AfterTruman won the election in 1948, one observer said the election was as much a victory for Feinberg as it was for Truman. Old Abe hung around to do the same for JFK and LBJ. Si Hersh, in The Sampson Option, describes how Feinberg then came to see candidate Kennedy and told him he’d take care of his bills “if you let us have control of your Middle East policy.” Feinberg remembered that JFK heard him out politely, but the next day, he reported the conversation to a friend and he was hopping mad. JFK didn’t oblige Feinberg, but he got the money anyway.

Although one will think that JFK’s relations with Israel were just wonderful from most books on the subject, most gloss over his support or ignore his support for the Palestinian right of return, prentend his opposition to Israel going nuclear was mostly lip service and don’t mention at all his efforts to get the main lobbying group, the American Zionist Council, precursor to AIPAC, to register as a foreign agent. Most books on Jewish politics strangely enough don’t mention the American Zionist Council, at all.

This may shed some light Mr Blankfort, than again, maybe not. Gore Vidal makes some interesting comments in the forward he wrote for Israel Shahak’s volume Jewish History, Jewish Religion. The Weight of Three Thousand Years –

“Sometime in the late 1950s, that world-class gossip and occasional historian, John F. Kennedy, told me how, in 1948, Harry S. Truman had been pretty much abandoned by everyone when he came to run for president. Then an American Zionist brought him two million dollars in cash, in a suitcase, aboard his whistle-stop campaign train. ‘That’s why our recognition of Israel was rushed through so fast.’ As neither Jack nor I was an antisemite (unlike his father and my grandfather) we took this to be just another funny story about Truman and the serene corruption of American politics.”

You wouldn’t know democracy if it rang your doorbell and asked you to sign a petition, Witty.

You are naming a potential minor emphasis, that is within Baruch’s right to the extent that he had the power, even if it did happen.

And, you have the fantasy that similar external pressures were not applied “undemocratically” at a thousand different instances directed to Israel.

Lame.

It is curious to see how much power the Jewish community was able to exert in this instance and on President Truman throughout his term in office, yet we are told these very same Jews did not have sufficient political clout to do anything to rescue the Jews of Europe just a year or two earlier.

You don’t get rid of “non-compliant governments” by obliterating the country.

“Strategic interests” is generally taken to mean business or raw materials. The only raw materials the region has that anyone is seriously interested in is oil, and oil companies had no desire to see instability in the regions created via war, just as American business has no desire to see huge, largely untapped markets destroyed.

American “strategic interests” are gained in every other part of the world via covert operations and the like, not waging wars. The wars in the Middle East are intended to destroy the countries and fragment the entire area in the interest of Israeli “security,” not to create a favorable environment for American business.

Not so. The overwhelming opposition to unlimited immigration is evidenced by the King Crane Commission – as if evidence was needed. No State would vote to allow wholesale immigration of one ethnic group to the point where it became a controlling bloc.

“As there was nothing democratic about the Arab uprising of the late 30’s”

” even though Israel was authorized by UN resolution and ratified.”

Quite simply untrue. The plan for partition was never ratified and the moment it was put on hold (at the insistence of the Americans who intended to create a bi-cultural State, Ben Gurion unilaterally declared Statehood in the full knowledge that War would ensue and with plans already laid for the expulsion of the indigenous people under the cover of general hostilities.

Israel’s claim to be a Democratic State is really just a silly semantic game. Apart from the subtle racism practiced within the “Jewish State”, an occupation maintained for more than forty years during which the occupying power colonizes the subject territory is an annexation in all but name. It is only the label “occupation” that has allowed Israel totalitarian rule outside the Green Line without incurring the World’s condemnation. That is changing now that the internet has shone a light on the nature of the occupation.

Incidentally, do “settlers” in the OT get to vote in Israeli elections?