I always say our journalism is broken when it comes to the Middle East and the Israel lobby: basic political questions go unasked, and unanswered, because journalists are afraid of raising what are said to be antisemitic canards. One of those prohibitions is using the words “Jews” and “money” in the same sentence. In Salon, this week there was a long and simpleminded article about Obama’s efforts to cultivate Jews with his acrobatics on Jerusalem and Israel. Typical of the leftish press, Salon averred that Obama’s prize is… Florida. All those Jewish voters in a swing state.
That kind of statement borders on fraud. First, Obama is widely thought to be plotting an electoral strategy that doesn’t depend on Florida. So where are all those swing Jewish voters–New York? California? Those are solid blue states.
Get real. Obama is playing Twister on Israel and Jerusalem because of Jewish influence (as the Nation’s Ari Berman said some weeks back in a rare violation of the taboo). Obama seeks Jewish media support, he wants Jewish money, which is central to the American political process. Look again at Connie Bruck’s piece on Sheldon Adelson in The New Yorker last week. Let’s focus on a key moment in the formation of the last White House administration. God bless her, Bruck reports that Adelson has supported the extremist Zionist group One Jerusalem and Adelson has given hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Republican National State Elections Committee. Bruck fails to connect the dots on this one, but according to the FEC, Adelson gave $300,000 to the Elections Committee before Bush took office, and one of those gifts, $100,000, was made in December 2000, right as Bush was awarded the White House by the Supreme Court. At that very moment, Douglas Feith says vaguely in his new book, Feith, an obscure hedgehog-like figure– who was reportedly a founder of One Jerusalem and probably knows Adelson– and who was then working at a small, very Israel-oriented law firm, got “feelers” from the Bush team. And lo and behold, Feith became an Under Secretary for Defense. A big job for a nebbish.
Did Adelson’s gift play a part? I bet it did. But I don’t know.
Is anyone doing simple journalism on an issue that helped incinerate Iraq and that is turning the Middle East into a tinder box? Where is Tom Blanton of the National Security Archive–a great reporter, my old friend, the guy who taught me the significance of corporate boards’ interlocking networks 30 years ago; Tom, are you even going near this stuff or have they got you too? Connie Bruck did fine work in The New Yorker. But consider that her own husband Mel Levine is engaged in an effort to convince Hollywood Jews of Obama’s bona fides on Israel– why? Because of the Jewish vote? No: California went 54-44 Kerry over Bush in ’04. L.A. is one of the cashcows of the Democratic party.
I need to take this issue of Jewish money on directly. It is simply too important to our politics. So I’m going to quote from four books, two of them by rightwing Zionists, that speak frankly of the role of Jewish money in establishing and securing the state of Israel. All emphases are mine.
1. In 1916, at the height of World War I, Chaim Weizmann, the leading proponent of Zionism in Europe, was lobbying England to produce the Balfour Declaration when he learned that the Germans were about to get war supplies from Russia. Weizmann was determined to cut the Germans off, so that America and England would be indebted to the Jews. “We think that Jews of South Russia who control trade could effectively counteract German and Bolshevik manoeuvres,” Weizmann wrote. “Every influence must be used now.” [From One Palestine Complete, by Tom Segev]
2. “The Depression also diminished the ability of American Zionists to
influence government policy toward Palestine. Jews, a high proportion
of whom were investors and businessmen, were especially devastated by
the crash and no longer able to engage in politics and philanthropy.”
—Michael Oren, in Power, Faith and Fantasy.
3. Jewish wealth played a role in making sure that the U.N. voted for Partition in
’47, Benny Morris writes in his new book, 1948. “Pecuniary
considerations apparently affected the votes of one or two Latin
American ambassadors… More telling, apparently, were promises and
threats directed at individual governments by American Jewish
businessmen and politicians. Apparently prominent in this lobbying
effort was Samuel Zemurray, head of the United Fruit Corporation, which
had large plantations in the Caribbean,” Morris writes. (Advice to young journalists. Don’t use “apparently” three times in one paragraph.)
4. “Jewish groups had opposed the reform [the Campaign Financing Act of
1974] , and a leader of one of them, for the record, has stated why. Speaking at a symposium sponsored by Commentary magazine, Rita Hauser,
a New York attorney who is a major force at the American Jewish
Committee, frankly declared that the new campaign financing laws had ‘eliminated the strongest weapon the Jewish community exercised in
influencing the selection of nominees in both political parties.'”
Namely money. [From The Lobby, by Edward Tivnan (thanks to Nim Chimpsky)].
