Binyamin Netanyahu is Sheldon Adelson's puppet

Adelson and Netanyahu

There is a lot of talk about Binyamin Netanyahu these days, but Bibi is just a figurehead, the real operator in this whole story is the American casino billionaire, Sheldon Adelson, who is going about proving beyond any reasonable doubt (if anybody still doubted it) that the American political system is for sale. In fact, he has been doing the same thing in Israel.

Since in his mind, Israel and the USA seem to be of one flesh, it might be interesting to visit Sheldon Adelson's view of democracy in Israel:

“I don’t think the Bible says anything about democracy. I think God didn’t say anything about democracy,” Adelson said. “God talked about all the good things in life. He didn’t talk about Israel remaining as a democratic state, otherwise Israel isn’t going to be a democratic state — so what?” The Jewish Daily Forward

What does Adelson's money buy for Israel in Washington? Nothing but the best.

Among foreign leaders, nobody has been invited to address Congress more often than Netanyahu. He now stands equal at the top of the table along with Winston Churchill. Behind Netanyahu trail Nelson Mandela and Yitzhak Rabin. That’s a pretty devastating commentary on the state of contemporary American political culture and the very notion of leadership. Roger Cohen - New York Times

The results of Adelson's meddling could have disastrous results for both Israel and the USA and many Israelis are fully aware of this and very disturbed by the prospect and so are many American Jewish people too.

If anyone ever decides to make a movie of 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,' the opening scene is already done. An Israeli prime minister bewitching hundreds of American Congress members who cheer him on as if he is their Caesar and they are his legions; a few short miles away, meanwhile, the leader of the free world and sole superpower sits in the White House, helplessly seething, pretending to be otherwise engaged, while his aides studiously ignore his very public humiliation.(...) They see a brash Jewish leader, backed by battalions of loyal AIPAC lobbyists and one casino magnate with billions of dollars to spare, thumbing his nose at the U.S. president and openly trying to derail his efforts to achieve a nuclear deal with Tehran, which most of the world supports. Netanyahu’s success, the conventional wisdom goes, could ultimately lead to war.  (...) And if the U.S. and Iran find themselves in an escalating conflict that leads to armed confrontation, Netanyahu, Israel and the Jewish people will find themselves in the dock, cast in a central role in a new chapter in the Protocols of the elders of Zion, but one which will be much harder to refute. As a student of Jewish history, this seems to be Netanyahu’s most reckless gamble of all.  Chemi Shalev - Haaretz

Iran may or may not be the existential threat to Israel that Netanyahu insists it is. But a lessening of U.S. support for Israel certainly would be. With an indifferent America, Israel would become a lonely, frightening place. Its chief export would not be high tech, but people looking to get out — Jews once more on the go. This is hardly the settlements policy that Netanyahu intends. Richard Cohen - Washington Post

Alas, Bibi is Churchill when it comes to isolating Iran, but he is AWOL when it comes to risking his own political future to make it happen. I have a problem with that. I still don’t know if I will support this Iran deal, but I also have a problem with my own Congress howling in support of a flawed foreign leader trying to scuttle the negotiations by my own government before they’re done. Rubs me the wrong way. Thomas Friedman - New York Times

How are Adelson's obsessions, vanity and dollars potentially more even harmful than, say, the Koch brothers' obsessions, vanity and dollars?

The answer is ISIS.

Everything is building up to this: ISIS's greatest wish is too draw the US armed forces back into a ground war in the Middle East. The ISIS is mobilizing, radicalizing and even more important, giving military training to hundreds of citizens of the European Union (who can enter the USA without a visa) and dozens of American citizens too. This means that within months, weeks, days, hours, anyone of these men or women could walk into a shopping mall  or Wal-Mart in the deepest flyover America and blow him or herself up, along with dozens of peaceful shoppers... And there might be several such instances in the space of a few hours in different regions. It is not difficult to imagine the ensuing paranoia, rage and hostility. 

Hysteria is modern America's default reaction to almost anything, it is hard to imagine how a series of well executed suicide bombings would play out and what lasting effect they might have on American life and institutions... any country seen to have brought it on in any way might face the full force of all the hysterical, paranoia, rage and hostility that might be out of control for quite some time.

Obviously in any US ground war against ISIS, any Israeli intervention against the jihadis would be worse than useless, just as it would have been in the first Gulf War, when Saddam Hussein invaded Iraq. If Israel intervened militarily to help the USA kill Sunni Muslims, it would instantly turn the ISIS into heroes for most of the world's Sunni Muslims. The only country that could reliably help the USA with the heavy lifting would be, (some say already is) Shiite Iran.

Sheldon Adelson and his puppet Netanyahu are simply playing with fire. DS

Thomas Friedman attacks Adelson, Netanyahu, AIPAC and the Israeli hard right

David Seaton's News Links

Certain people have more credibility than others when talking about certain subjects. For example, if Warren Buffet says that rich people should pay more taxes, nobody would accuse him of fomenting "class warfare". 

That is because he will be the one that ends up paying all those taxes and he will have to endure the frosty reception from his fellow billionaires at social functions. In short he is credible when he speaks about rich people and their duties to society.

This brings me to a recent column of Thomas Friedman's in the New York Times, entitled, "Why Not in Vegas?", where he attacks with unusual ferocity, Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli hard right, the casino magnate, Sheldon Adelson, who is bankrolling Mitt Romney, and AIPAC itself.

First Buffetwise, let us set out Thomas Friedman's credentials in making this attack. Here is an excerpt from his Wikipedia entry:

Friedman is Jewish. He attended Hebrew school five days a week until his Bar Mitzvah(...) He became enamored of Israel after a visit there in December 1968, and he spent all three of his high school summers living on Kibbutz Hahotrim, near Haifa. He has characterized his high school years as "one big celebration of Israel's victory in the Six-Day War." Friedman studied at the University of Minnesota for two years, but later transferred to Brandeis University and graduated summa cum laude in 1975 with a degree in Mediterranean studies. (...) After Brandeis he attended St Antony's College at the University of Oxford on a Marshall scholarship, earning an M.Phil. in Middle Eastern studies.(...) Friedman joined the London bureau of United Press International after completing his Master's degree. He was dispatched a year later to Beirut, where he lived from June 1979 to May 1981 while covering the civil war there. He was hired by The New York Times as a reporter in 1981, and redispatched to Beirut at the start of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. His coverage of the war, particularly the Sabra and Shatila massacre, won him the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting (shared with Loren Jenkins of The Washington Post).(...) In June 1984, Friedman was transferred to Jerusalem, where he served as the Times Jerusalem Bureau Chief until February 1988. That year he received a second Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting, which cited his coverage of the First Palestinian Intifada.

So, not only is Thomas Friedman Jewish, but he has studied the Middle East in depth, lived there, speaks the languages and can be considered knowledgeable and committed by any standard I can imagine.  Whether you agree with him or not, (I rarely find myself reading off the same page as he does, especially on globalization) he is someone fully qualified to speak about the relations between Israel and the USA. 

Here is a snippet of what he wrote in the New York Times:

I have one question and one observation about Mitt Romney’s visit to Israel. The question is this: Since the whole trip was not about learning anything but about how to satisfy the political whims of the right-wing, super pro-Bibi Netanyahu, American Jewish casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, why didn’t they just do the whole thing in Las Vegas? I mean, it was all about money anyway — how much Romney would abase himself by saying whatever the Israeli right wanted to hear and how big a jackpot of donations Adelson would shower on the Romney campaign in return. Really, Vegas would have been so much more appropriate than Jerusalem. They could have constructed a plastic Wailing Wall and saved so much on gas.(...) So how about all you U.S. politicians — Republicans and Democrats — stop feeding off this conflict for political gain. Stop using this conflict as a backdrop for campaign photo-ops and fund-raisers. Stop making things even worse by telling the most hard-line Israelis everything that they want to hear, just to grovel for Jewish votes and money, while blatantly ignoring the other side. There are real lives at stake out there. If you’re not going to do something constructive, stay away. They can make enough trouble for themselves on their own. 

This is not the first such attack. In December of 2011 he wrote the following about the Israeli prime minister Netanyahu's appearance before the US Congress in the New York Times:

I’d never claim to speak for American Jews, but I’m certain there are many out there like me, who strongly believe in the right of the Jewish people to a state, who understand that Israel lives in a dangerous neighborhood yet remains a democracy, but who are deeply worried about where Israel is going today. My guess is we’re the minority when it comes to secular American Jews. We still care. Many other Jews are just drifting away. I sure hope that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, understands that the standing ovation he got in Congress this year was not for his politics. That ovation was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby. The real test is what would happen if Bibi tried to speak at, let’s say, the University of Wisconsin. My guess is that many students would boycott him and many Jewish students would stay away, not because they are hostile but because they are confused. 

Many gentile readers will say to themselves that Friedman can get away with saying such things and using such unvarnished language because he is Jewish. That isn't so.  Exactly the opposite really. Many Jewish people, especially older ones, seem convinced that all gentiles are latent antisemites, just waiting to turn and rend them, so Friedman's attack would be considered just par for the course if it came from a gentile. From a Jewish person it stings.

The Jewish people have a long and perfectly justifiable reluctance to wash their community's dirty linen before strangers. Thomas Friedman, is not a secular Jew in the sense that Noam Chomsky is, Friedman is an observant Jew who participates actively in the life of his synagog and by speaking out so forcefully against the government of Israel and AIPAC, he is drawing a moral line in the sand which he may well suffer in defending, even among, or especially among, people close to him. It is necessary to understand this in order to properly value his stand.

Here is how his earlier article was treated in Commentary Magazine:

(...) let’s address one of the primary slanders at the heart of his piece: that the standing ovations Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu received last spring were “bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.” Rather, they were the result of the fact that the overwhelming majority of Americans–Jew and non-Jew alike–think of Israel as a friend and ally.(...) The notion that the only reason politicians support Israel is because of Jewish money is a central myth of a new form of anti-Semitism which masquerades as a defense of American foreign policy against the depredations of a venal Israel lobby. This canard not only feeds off of the traditional themes of Jew-hatred, it also requires Friedman to ignore the deep roots of American backing for Zionism in our history and culture.

Why are Jewish Americans like Thomas Friedman and Peter Beinart,  exposing themselves to such abuse?

In my opinion this is because, in the world's most ancient prophetic tradition, Friedman and others like him, can see a nightmare scenario about to unfold in the Middle East, a war that may spread unpredictably throughout that entire region and even beyond, perhaps sucking in great powers on opposing sides, a war with a domino effect that may well push the entire world economy off the edge and into a full blown great depression, with unforeseeably sinister social consequences; a disaster that will affect the lives of every American, especially the most vulnerable, and will bring the curse of all humanity on the heads of those seen to have caused it. 

Someone credible has to speak out.

I consider Thomas Friedman a brave and patriotic American and I salute him. DS

Netanyahu's target is Obama, not Iran

David Seaton's News Links

It cannot be denied that the Holocaust theme has served Netanyahu well politically. As many commentators have pointed out, Netanyahu has succeeded in reframing political discourse on the Middle East: this visit to the U.S. was the first in a long time in which the Palestinian issue was completely off the table. Nobody even raised the question of settlement construction or the old question how to bring Israel and the Palestinians back to the negotiation table. Instead of being on the defensive on the Palestinian issue, Netanyahu is now on the offensive on Iran. By invoking the allied power’s failure to disrupt the Nazis sending millions to concentration camps in 1944, he is reminding the Free World of a horrible mistake, and demanding that this mistake not be repeated. Carlo Strenger - Haaretz

Observing Netanyahu's continuous invocation of the Holocaust and the imminent threat of Iran annihilating the Jewish people, it is passing curious to note that much of the most qualified Israeli military and intelligence community is openly against attacking Iran and neither are most Israelis.

Most Israelis believe that if the United States does not attack Iran's nuclear facilities, Israel must no try to do so alone, according to a Haaretz poll.

This lack of enthusiasm by informed Israelis and the Israeli street at such a moment of declared existential threat,  makes me suspect that Iran is not really Bibi's true objective, that is to say, this hysterical lead up to war is merely a tactical "feint" to distract world attention from his true strategic objective.

I believe that the prime strategic objective of Netanyahu, and the hard Israeli right wing that he represents, is to prevent, at any cost, the  final delimitation of Israel's borders. Because any "two state" solution of the Palestinian problem, however modest and fudged it might be, would create a Palestinian state in "Judea" and "Samaria", whose boundaries would be sanctioned by the United Nations. This would mean kissing goodbye, or putting on ice, any hope of finally creating the ultra-right dream of "Greater Israel".

What is Greater Israel? Lets look at this map from Wikipedia Commons:

"Greater Israel" - Wikipedia Commons

As you can see from the map or from the Wikipedia article, we are talking here about "Biblical" Israel.

The Bible contains three geographical definitions of the Land of Israel. The first, found in Genesis 15:18-21, is vague. It describes a large territory, "from the brook of Egypt to the Euphrates", comprising all of modern-day Israel, the Palestinian Territories, and Lebanon, as well as large parts of Syria, Jordan, and Egypt. The proportion of current Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey included in this territory is debatable. The other two definitions are found in Numbers 34:1-15 and Ezekiel 47:13-20 and describe a smaller territory

Now, polls usually show that most Israelis would accept, perhaps welcome, a two state solution, based on the 1967 frontiers, with "minor adjustments"(the devil being in the details). That being so, it isn't difficult to see that a lot of the pressure to keep a settlement of the Palestinian problem from being solved is coming from outside Israel. In fact, much of the sound and fury is coming from right wing, American, Jewish people, who are doubly adamant supporters, having, as many Israelis note, no actual skin in the game. This reminds me of how rich Irish-Americans used to raise money to finance and arm the IRA.

A prime example of this group of "more Zionist than thou" Americans would be casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who someone no less than George W. Bush, described as a "crazy Jewish billionaire". Adelson, the third richest man in the USA, who according to The New Yorker, "is fiercely opposed to a two-state solution", is bankrolling the campaign of Newt Gingrich to the tune of millions upon millions of dollars, in order to have him describe the Palestinians as an "invented people". Gingrich is not going to be the Republican candidate, but he is setting the tone: no Republican would like to appear less pro-Israel than Newt Gingrich in an election year, all of them are accusing Obama of selling out Israel. With Netanyahu feeding the hysteria these attacks and calls for war with Iran, will become even more shrill.

Well, obviously the President of the United States, today Barack Obama, is going to come into any issue touching foreign affairs, but why would the Israel Lobby and Netanyahu have any beef with such a malleable pragmatist as Barack Obama, someone who is easily as adept as any other American politician in swearing eternal fealty to Israel?

The first reason is that he is on track to win a second and final term as president.

The first two years of any US president's second term of office is famously/notoriously the only time when he is free to lead, or get anything important done. In his first term, he spends four years running for reelection and during the last two years of a hypothetical second term he is considered a "lame duck" who becomes daily more irrelevant as the excruciatingly, interminable American presidential cycle kicks in once more and begins to dilute and drain out his power and relevance. The sixth and seventh year of a US presidency are the dangerous years, this is when a president might actually do something in the genuine public interest. Some of these people even begin to think about their "legacy", like an aging lady of the evening who begins going to church, presidents suddenly aspire to virtue... Very dangerous that legacy stuff.

So from the point of anyone who influences politics by funding politician's election campaigns, first term presidents are to be greatly preferred to second term presidents. Obvious, right? So Obama, despite all his professed love for Israel, has that against him from get-go this year.

This takes us back to the Middle East and the second reason for trying to derail Obama.

As you may have noticed the Middle East is on the boil, and how to stabilize the most important oil and gas producing region on earth is a  priority for everybody, everywhere, now, with the world economy teetering on the brink of a great depression. 

After, supporting tyrannical Arab regimes for decades, invading Iraq and botching up the occupation and never missing a chance to kowtow to the Israelis, America's credibility at present is as low as a snake's abdomen. Except for killing people and blowing things up, nobody is expecting much from the USA these days in the Middle East.

There is one thing that has worldwide support and universal approval,  something, which would at least give the USA a minimum of credibility and that something would be to finally "solve" the Palestinian problem and give them a state of their own... and the six and seventh year of a second term American president would make that something look doable

Now cynics among you will point out that all the versions of that proposed state that the USA has ever put forward added up to miserable little unarmed bantustans cut up by Israeli security roads, without control over the water under them and without sovereignty over the airspace above them... And I doubt if even the most "liberated" version of Barack Obama would ask for much more than that. And even something that mild and decaffeinated would probably justify his heretofore absurd Nobel Peace Prize and refurbish his tattered image as "The One".

Why should this be such a huge problem?

Because, even such a pitiful, Swiss cheese, scrap of a state would finally and unambiguously establish the frontiers of Israel and put paid to the dream of Eretz Yisrael Ha-Shlema  (greater Israel).

And in my humble opinion, it is the fear of that, and not the fear of a nuclear Holocaust that is behind Netanyahu's hysterical push toward war. He is trying to create a damned if you do and damned if you don't scenario for Barack Obama to see if he can derail his reelection and get himself another first term president to manipulate at will. DS