Watching the tragedy unfold in Gaza, a myriad of questions arise: Why does the US government go to war with Israel’s perceived enemies? Why has the US destroyed Iraq, half of Syria and threatens to attack Iran? Why does the US always ipso facto support every Israeli action, no matter how perverse?

The costs have been enormous, the results horrible and the «rewards» obtained by the U.S. imperceptible. How did this happen? Is the Israeli lobby in the U.S. really so powerful? And, even if it is, why has the rest of the US establishment gone along with it, indeed subservient to it? How have they managed to confuse so many in the country?

The explanation lies in the Military Industrial Complex (MIC) and the deeply fateful concubinage that has emerged between it and the State of Israel. Moreover, it was an extension of Eurocentrism, where white European Jewish settlers were widely preferred to Arabs, not to mention ideological affinity and self-titled «chosen people» (many evangelical churches in the U.S. consider Israel the «chosen people» for example). Israel’s or Israel-associated wars in the Middle East have become important parts of the WCC’s income. Every bomb Israel drops; every missile the US fires; every Muslim country the US and its allies invade, generates money for the WCC. Israel receives over three billion dollars in military aid from Washington every year. Most of this money goes immediately back to US military corporations to buy weapons. They are economic partners in crime.

Most Americans hear the information about all these Israel-related conflicts after it is filtered by the pro-Israel lobby and its media extensions, which are of the widest range. American neo-fascism, now rampant, was originally presented as neo-conservatism, which set out from the very beginning to create an everlasting (but impossible) unipolar world. The Pentagon and military corporations already had powerful lobbying programs. Some «loyalists» to Israel realized that if they could provide the wars, the MIC would reap the benefits, strengthening Israel in the process.

The group that became the conceptual center of neoconservatism began with Jewish intellectuals, many of them followers of Leo Strauss and Albert Wohlstetter at the University of Chicago. Strauss was a philosopher who had escaped from the Nazis in 1937. Wohlstetter was a New York-born researcher who became a leading figure in the RAND corporation, advising the Pentagon on intelligence and weapons systems. They were constant advocates of further weaponization and an aggressive attitude toward the USSR.

From the beginning, the U.S. and Israeli causes seemed inseparable in neoconservative writings. According to former CIA, Phil Giraldi, neoconservatives have two unshakable beliefs: «The first is their insistence that the United States has the right or even the responsibility to use its military and economic power to reshape the world in terms of its own interests and values…The second principle, inextricably linked to the first, is that Washington must uncritically or uncritically support Israel no matter what its government does, which makes defense of all things Israeli an American value.» The other commonality has been virulent opposition to the Russians (originally the Soviets). In 1960-1989, neoconservatives saw the Soviet Union, not the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as the main threat to U.S. interests in the Middle East and control of that region’s oil fields. They saw a strong and powerful Israel as essential to their plans for U.S. domination of the region and the world. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, military spending fell, threatening the CMI’s profits. They needed new enemies to replace the USSR, and Israel was happy to provide its own. New enemies were established and designated by neoconservative think tanks including: JINSA, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs; AEI, the American Enterprise Institute; WINEP, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy; FDD, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and a dozen others. These groups collaborate with longer-standing Israel advocacy groups such as AIPAC and Stand with Us. They share staff and funders and rent space from each other. One of the most influential, PNAC (Project for a New American Century), included at least six men who later served as secretaries (ministers) in the Bush administration.

Two neoconservative documents that inflamed world peace

The neoconservatives created two defining documents for the endless wars of the 21st century. In 1997, they, meeting with the Jerusalem-based think tank Institute for Advanced Political and Strategic Studies, wrote a strategy paper for the Likud Party called Clean Break, which proposed that Israel no longer try to make peace with its Arab neighbors such as Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, but to push them back, destabilize them and ultimately change their regimes to ones sympathetic to Israel, and thus to the US. The recommendations contained in Clean Break have largely been carried out using military force, both Israeli and US.

In 1999, PNAC wrote a similar document, «Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategies, Forces and Resources for a New Century,» a sort of pre-MAGA (Make America Great Again) , advocating a massive growth in the US military budget, seeking the ability to wage multiple simultaneous wars and police actions. Authors Donald Kagan, along with former Pentagon consultant Gary Schmitt, and Thomas Donnelly, former head of Lockheed Martin, called the document «a plan to maintain U.S. global preeminence, prevent the rise of a rival great power, and shape the international security order in accordance with American principles and interests».

The U.S. military budget increased from $287 billion in 2001 to $722 billion in 2011 (now in the vicinity of $1 trillion, all inclusive). As former Vice President Al Gore said, «We have replaced a world in which states consider themselves subject to law» with «the notion that there is no such law, but the discretion of the President of the United States.»

While international stability had been considered one of the loftiest goals in foreign affairs (at least lip service), advocated even by war criminals like Henry Kissinger, the neoconservatives promoted chaos and destruction. Michael Ledeen called for «turning the Middle East into a cauldron.» The governments of Israel and the United States have adopted these attitudes, and NATO countries have followed in varying degrees. International stability, which had never really existed, has become a thing of the past. And all of this was structured even before the Donald Trump administration.

The pro-Israeli lobby in its political and media aspects is sustained by all of the above, and by the need to make it acceptable and moral before the people of the USA. For this, a gigantic disinformation became an indispensable requirement.

Other organizations such as the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations (CPMJO), the Zionist Organization of America and Christians United for Israel are also prominent elements of the lobby. However, it is not only lobbying organizations, but also media owners, politicians and many academics.

In short, a powerful and complex system of political lobbying and media obfuscation has been formed, aimed at convincing Americans that defending Israel is defending the US. Despite all this, there is also a growing popular movement in defense of the Palestinian cause and in denunciation of the fascist aggressiveness of the State of Israel.

Anti-Zionism = Anti-Semitism, or is it an instrument to repress criticism of Israel’s aggressions?

My academic friends here in New England tell me that they are experiencing the most repressive work environment of their lives. Campuses at Harvard, Yale, the University of Connecticut, Cornell, MIT and other world-renowned centers of higher learning have been divided by the Gaza conflict. Professors deemed «too sympathetic» to Palestine have been labeled naïve at best and anti-Semitic at worst by university administrations, other professors and certain students. Some professors have lost their jobs or have been the subject of student petitions demanding their dismissal. University rectors have been harassed by pro-Israeli organizations to condemn loudly and publicly criticism of Zionism or Israel.

Pro-Palestinian student organizations have also been rebuked and publicly censured, either for «insufficient zeal» in condemning the «inexplicable Hamas brutality» on October 7, «for attributing the attack to a long history of Israeli provocations» or for calling for a cease-fire. Some groups, including Jewish Voices for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine, have even been banned from entering the universities. Students from these groups have been ridiculed, misled, harassed and, in some cases, assaulted. Some Jewish students have also been attacked or verbally abused for their vocal support of Israel. The pain and anger on many college campuses is truly overwhelming.

To be called an anti-Semite (even if this is not proven) is painful, extremely serious and can be professionally annihilating. Anti-Semitism (and any other form of discrimination) is especially vilified by a faculty that is often liberal or leftist in its politics and strives for a classist historical understanding of economic and political oppression. Anti-Semitism was central to the German Nazi regime; the one constant faith of Adolf Hitler, the greatest criminal the world has ever known (so far). All this is used to brand, with great effect, as «anti-Semitic» any opponent of Israel’s aggressions.

In a most unusual intervention, Israel’s President Isaac Herzog recently sent a letter to the presidents of American universities alluding to the Holocaust. In asking them to «publicly and unequivocally» reject «calls for the elimination of an entire country, Israel,» Herzog suggests that current criticism of his country is anti-Semitic and eliminationist, i.e., potentially genocidal against Jews.

This goes far beyond even the overly broad definitions of anti-Semitism proposed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (HRA) and the influential Anti-Defamation League (ADL). The latter wrote: «While anti-Zionism is indeed anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism is much more socially accepted than classical anti-Semitism, which is why it is so dangerous.» Both of these statements are lies, outright lies, in my opinion. In its broadest form, anti-Zionism is a rejection of the idea and reality of an exclusively Jewish state in the land of historic Palestine. More commonly, it means rejection of the radical and unchecked expansionism of the current Israeli regime and its policy of isolating the Palestinians behind walls and checkpoints, a system of Middle Eastern apartheid. Nothing to do with discrimination against Jews as individuals.

Continuing with its lies, the ADL repeats that anti-Zionism (sold as anti-Semitism) enjoys widespread political and financial backing. In fact, the mainstream media and elected politicians in the U.S. overwhelmingly accept (and often endorse) Israeli expansionism and the HRA and ADL definition of anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism. And they repeat the ADL’s hoax that we are experiencing a wave of anti-Semitism unparalleled in American history. This is not only historically shortsighted and an outright hoax, but it overlooks the genuine danger posed by far-right extremists and American gun rights advocates who have perpetrated or allowed acts of murderous violence against Jews themselves and others, such as at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and in Highland. Park, Illinois. In fact, the pro-Zionist lobby hides the fact that their «allies today» whether in the U.S., the European Union, Zelenski’s Ukraine or the Middle East, were responsible for the Holocaust.

A terrible omission is not to mention, NOT ONCE, that the Red Army saved the lives of millions of European Jews in Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic countries, Poland, Germany, Romania, Hungary and other countries. The allies of Zelenski, a Jew himself, are the fascist ultras of the UOM (today under different names) who massacred tens of thousands of Jews at Babi Yar. At present they are not anti-Semitic, but his staunchest and most faithful allies.

An example of branding as anti-Semitic anyone who opposes the actions of the state of Israel has just occurred in Chile. The Court of Appeals of Santiago de Chile rejected on Friday, November 24, the appeal for protection filed by a Zionist entity, on behalf of the local Jewish community, against Roger Waters (by the way, a great friend of Cuba) in an attempt to censor his actions or words during the two concerts he offered in that capital city. In its brief, the CJCh argued that the former member of the world-famous Pink Floyd group has «an established track record» of what they call «Judeophobic» statements that could constitute a crime of «incitement to hatred» and includes links to reports, information and photographs of past concerts. «Following such a history CJCh seeks to have him banned from his concert from using elements or uttering comments that incite hatred and anti-Semitism,» it noted.

In conclusion: Israel has become since 1948 to date the main ally of the USA and its spearhead in the Middle East and in many other places in the world. I think it is necessary to express that we really know who is the puppet and who is the puppeteer. At times it seems that Israel controls the U.S. and not the other way around.

José R. Oro*, Prensa Latina contributor

*Cuban engineer residing in the United States.

(Taken from Firmas Selectas)