Was Israel ever legitimate?

Was Israel ever legitimate?(no)
What role has Israel really played in US-Israeli relations,
asks Jeff Gates*
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2010/997/op12.htm
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The history of Israel as a geopolitical fraud will fill entire libraries, as those defrauded marvel at how so few deceived so many for so long. Those duped include many Jews who even now identify their interests with this extremist enclave.

Israeli leaders are wrong to worry about "de-legitimisation". They are right to fear that a long-deceived public is fast realising that Israel's founding was key to an ongoing deception.

The "invention of the Jewish people" did not begin with Shlomo Sand's 2009 bestseller of that name. There was no exile, says Sand, a distinguished Jewish scholar. Nor was there an exodus. So how could there be a return, the core premise of Israeli statehood?



If this patch of Palestinian land never rightly belonged to a mythical Jewish people, what then becomes of the legitimacy of the "Jewish homeland"? And of its depiction by British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour in his famous November 1917 letter to Lord Rothschild?

Were Christians likewise seduced by Sunday school teachings reliant on the phony findings of Biblical archaeologist William Albright? Sand chronicles how in the 1920s Albright interpreted every excavation in Palestine in order to "reaffirm the Old Testament and thereby the New".

In 1948, US president Harry Truman, a Christian Zionist, was advised by secretary of state George Marshall not to recognise this enclave as a state. This World War II general assured Truman that he would vote against him, and he did.

That military tradition resurfaced in January 2010 when General David Petraeus dispatched a team to brief Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the perils that Israel still poses to US national security. Mullen was reportedly shocked.

But he should not have been surprised. Such insights are hardly new. More than six decades ago the US Joint Chiefs of Staff cautioned Truman about the "fanatical concepts of the Jewish leaders" and their plans for "Jewish military and economic hegemony over the entire Middle East."

In December 1948, Albert Einstein and 27 prominent Jews urged the US "not to support this latest manifestation of fascism". They warned that a "Leader State" was the goal of the "terrorist party" that has governed Israel for all but a handful of the past 62 years.

The US Joint Chiefs foresaw that "Zionist strategy will seek to involve [the US] in a continuously widening and deepening series of operations intended to secure maximum Jewish objectives."

Soon after Truman recognised Israel, his presidential campaign was "refuelled" by Zionist Jews with $400,000 in contributions ($3.6 million in 2010 dollars). Soon thereafter, Israel betrayed the US by allying with the British and the French to invade Egypt in the 1956 aggression.

Though London and Paris soon abandoned the operation, months more were required to dissuade Tel Aviv from pursuing its expansionist agenda then, as now, for a Greater Israel.

Outraged by Israeli duplicity, US president Eisenhower sought help to rein it in. He soon found that even then, as now, the Israel lobby dominated the US Congress. Thus, Eisenhower, the former Supreme Allied Commander appeared on television with an appeal directly to the American people. Then, unlike now, a US commander in chief threatened to reduce US assistance to Israel.

To revamp Israel's tattered image, New York public-relations expert Edward Gottlieb retained novelist Leon Uris to write Exodus. Jewish Zionists have routinely proven themselves skilled storytellers and masterful mythmakers.

The resulting 1958 bestseller was then translated into dozens of languages and quickly made into a movie for the 1960 Christmas season starring Paul Newman and featuring Peter Lawford, brother-in-law of the just-elected US president John F Kennedy.

Later, US military veteran Phil Tourney was just one of the American serviceman to survive the 8 June 1967 Israeli attack on the USS Liberty that left 34 Americans dead and 175 wounded. The region-wide dynamics accompanying the provocative Israeli Six-Day land-grab guaranteed the conflicts in the region that remain so perilous to US national security.

It was during this Israeli operation that Tourney gave a one-fingered salute to armed Israeli troops as they hovered in helicopters over the USS Liberty while preparing to come down onto the deck and, he surmises, kill the survivors and sink the ship.

Just then, the captain of a nearby US carrier scrambled jets to assist a vessel under attack by an "ally". When Israeli intelligence intercepted the transmission, the helicopters fled, only to have US president Lyndon Johnson and defense secretary Robert McNamara recall the fighters.

Soon thereafter, Israeli torpedo boats pulled up alongside the USS Liberty to inquire if those aboard needed assistance. Those same boats had just blown a hole in the hull, killing 25 Americans. Israeli machine- gunners had then strafed stretcher-bearers, firemen, life-rafts and even fire-hoses -- all clear war crimes. Only then did this US ally display the chutzpah to ask if our servicemen required assistance.

Had this notorious land-grab failed to advance the narrative of Israel as the victim, what might be the condition of US national security today? The current Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu recently conceded the duplicity that continues to typify this "special relationship" between the US and Israel.

As Netanyahu confessed, "our policy on Jerusalem is the same policy followed by all Israeli governments for 42 years, and it has not changed. As far as we are concerned, building in Jerusalem is the same as building in Tel Aviv."

In other words, the 1967 War was neither defensive nor pre-emptive, but was rather an outright taking of land that, one year later, Tel Aviv acknowledged as having been precisely what had concerned the US Pentagon 62 years ago.

In effect, Netanyahu confirmed that the US-Israeli relationship reflects a multi-decade premeditation. The US has since discredited itself by protecting this "ally" from the rule of law for its taking and brutal occupation of land that rightly belongs to others.

Even now, few know that Mathilde Krim, a former Israeli Irgun operative, was with the US commander-in-chief in the White House the night the 1967 War began. Her husband, Arthur, then chaired the finance committee of the Democratic National Committee.

Even now, few Americans know the role in the cover-up played by Admiral John McCain, Jr, or the role still being played by his son, US Republican Senator John McCain III.

Are those who champion this "state" the same belief-makers responsible for the myth of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction? Or Iraqi meetings in Prague? Or Iraqi mobile biological weapons laboratories? Or high-level Iraqi contacts with Al-Qaeda? Or Iraqi yellowcake uranium from Niger?

Was any of that intelligence legitimate? Whose interests were served by deceiving the US to cause it to wage war in the Middle East? Or by the Suez Crisis and the Six-Day War? Whose interests were served by covering up the attack on the USS Liberty?

How are US interests served by treating Israel as a legitimate state? When was Israeli behaviour anything other than duplicitous? At what point do we concede the common source of the storylines foisted on an imperiled global public?

Who created the narrative that saw the US segue seamlessly from a global cold war to a global war on terrorism? Remember the promise of a post- cold war "peace dividend"? Who induced the US to wage a war whose costs could total $3 trillion, including $700 billion in interest payments?

Why is debt always the prize? At the end of WWII, the US was home to 50 per cent of the world's productive power. Were Americans induced to hollow out their economy by the same consensus-shapers that induced them to wage war in the Middle East? Do these devastating dynamics trace to a common source?

Who benefits from the present "Islamo-fascist" narrative? Whose storyline, really, is "the clash of civilisations"? Who has long spied on the US and routinely transferred to other nations sensitive US defence technologies?

Who had the means, motive, opportunity and, most importantly, the stable state intelligence required to perpetrate such a debilitating fraud from inside the US government? And from inside other governments that joined the "coalition of the willing"?

If not Israel and its supporters, then who? In effect, are those now advocating an "unbreakable bond" with Israel giving aid and comfort to an enemy within?

Israel is right to worry. It was never legitimate. As both an enabler and a target of fraud, the US has an obligation to concede its source and to secure the weapons of mass destruction now under the control of this enclave.

* The writer is a US attorney and author of Guilt by Association: Democracy at Risk and the Ownership Solution.

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