadership of the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate” (emphasis added and see this Reuters piece published today)— Sens. Mark Kirk (R-IL) and Robert Menendez (D-NJ) had a shot at peeling off enough Democrats to get a sanctions bill through the Senate even before March.

But, as widely predicted, the invitation made it clearer than ever that Boehner’s—and Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY)—stunt was fundamentally a partisan maneuver designed to embarrass and undermine the president. This point was underlined by the praise it immediately elicited from the Sheldon Adelson-chaired Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) and the boast a few hours later by Bill Kristol’s Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI)—a Republican operation through and through—that it would host a reception for Netanyahu after his address to Congress.

“It is our impression that these people’s support for the speech stems from their identification with, and admiration for, a move to defy and humiliate President Obama, more than from the importance they attribute to the Iranian issue, which should be the center of the speech,” noted Yaron Seidman, Israel’s consul general in Philadelphia, in a cable to his superiors in the Foreign Ministry, according to an account in Haaretz. Seidman, who previously served as the Israeli embassy’s main liaison to Congress, was referring specifically to the RJC, the ultra-right Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), and various Christian Zionist evangelical figures, Haaretz reported.

Nor was Seidman the only Israeli consular official who suggested that the invitation and Bibi’s snap acceptance were causing problems. Haaretz quoted an unnamed ministry official as saying that the consuls general based in San Francisco, Chicago, Atlanta, Boston, and Los Angeles had voiced similar concerns. “The recurrent message in all the consuls’ reports is that Israel’s friends in the United States think Netanyahu’s speech in Congress is a bad mistake and could harm U.S.-Israel relations,” the official told Haaretz. Israel’s ambassador to Switzerland was reportedly recalled for retweeting comments by Israeli journalists that were critical of Netanyahu’s maneuver.

As you have probably read elsewhere, the affair has also resulted in considerable uncertainty as to who, besides Republicans, will show up for Bibi’s address if it indeed takes place. The vice president, who normally loves affairs like these, seems likely to avoid this one due to questions about scheduling, while Democrats are actively debating whether or not to attend.

As noted by the Associated Press Thursday afternoon, at least three have announced they will indeed boycott: Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR), who called the affair “a reckless act of political grandstanding;” Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), who said the invitation was “an affront to the president and the State Department;” and Rep. G.K. Butterfield (D-NC), who also serves as chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC). The fact that Butterfield and Lewis will boycott is particularly remarkable given the CBC’s historically close ties to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which has long made its courtship of black political leaders a major priority.

Dozens of Democrats are reportedly considering staying away. They’ve also taken other steps to demonstrate their disapproval, such as issuing an appeal to delay Netanyahu’s appearance until after the March 17 Israeli elections that will decide whether Bibi holds on to his premiership.

The Israeli Embassy, headed by former Florida-born Republican activist and “Bibi’s Brain,” Amb. Ron Dermer, has reportedly been trying hard to undo the damage with Democrats, but apparently with little or no success, according to various reports published by Politico. (See, for example, here and here.)

Although the RJC, ECI, and ZOA have all enthusiastically supported the invitation and Netanyahu’s acceptance, mainstream Jewish organizations have, as I suggested when the invitation was first announced, kept a low profile. The leadership of these organizations may lean right, especially with respect to Israel, but the vast majority of American Jews vote Democratic and are certainly far more liberal in their worldview than either John Boehner or Bibi Netanyahu. Referring to the possible “terrible consequences” of Netanyahu’s show of contempt for a U.S. president in a critical commentary (“The Netanyahu Disaster”) by Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic last week, The Forward headlined its most recent editorial “Bibi’s Bad Choice:”

[O]ne of those consequences incurred by the “Republican Senator from Israel” — that’s what some call Netanyahu now — is the damage done to the Israeli government’s relationship with the majority of American Jews. Netanyahu may be appeasing his funders, his Congressional allies and his friends in Jewish communal leadership with his upcoming speech. But he risks alienating many more American Jews whose support he may no longer take for granted.
This no doubt is what has concerned the Israeli consuls general.

Meanwhile, the liberal Zionist group, J Street, has compiled a list of many of the critical comments that the “Netanyahu Disaster,” as Goldberg called it, has elicited from members of Congress, prominent Israelis, as well as several U.S. Jewish leaders and organizations. It’s in alphabetical order for each category.



Statements by Key Figures on Netanyahu Congressional Address



Members of Congress:

Senator Chris Coons (D-DE) – “I remain hopeful that his address would be delayed until after their election.”

Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) – “We have a strong relationship, a strong alliance with Israel. For the speaker to decide to go at it alone and to invite Prime Minister Netanyahu without consulting with the White House was a mistake.”

Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) – Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein of California says that inviting Prime Minister Netanyahu to address Congress during an Israeli election period is “highly inappropriate” and that imposing new sanctions on Iran at this time is “reckless and dangerous.”

Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA) – “It is not the norm to do this right before an election and it is being widely reported in the Israeli press as the U.S. expressing some kind of a preference.”

Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) – “It didn’t show a lot of class. If it had been George W. Bush or Reagan or Clinton or whoever, protocol is protocol.”

Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) – “I’m sick about the fact that protocol has been violated, but you know, I’m always eager to hear what he has to say.”

Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) – “This was not the right thing to do.”

Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) – “For the sake of diplomacy, peace, and respect for our ally Israel, to say nothing of stability in the Middle East, Speaker Boehner must cancel the joint session of Congress with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. If he does not, I will refuse to be part of a reckless act of political grandstanding.”

Reps. Steve Cohen (D-TN), Maxine Waters (D-CA), and Keith Ellison (D-MN) sign-on letter – “We strongly urge you to postpone this invitation until Israelis have cast their ballots and the deadline for diplomatic negotiations with Iran has passed. When the Israeli prime minister visits us outside the specter of partisan politics, we will be delighted and honored to greet him or her on the Floor of the House.”

Rep. Ted Deutch (D-FL) – Ranking Member on the House of Representatives Middle East subcommittee, accused the speaker of “political gamesmanship.”

Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA) – “Moreover, the timing and context of the speech smacks of political opportunism: an attempt to undermine the President in the middle of delicate nuclear negotiations with Iran, while inappropriately projecting political support for Mr. Netanyahu in the middle of Israel’s election.”

Rep. Nita Lowey (D-NY) – “Israel is our strongest ally in the Middle East, deserves our continued bipartisan support and the prime minister is always welcome. Moving forward, the speaker must improve his coordination with the president and minority leader.”

Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA) – “It’s a campaign stunt, and I’m not working for his campaign. I’m not a standing stooge. What will be remembered here is the slight against our president and the partisan political nature of it, and I don’t know who’s served by that.”

Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) – “True friends of Israel understand that bi-partisan support — going back to Harry Truman — has been essential for the safety of Israel and to the success of the US-Israel strategic partnership. And particularly given the fact that Israel is currently facing its most serious threats from all sides, by terrorists and terrorist states alike, that bi-partisan consensus is more important than ever. It would be very wise for both parties to this invitation to consider measures to mitigate the damage this political maneuvering has inflicted.”

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) – “It’s a serious big honor that we extend. That it should be extended two weeks before an election in a country without collaboration among the leaders of Congress, and without collaboration with the White House, is not appropriate.”

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) – “I think for us to extend an invitation two weeks before the Israeli election gives Israelis the impression we’re trying to meddle in their politics and I also find it extraordinary that a world leader would be invited before the Congress effectively to lobby in favor of a bill that the president opposes.”

Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA) – “It was not what would have occurred if the legislative branch and the executive branch worked better together in general and on foreign policy in particular. Those of us in the pro-Israel community don’t want to see Israel be a partisan football.”

Rep. John Yarmuth (D-KY) – “I am totally outraged at Speaker Boehner for doing it, I think it’s, it was deliberately designed to undermine the president — that’s close to subversion.”

Prominent Israelis:

Meir Dagan, former head of Mossad – “Netanyahu’s position will not change the West’s position on the Iranian issue, but his actions bring our relationship with the Americans to an extreme point and this might extract an unbearable price from us in the future.”

MK Zehava Galon – “The State Comptroller should launch an investigation to determine if PM Netanyahu is using the Israeli embassy in Washington to promote his political and partisan interests. This suspicion arises due to the reports about the contact the embassy had with sources in the congress behind the government’s back in order to promote Netanyahu’s congressional speech two weeks before the elections in Israel.”

MK Yair Lapid – “The conduct around Netanyahu’s congressional speech goes against protocol, and against the rules of courtesy. We have to remember: The White House is the institution that we conduct our daily relationship with, according to American law, the president is the high commander of the army, the White House is managing the negotiations with Iran. The strategic relationship with the US is important to the security of Israel, It will take time to mend the damage. Netanyahu has deep knowledge about our relationship with the US, he knows the protocol and he knows the international arena – if he decided to compromise all of that just to give a speech in congress, it is only for one reason: because he thinks it will help him in the Israeli elections, even at the cost of damaging our relationship with the US.”

MK Tzipi Livni, Hatnuah chairwoman – “Netanyahu is compromising our relationship with the United States and therefore he is compromising Israel’s security and jeopardising the lives of its soldiers, and for what? For politics. We – Hertzog and I – will work with the US president – no matter who he is – and take care of Israel’s most important interests. Two weeks before the election he is flying to Washington – he should stay in Israel and speak in Hebrew to the citizens of this country instead of arranging a congressional speech for himself so he can speak in English and get a standing ovation – let him try get a standing ovation here.”

Michael Oren, former Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. – “It’s advisable to cancel the speech to Congress so as not to cause a rift with the American government.”

MK Shelly Yachimovich – “It’s a very brutal and unacceptable bypass of the president of the United States and something like that simply damages [Israel].”

Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin, former intelligence chief – “When we manage our relationship with the US, we have to manage it simultaneously with the president and Congress. The prime minister has made it into a partisan issue in the US, and we cannot let Israel become a problem for one party or the other.”

MK Ofer Shelach – “Democratic delegates that want to support more sanctions on Iran won’t support it now, because they feel that Netanyahu is pushing their president to the corner, they have to stand behind him”.

American Jewish Community Leaders & Groups:

Abe Foxman, Anti-Defamation League – “This looks like a political challenge to the White House and/or a campaign effort in Israel.”

Debra DeLee, Americans for Peace Now President and CEO – “Both the timing of the invitation and its manner are outrageous. They are inappropriate and irresponsible. Not only were the invitations issued in a way that violates protocol, their timing suggests congressional meddling in a foreign country’s election campaign – two weeks only before Israel’s general elections, in which Benjamin Netanyahu is a candidate. Furthermore, the timing strongly suggests an attempt to use a foreign leader to influence the debate between Congress and the White House over America’s Iran policy. To top it all, this move uses Israel, yet again, as a wedge issue in internal American politics. Speaker Boehner’s invitation – both its timing and manner – is therefore a disservice to US national security interests and to Israel’s.”

Israel Policy Forum – “Now that consideration of new sanctions legislation will be postponed until after the March 24 interim deadline for the P5+1 negotiations, Netanyahu’s scheduled address is of questionable purpose. It will not have a demonstrable impact on U.S. legislation, or strengthen American resolve to pressure Iran in negotiations. It is more likely to have the counterproductive effect of highlighting and intensifying disagreements between Democrats and Republicans and between the Israeli and American governments.”

J Street – “Mr. Netanyahu is not only head of the Israeli government — he is also a candidate in the midst of a highly-contested election campaign. His invitation, rightly or wrongly, will inevitably be interpreted in Israel and elsewhere as an attempt by an outside actor to interfere in the Israeli election. We would urge Mr. Boehner to postpone the invitation until after the election and then to invite whoever is elected Prime Minister, who will enjoy a fresh mandate from his or her people to address the Congress. The timing is also troubling because of what may be a looming battle over Iran sanctions legislation that President Obama has vowed to veto should it reach his desk. Again, the intention may be pure, but the appearance is just as important as the intent. This will inevitably appear to many to be an attempt by a Republican standard-bearer to enlist the support of a foreign leader in a battle to gather votes to overturn a presidential veto.”

[seemslikeadream]

When you’ve Lost Bernie Sanders: How Netanyahu destroyed the Israel Lobby
By Juan Cole | Feb. 10, 2015 |

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) –
Senator Bernie Sanders, the most consistent and prominent progressive in the US Senate, has decided to skip the speech of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to Congress on March 3, which was orchestrated by Israel’s ambassador to the US Ron Dermer and Speaker of the House John Boehner in an attempt to derail President Obama’s negotiations with Iran over its civilian nuclear enrichment program. It is Bibi’s Kanye West moment.
Sanders’s announcement may well signal a turning point in the domestic politics of Mideast policy. Sanders runs as a Socialist but might well announce his candidacy within the Democratic Party for president in the 2016 race. He can’t win, of course, but could push the electoral issues to the left. He in any case caucuses with the Democrats. Despite his strong progressive vision, Sanders has in the past been reluctant to criticize Israel. He, like many on the American left, held up Israel in general as a progressive cause, regardless of the country’s colonial actions in the Palestinian West Bank or its illegal blockade of Gaza
Obama believes that a deal can be had whereby Iran is allowed to enrich uranium for reactor fuel but through restrictions and inspections can be kept from ever militarizing the program. Boehner and Netanyahu believe that Iran’s enrichment program must be closed down to forestall the development of a bomb by Tehran. Israel is currently the only nuclear power in the region, which makes it a regional hegemon, a position it might lose if it were one of many nuclear powers.
The Israel lobbies as a project of Jewish nationalism have long depended primarily on three tactics for their success. 1) They brutally punish those critical of Israeli policy (no matter how justified the criticism) with boycotts, smears and blackballing; 2) They marshal American Jewish groups into unanimity in support of Israel regardless of the latter’s feelings about certain policies, and 3) they use political donations to shape Congressional and general political discourse on Israel in official circles.
The Israel lobbies are not by any means unique, since there are Cuban, Armenian and other ethnic lobbies. And of course there are many ideological lobbies, including that of the Koch brothers for a peculiar kind of conservatism (they say they are Libertarians but seek government policies favorable to their Oil businesses).
But the Israel lobbies are, while sometimes dealt defeat, remarkably successful among lobbies. And, whereas many wealthy conservatives might have objected to the views of Native Americans specialist Steven Salaita at the University of Illinois Urbana Champagne, none of them pressured the chancellor with withdrawal of donations on the basis of conservatism. A Jewish nationalist donor did get Salaita fired over his private tweets, done on his own time and unconnected to his position in Native American studies, about the brutality of the Gaza War. Jewish nationalist legislators or those beholden to the Israel lobbies also routinely shoot down government appointments of officials insufficiently obsequious to Israel as a cause.
Rep. Steven Cohen (D-Tenn.) is also said to be leaning toward a boycott of Netanyahu’s speech. So are a number of other Jewish Congressmen on the Democratic side. And, Vice President Joe Biden’s own decision to boycott may sway many Democrats in Congress.
This stampede of Democratic legislators away from Netanyahu’s speech disrupts principles 2) and 3) above, and makes it difficult for the Israel lobbies to implement 1) consistently. Biden has been close for his entire career to the positions of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a coordinating body for 16,000 smaller lobbies that throw millions into congressional races. He may not have another race to run, and for the lobbies to try to smear or punish him would surely backfire on them. It would also signal to younger politicians that it is dangerous to take their money because they are fickle and intolerant of the slightest dissent. I have argued that for many reasons, Israel is becoming more a Republican Party project than a Democratic one. Many in the GOP agree and hope this development will bring US Jews, who vote overwhelmingly Democratic, over to the Republicans. But another development is possible, which is that Jewish Democrats may become less supportive of an increasingly far rightwing Israel.
By overreaching, Netanyahu may be shattering the hammer his partisans in the US have used to destroy critics of his policies in America. And Mideast policy in the US may never be quite the same.
—
Related video:
“This Is the First Senator to Say He’ll Skip Netanyahu Speech”

Former Israeli Opposition Leader Puts Bibi-Boehner Ploy Bluntly

by Jim Lobe

Yossi Sarid, the former head of Israel’s Meretz Party and leader of the opposition in the Knesset from 2001 to 2003, has just written a very blunt—far too blunt for “acceptable” political discourse in Washington, DC—op-ed published Sunday by Haaretz. Unfortunately, it’s behind a pay wall, so the most I can do is extract a few excerpts. The title is straightforward: “Beware: Republican Jews on the Warpath,” and Sarid, who also served as minister of education under Ehud Barak, doesn’t pull any punches about what Boehner’s fraudulent invitation to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is really all about.

Now it’s no longer a “crisis in the relationship” that they try to paper over; now it’s no longer just “tensions with the White House” that they’re making every effort to reduce in between meetings; now, it’s an open war with the United States. It’s Sheldon Adelson versus Barack Obama, and Israel is caught in the cross-fire.
After Vice President Joe Biden, our greatest friend over there, announced an unspecified trip abroad that will prevent him from being in Congress at the fateful hour, Republican Jewish organizations launched a campaign of intimidation against those lawmakers who had already announced their intent to skip the joint session: Their political fate will be bitter.
…Ambassador to Washington Ron Dermer, in the service of his master, is rallying his troops and launching a combined assault on Capitol Hill. Benjamin Netanyahu is determined to show the president once and for all who really rules in Washington, who is the landlord both here and there.
…
One Matthew Brooks – the executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, who does the will of its financial backers – explained over the weekend, “We will commit whatever resources we need to make sure that people are aware of the facts, that given the choice to stand with Israel and Prime Minister Netanyahu in opposition to a nuclear Iran, they chose partisan interests and to stand with President Obama.” Mort Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, added unambiguously, “We will, of course, be publicly condemning any Democrats who don’t show up for the speech — unless they have a doctor’s note.” Doctor, this man is sick and urgently needs tranquilizers.
…
Israel, which until now was a cornerstone of bipartisanship, has become loathsome to its traditional supporters. Benjamin Nitay Netanyahu, the Israeli-American, has made it into something that reeks, even among its longtime supporters.
In these very moments, the protocols are being rewritten. Rich Jews are writing them in their own handwriting. They, in their wealth, are confirming with their own signatures what anti-Semites used to slander them with in days gone by: We, the elders of Zion, pull the strings of Congress, and the congressmen are nothing but marionettes who do our will. If they don’t understand our words, they’ll understand our threats. And if in the past, we ran the show from behind the scenes, now we’re doing it openly, from center stage. And if you forget our donations, the wellspring will run dry.
You’ll remember that Obama, during an off-the-record meeting with Democratic senators three weeks ago, reportedly appealed to them to resist “donors and others” who opposed a deal with Iran and were pushing for new sanctions legislation that risked sabotaging the nuclear-focused talks with Iran and an eventual deal. Sen. Robert Menendez, who has been pushing for such legislation for more than a year, reportedly replied that he took “personal offense” at Obama’s remarks about donors, apparently interpreting Obama’s comments as suggesting that Menendez’s position was motivated by his desire and need for campaign cash.

The New York Times helpfully noted in a profile of Menendez that the New Jersey senator had received $341,170 from hard-line pro-Israel groups over the past seven years, “more than any other Democrat in the Senate.” (In fact, he received more money than any other Senate candidate—Democratic or Republican—in the 2012 elections, while his Republican comrade-in-arms and co-sponsor for sanctions legislation, Illinois Sen. Mark Kirk, has received more campaign cash from pro-Israel political actions committees (PACs) associated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) than any other member of Congress over the past decade. And that doesn’t necessarily include all the much-harder-to-track money provided by donors like Adelson, who chairs Brooks’s RJC, through super PACS and other vehicles.) Indeed, there’s no doubt that Obama’s reference to “donors” touched a very sensitive nerve with Menendez.

Sarid, whose op-ed is most unlikely to appear in any mainstream U.S. publication, has now pounded it with a sledgehammer.

[seemslikeadream]

60% of Gaza Victims of Israel Strikes Were Women, Children or Elderly, Study Finds
AP Says Just 11% of Those Killed Were Militants

GETTY IMAGES

By JTA
Published February 14, 2015.

4 Gaza Children Killed 'Playing Soccer' on Beach — Both SIdes Set Brief Truce
Israel 'Pinpoint' Strikes Kill Mostly Gaza Innocents — Entire Families Wiped Out
An Associated Press investigation into Israeli airstrikes on Gaza homes during last summer’s war against Hamas concluded that 508 people, or over 60 percent of the casualties, were children, women and older men.
The report, which the Associated Press called “the most painstaking attempt to date to try to determine who was killed in strikes on homes,” was compiled by investigating 247 Israeli airstrikes and interviewing witnesses.
Israel launched air strikes after an intensification of rocket fire attacks launched from Gaza onto southern Israeli towns.
Israeli officials have accused Hamas and other groups of launching attacks from population-dense areas. According to Israel, Palestinian groups used houses to hide weapons, fighters and command centers. Israeli officials said they used safeguards against hitting civilians, including calling off strikes at the last minute when civilians appeared and delivering warnings so civilians could evacuate.
The AP report concluded that 96 of those killed in airstrikes, or 11 percent of the total casualties, were “confirmed or suspected militants.” The Associated Press acknowledged that its numbers could be wrong since Hamas has not released a detailed casualty list.
The number of civilian deaths has been a central element of the heated discussion of the Gaza conflict. In August 2014, the United Nations reported that 70 percent of the war’s total Palestinian casualties were civilians. Israel refuted that report.

Netanyahu calls for 'massive immigration' of European Jews to Israel
After two shootings in Copenhagen, PM says cabinet to discuss $46 million plan to encourage Jewish immigration from Ukraine, France and Belgium; Bennett: European Jews should know Israel is their home.

[seemslikeadream]

NEWS & POLITICS
Meet the Family With a Megaphone in U.S. & Israeli Politics
The Falic family owns the chain of stores known as Duty Free Americas, and likes to use their influence to meddle in geopolitics.
By Jessica Desvarieux / The Real News Network February 17, 2015

With 90 percent of Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu's campaign donors being U.S. Americans, the Falic family tops the list, and their influence reaches both sides of the aisle in Congress

[seemslikeadream]

FEBRUARY 25, 2015

A Bad Week
Israel’s New Asian Allies
by JONATHAN COOK
It was another difficult week for Israel.

In Britain, 700 artists, including many household names, pledged a cultural boycott of Israel, and a leader of the Board of Deputies, the representative body of UK Jews, quit, saying he could no longer abide by its ban on criticising Israel.

Across the Atlantic, the student body of one of the most prestigious US universities, Stanford, voted to withdraw investments from companies implicated in Israel’s occupation, giving a significant boost to the growing international boycott (BDS) movement.

Meanwhile, a CNN poll found that two-thirds of Americans, and three-quarters of those under 50, believed the US foreign policy should be neutral between Israel and Palestine.

This drip-drip of bad news, as American and European popular opinion shifts against Israel, is gradually changing the west’s political culture and forcing Israel to rethink its historic alliances.

The deterioration in relations between Israel and the White House is now impossible to dismiss, as Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Barack Obama lock horns, this time over negotiations with Iran.

The US was reported last week to be refusing to share with Israel sensitive information on the talks, fearful it will be misused. A senior Israeli official described it as like being evicted from the “deluxe guest suite” in Washington. “Astonishing doesn’t begin to describe it,” he said.

The fall-out is spreading to the US Congress, where for the first time Israel is becoming a partisan issue. A growing number of Democrats have declared they will boycott Netanyahu’s address to the Congress next month, when he is expected to try to undermine the Iran talks.

Things are more precarious still in Europe. Several leading parliaments have called on their governments to recognise Palestinian statehood, and France rocked Israel by backing just such a resolution recently in the UN Security Council.

Europe has also begun punishing Israel for its intransigence towards the Palestinians. It is labelling settlement products and is expected to start demanding compensation for its projects in the occupied territories the Israeli army destroys.

This month 63 members of the European Parliament went further, urging the European Union to suspend its “association agreement”, which allows Israel unrestricted trade and access to special funding.

None of this has gone unnoticed in Israel. A classified report by the foreign ministry leaked last month paints a dark future. It concludes that western support for the Palestinians will increase, the threat of European sanctions will grow, and the US might even refuse to “protect Israel with its veto” at the UN.

Israel is particularly concerned about the economic impact, given that Europe is its largest trading partner. Serious sanctions could ravage the economy.

One might assume that, faced with these drastic calculations, Israel would reconsider its obstructive approach to peace negotiations and Palestinian statehood. Not a bit of it.

Netanyahu’s officials blame the crisis with Washington on Obama, implying that they will wait out his presidency for better times to return.

As for Europe, Netanyahu blames the shift there on what he calls “Islamisation”, suggesting that Europe’s growing Muslim population is holding the region’s politicians to ransom. On this view, the price paid for the recent terror attacks in Paris and Copenhagen is Europe’s support for Israel.

Instead, Netanyahu has begun looking elsewhere for economic – and ultimately political – patrons.

In doing so, he is returning to an early Israeli tradition. The state’s founders were inspired by the collectivist ideals of the Soviet Union, not US individualism. And in return for attacking Egypt in 1956, Israel was secretly helped by Britain and France to build nuclear weapons over stiff US opposition.

In response to recent developments, Netanyahu announced last month that he was courting trade with China, India and Japan – comprising nearly 40 per cent of the planet’s population.

Last year, for the first time, Israel did more trade with these Asian giants than with the US. Much of it focused on the burgeoning arms market, with Israel supplying nearly $4 billion worth of weapons in 2013. A region once implacably hostile to Israel is throwing open its doors.

India, plagued by border tensions with Pakistan and China, is now Israel’s largest arms purchaser – and such trade is expected to expand further following the election last year of Narendra Modi, known for his anti-Muslim views.

He has lifted the veil off India’s growing defence cooperation with Israel, one reason why Moshe Yaalon last week became the first Israeli defence minister to make an official visit.

Ties between Israel and China are deepening rapidly too. Beijing has become Israel’s third largest trading partner, while Israel is China’s second biggest supplier of military technology after Russia.

Last month the two signed a three-year cooperation plan, with China keen to exploit – in addition to Israel’s military hardware – its innovations on solar energy, irrigation and desalination.

Emmanuel Navon, an international relations expert at Tel Aviv University, claims that, despite its poor public image, Israel now enjoys a “global clout” unprecedented in its history.

Israel’s immediate goal is to future-proof itself economically against mounting popular pressure in Europe and the US to act in favour of the Palestinian cause.

But longer term Israel hopes to convert Chinese and Indian dependency on Israeli armaments – based on technology it tests and refines on a captive Palestinian population – into diplomatic cover. One day Israel may be relying on a Chinese veto at the UN, not a US one.

[Searcher08]

I think Israel has very different relations with India and China.

India is a long-term and growing ideological ally, with much intel-services cooperation - China is a trade partner that ultimately needs Iranian energy much more than weapons from Israel.

The Japanese connection is probably through organised crime, who corrupt tentacles seem to have reached into every area of Japanese society, notably the Fukushima "clean-up".

[seemslikeadream]

http://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/Jewish-gr ... ice-392519
Jewish groups line up to denounce Boteach ad on Susan Rice
US national security advisor Rice says Netanyahu addr...
ADL denounces Rabbi Shmuley Boteach's Susan Rice atta...

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, the New Jersey-based author and pro-Israel advocate, took out an ad in the NY Times attacking Susan Rice after she criticized Netanyahu.

[stillrobertpaulsen]

This Isn’t The Reaction Netanyahu Hoped For After His Dramatic Speech To Congress

by Igor Volsky Posted on March 4, 2015 at 3:45 pm


Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks before a joint meeting of Congress on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, March 3, 2015

Tuesday’s speech by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to a joint session of Congress seemed to have zero impact on the ongoing negotiations surrounding Iran’s nuclear program and may have even undermined the leader’s efforts to scuttle a diplomatic solution to the crisis.

On Wednesday, world leaders negotiating with Iran in Montreux, Switzerland hinted that they were closing the gap on a possible deal that would contain Iran’s nuclear capabilities for at least 10 years and prevent it from breaking out of that agreement and obtaining enough fuel for a nuclear weapon for at least one year. The Wall Street Journal reported that “an understanding is emerging” on the break-out issue — a critical stepping stone to any final deal.

Without mentioning Netanyahu by name, Secretary of State John Kerry swiftly dismissed the Prime Minister’s insistence that the United States and its negotiating partner demand full capitulation from Iran and refuse to deal with the regime until it renounces violence and recognizes Israel.

“No one has presented a more viable, lasting alternative for how you actually prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon,” Kerry said. “So folks, simply demanding that Iran capitulate is not a plan. And nor would any of our P5+1 partners support us in that position.”

Leaders in Iran and Israeli opposition figures also condemned Netanyahu’s speech.

Meanwhile, Republicans in the Senate are responding to the address by fast tracking legislation requiring Congress to review any agreement with Tehran. The White House has threatened to veto the measure and the GOP doesn’t appear to have the 13 Democratic votes to override the president. The Obama administration argues that requiring Congressional consent to a final deal would create “an additional hurdle” to reaching any agreement and undermine the Americans and its negotiating partners. It also notes that Congress will ultimately vote to lift sanctions against Iran should an agreement be reached.

But Senate Democrats who had co-sponsored the bill in the Foreign Relations Committee are now pledging to vote against the measure and, according to The Hill, Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) “is circulating a letter to [Senate Majority Leader Mitch] McConnell signed by [Sen. Angus] King and the other Democratic co-sponsors in which they pledge to oppose the bill if it is brought to the floor next week.”

“I think the bill — barring what happened yesterday — was headed for a veto-proof majority,” Sen. Angus King (I-ME) told the paper. “I think yesterday derailed that to some extent.”

In an interview with the Associated Press, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) also criticized McConnell for fast tracking the measure. “I think we are better off when things are related to the Iran deal to wait ‘til we see if something can be negotiated,” he said. “And if there is something negotiated that allows a deal, then we should all jump in with all the energy we have. But until then, I think it takes away from the fact that we may get a deal that’s a good deal.”

[seemslikeadream]

Tens of Thousands Attend Anti-Netanyahu Rally in Tel Aviv
TEL AVIV, Israel — Mar 7, 2015, 1:45 PM ET
Associated Press
Tens of thousands of Israelis are gathering at a Tel Aviv square under the banner "Israel wants change" and calling for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to be replaced in March 17 national elections.

Saturday night's rally at Rabin Square is the highest profile demonstration yet in the run-up to the election. It is organized by a non-profit organization seeking to change Israel's priorities and refocus on health, education, housing and the country's cost of living. Though not officially endorsed by any political party, it drew mostly supporters of leftist and centrist parties.

The rally's keynote speaker is former Mossad chief Meir Dagan who recently slammed Netanyahu's conduct and called him "the person who has caused the greatest strategic damage to Israel."

[seemslikeadream]

TUESDAY, MAR 10, 2015 01:20 PM CDT
Bibi in big trouble: New poll shows Israeli PM in danger of losing bid for fourth term
Center-left Zionist Union alliance pulls ahead of Netanyahu's Likud
LUKE BRINKER


Corroborating other surveys showing that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu failed to score a big polling bounce following his controversial March 3 congressional address on Iran, a new poll released Tuesday finds the prime minister in grave danger of losing his bid for a fourth term ahead of national elections in one week.

The poll, from the Knesset Channel, puts the center-left Zionist Union ahead of Netanyahu’s Likud party, with the Zionist Union on track to win 24 seats in the 120-seat parliament to Likud’s 21. The centrist Yesh Atid party is projected to win 14 seats.

Haaretz notes that if the Zionist Union joins forces with Yesh Atid and smaller left-leaning and Arab parties, it could form a government with 56 seats. Combining with smaller right-rightist and ultra-Orthodox parties, Netanyahu is on track to assemble 55 seats at most.

The Zionist Union is a coalition of Isaac Herzog’s Labor and Tzipi Livini’s Hatnuah parties. If the coalition manages to form a government, the two plan to rotate the prime ministership, with Herzog serving as premier for the first two years of the government’s term and Livni serving for the latter half. Both Herzog and Livni harshly criticized Netanyahu’s congressional address denouncing a potential Iranian nuclear deal, arguing that the speech further isolated Israel on the international stage.

[seemslikeadream]

Exclusive: Netanyahu Canceled Intel Briefing for U.S. Senators on Iran Dangers
Massimo Calabresi @calabresim 5:00 PM ET
Israel's Prime Minister Netanyahu attends cabinet meeting in Jerusalem
Gali Tibbon—Reuters
Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attends the weekly cabinet meeting at his office in Jerusalem March 8, 2015.
Israeli spy chief warned Congress might blow up talks on Iranian nuke program

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tried to cancel a January briefing for U.S. Senators by his nation’s intelligence service that warned Congress could damage talks aimed at constraining Iran’s nuclear program, according to sources familiar with the events.

Tennessee Republican Bob Corker, the head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, had requested the Jan. 19 briefing for six of his colleagues traveling to Israel so that the intelligence agency, Mossad, could warn them that a Senate proposal might inadvertently collapse the talks. After Netanyahu’s office stripped the meeting from the trip schedule, Corker threatened to cut his own Israel trip short in protest.

Netanyahu relented after the personal intervention of Israeli ambassador to the U.S., Ron Dermer, and allowed the briefing to go forward, sources say. Attending were Corker, Republican Senators John McCain, Lindsey Graham and John Barrasso, Democratic Senators Tim Kaine and Joe Donnelly, and Independent Senator Angus King.

At issue was the fate of a Nov. 2013 agreement between Iran, the U.S. and five other international powers. That temporary agreement promised no new economic sanctions on Iran in exchange for a freeze of Iran’s nuclear program, new international inspections of Iran’s nuclear sites and the removal of nearly all medium-enriched uranium from Iran’s possession. Both sides have stuck to the interim deal while talks on a long-term deal to constrain the Iranian nuclear program have dragged out.


The controversial but popular bill proposed by Republican Mark Kirk and Democrat Robert Menendez would have imposed new sanctions on Iran if it didn’t agree by June 30 to a long-term deal. U.S. intelligence officials had concluded that the Kirk-Menendez bill risked collapsing the talks and taking with it the 16-month-old agreement, according to a report by Eli Lake and Josh Rogin of Bloomberg View. Corker wanted the Mossad briefing to bolster the U.S. assessment.

During the Mossad briefing, the agency’s chief, Tamir Pardo, warned that the Kirk-Menendez bill would be like “throwing a grenade” into the U.S.-Iran diplomatic process. After some of the contents of the briefing were first reported by Bloomberg View, Pardo released a statement saying he had used the phrase not to oppose new sanctions, but “as a metaphor” to describe the effect derailing current talks might have.

A spokesman for Netanyahu declined to say why the Prime Minister acted to prevent the Senators from receiving the briefing from Pardo. Since the Mossad briefing, Corker has rallied support for an alternative measure to replace the Kirk-Menendez proposal, support for which has faded. Corker’s bill, which has broad support and potentially could receive enough votes for a veto-proof majority, would only impose new sanctions if Iran walked away from the Nov. 2013 agreement.

U.S. and Iranian officials are entering a tense phase of negotiations in Switzerland this week as they attempt to reach a political deal to extend and expand the Nov. 2013 agreement for at least 10 years. As the challenges of reaching the longer-term deal have increased, some in the U.S. are trying to ensure the interim agreement that has frozen the Iranian program isn’t undermined in the process.




Some members of the Senate oppose the ongoing talks with Iran. Freshman Republican Senator Tom Cotton last week issued an open letter with 46 other GOP Senators warning the Iranian leadership that Congress could reverse parts of any deal the talks produce. Corker did not sign that letter; his bill provides for partial Congressional approval of a deal.

Cotton has said that rather than negotiate with Iran, the U.S. should adopt a policy of regime change and should arm Israel with bombers and bunker busting bombs with which it could attack Iranian nuclear sites. Authorities in both parties, including Obama’s first Defense Secretary Robert Gates, have worried that an Israeli attack could draw the U.S. into a military confrontation with Iran on unfavorable terms.

Supporters of Kirk-Menendez argue it would increase pressure on Iran to make concessions that would more effectively limit its ability to get a nuclear weapon. Republicans are concerned that the Obama administration is too eager to do a long-term deal with Iran and is making too many concessions in the current talks. Secretary of State John Kerry arrives for talks in Geneva Sunday ahead of a self-imposed Mar. 24 deadline for the political framework for a long-term deal. Final terms of a comprehensive agreement would not be worked out before June.

Netanyahu is seeking re-election in a tough vote Tuesday, with his Likud Party trailing his strongest competitor, Zionist Union, by four points in recent polls.

[seemslikeadream]

WORLD
Paranoid Benjamin Netanyahu Prepares For His Last Stand
Netanyahu has described a suicidal Jewish extremist as his personal hero. Will he follow in his path?
By Max Blumenthal / AlterNet March 20, 2015

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu propelled his Likud Party to victory over the centrist Zionist Union in national elections this week with a vehement rejection of a Palestinian state and warning of “buses full of Arabs” inundating polling places. He understands that most Jewish Israelis do not want to live beside an independent Palestinian state or next door to a Palestinian. He is one of them, after all, and he shares their sensibility. His last minute desperate appeal to racism was an Israeli application of Alabama Governor George C. Wallace’s political rule: “I will never be out-niggered again.”

By making Netanyahu the longest serving prime minister in Israel’s history, Jewish Israeli voters have chosen occupation, apartheid and periodic bouts of warfare. By signing onto Likud’s election list, they have sent figures to the Knesset who make Netanyahu look like Arlo Guthrie. They include Miri Regev, an Israeli blend of Sarah Palin and Marine Le Pen who incited racist riots at a 2012 rally when she called African migrants “a cancer in the nation’s body.” Also on the list is Avi Dichter, a hardline former Shin Bet chief who authored a bill that would have formally enshrined Israel’s Jewish character as superior to its democratic charter. (The bill may pass in diluted form in the coming months). Then there is Ayoub Kara, a rabidly anti-Palestinian Druze Arab legislator who flew to Berlin in 2011 to pal around with a neo-Nazi German millionaire and later described Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman as “really a leftist.” Avigdor Lieberman, for his part, recently called for beheading Arab citizens of Israel he deemed disloyal—“we need to pick up an axe and cut off his head.”

A minority of Israeli Jewish citizens have attempted to resist their country’s destructive path, but they have never been more stigmatized or marginalized. Meanwhile, millions of Palestinians live under Israeli rule without the right to vote or any legal rights at all. The war that left some 2,200 residents of the Gaza Strip dead last summer and reduced nearly a quarter of the besieged coastal enclave’s urban landscape to rubble was supported by over 90 percent of the Jewish Israeli public, with 45 percent of Israelis complaining that their army had not used enough force. This was the Israel that rewarded Netanyahu with his fourth term.


Marketed to the Western world as a vibrant liberal democracy filled with sexy citizen-soldier girls, gay pride marchers and bespectacled Ashkenazi intellectuals anguishing over Israel’s excesses in quaint cafes, Israel today increasingly resembles the first-century CE desert fortress known as Masada. Now a popular tourist destination, Masada was the site of a mass suicide by Jewish fanatics who rebelled against the Roman Empire, then slaughtered and robbed a community of Jews at the village of Ein Gedi who had attempted to negotiate with the Romans. The Jewish Roman historian Josephus referred to the rebels as “Sicarii,” or terrorist bandits.

In his final address at Masada, with the hilltop fortress surrounded by the Roman legions, the messianic rebel leader Elazar Ben-Yair exhorted his followers to commit mass suicide. “Let our wives die before they are abused, and our children before they have tasted of slavery,” Ben-Yair declared. “And after we have slain them, let us bestow that glorious benefit upon one another mutually, and preserve ourselves in freedom.” The zealots slaughtered one another, with the men among some 960 rebels running swords through their wives then butchering their children before killing themselves. The seven survivors of the massacre recalled to Josephus a stifling atmosphere in which all dissent was crushed and conformism reigned.

Instead of teaching Masada as a cautionary tale, Israel’s founding generation glorified the suicidal zealots. Israeli children celebrated their bar mitzvahs en masse at Masada, while soldiers ascended the steep incline to take their induction rites at the hilltop fort and recite a line from the poet Yitzhak Lamdan: “Never again willl Masada fall!” The Israeli political psychologist Daniel Bar-Tal titled his groundbreaking 1983 study of Jewish Israeli attitudes, “Masada Syndrome,” revealing the powerful influence of a siege mentality “in which members of a group hold a central belief that the rest of the world has highly negative behavioral intentions towards the group.” Masada was the symbolic space where all the demons of the Israeli psyche blended into a single phantasm of a last stand.

Nearly all of Israel’s leaders have demonstrated symptoms of Masada Syndrome, but few have embraced it as enthusiastically as Netanyahu. His world is a dystopia filled with genocidal enemies hellbent on the destruction of the Jewish people. They range from what he called “the insatiable crocodile of militant Islam” to the “modern Hitler” in Tehran, from the “goons in Gaza” to a Palestinian national movement controlled by anti-Semitic gamma rays emitted from Hitler’s brain. Netanyahu has identified the New York Times and Ha’aretz as two of Israel’s greatest foes, and once described former Obama advisors Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod as “self-hating Jews.” In the final days of his re-election campaign, he howled against an international conspiracy to overthrow him, with Barack Hussein Obama as its puppet-master. (A robo-call to voters in Israel warned them to vote for Netanyahu against “Hussein Obama.”)

Given his paranoid style, it is unsurprising that Netanyahu has identified the leader of the suicidal Masada bandits, Elazar Ben-Yair, as one of his personal heroes in his ironically titled 1994 book, A Durable Peace. During his speech to the Congress just before the election, boycotted by 58 Democratic lawmakers and Vice-President Joseph Biden, Netanyahu channeled Ben-Yair’s final words: “For the first time in 100 generations, we, the Jewish people, can defend ourselves. This is why—this is why, as a prime minister of Israel, I can promise you one more thing: Even if Israel has to stand alone, Israel will stand.”

Few observers of his extraordinary performance in Washington understood his subtext. Netanyahu’s statement can be read in the wake of his victory as his threat to Israel’s Western patrons. To him, the EU and US are not allies, but Romans attempting to impose their oppressive order on Jerusalem. If they refuse to bend to his will, he will defy them as his hero Ben-Yair did. Vowing to “stand alone,” Netanyahu has set the stage for an ultimate stand-off.