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‘Israelis are helping write US laws, fund US campaigns, craft US war policy’

At Al Jazeera, Ahmed Moor has a piece titled, “How the Israel lobby erodes US sovereignty.” Strong words. Moor says that Israelis are “helping write US laws, funding US campaigns, and helping craft US war-making policy.”

Part of his case is the Mark Kirk Senate bill on refugees that came straight out of Israel.

Ha’aretz reported that the senator had some help with his legislative burden, and not only from his deputy chief of staff, Richard Goldberg. It turns out that the amendment to the bill was first written by an Israeli politician. Einat Wilf, a member of the Israeli parliament, reportedly spent months working with current and former AIPAC employees, including Steve Rosen – who was once suspected by FBI agents of obtaining classified US government information and passing it on to Israeli officials - to deliver the language on Palestinian refugees to the US legislature.

In summary: a senator who suffered crippling neurological damage received legislation from an Israeli politician by way of AIPAC before he slipped it into a US bill that eventually became law. In other words, an Israeli politician helped write a US law. Then she boasted about it. “I have nothing against the descendents of refugees and I’m not asking them to give up of their dream of returning,” Haaretz quoted Wilf as saying. “But if we want a two-state solution, UNWRA can’t continue to aid an inflation of refugees … It ends up harming peace.”

Annie Robbins treated the same scandal on our site. When is the American press going to go after that story?

The good news is that leftists and realists are carving out new territory together. Moor’s post recalls Scott McConnell’s essay at the Mideast Policy Council of a year or so back, saying that Israel is a “transmission belt” for a lot of really bad ideas to the U.S., including Islamophobia:

[The special relationship] is at bottom a transmission belt, conveying Israeli ideas on how the United States should conduct itself in a contested and volatile part of the world. To a great extent, a receptive American political class now views the Middle East and their country’s role in it through Israel’s eyes…

the United States receives, principally, the enmity of Israel’s seemingly ever-expanding circle of foes, a small percentage of whom resort to terrorism. And, as an added bargain, it gets a powerful domestic lobby that now pursues as its main activity the incitement of wars between the United States and Israel’s enemies.

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Thanks to our media mavens, the Israel Lobby, like no other foreign lobby ever before, has become a fifth column in the US dictating to our Congress and the White House, no matter the political party. A media committed to “engineering consent” for total US support for Israel’s ethnic cleansing and occupation of the Palestinians, reports on behalf of, not on the Lobby/fifth column. When the State Department tells an American citizen jailed by Israel that it can’t help her because she isn’t Jewish, we have all the evidence needed to understand that Israel’s fifth column has the same death grip on the White House as it does on Congress. Jewish Voice for Peace won a huge victory against Caterpillar, totally ignored by a media that feels its is the sole Jewish voice worth anything.

“Israel is a “transmission belt” for a lot of really bad ideas to the U.S., including Islamophobia”

Yes it is. And the combination of US zios and neos is deadly. Has anyone ever seen a neo imperalist that wasn’t also a zio? There might be one or two but that’s about it. Both share a love of destruction and power. IOW, they are all psychopaths.
In some ways it might be good if Romney gets elected, it would speed up this certain Isr’merica disaster and we could get it over with and start over.

Moor has written a really good article. i hope everyone opens it and reads the whole thing.

“Romney’s foreign policy advisers are graduates of the workshop of Dick Cheney and the various American outworks of the Likud or the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute. These people – including Cofer Black, Michael Chertoff, Robert Kagan and Dan Senor – have their eyes on a goal beyond victory in Syria and Iran: they look forward to a militarised approach to Russia and China.”
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n13/david-bromwich/diary

Wilf: “But if we want a two-state solution, UNWRA can’t continue to aid an inflation of refugees … It ends up harming peace.”

A two-state solution is off the table, poor thing, because you took it off yourself. The good news is that a one-state solution will be by a superior way to bring the refugees and their descendents back home.