ISRAELI DIPLOMATS AND OUR DIPLOMACY

H.D.S. Greenway makes an interesting point in an editorial about the troubles presently bethumping the Israeli consul-general up in Boston.

As you may recall, that worthy recently sent back a candid assessment to his superiors, based on his observations about Israel’s position in the opinion of the American public and – Boston being the home of so much institutional brain-power – America’s ‘elites’.

And that’s what his government sent him to do. As do all governments when they send ‘accredited representatives’ to a foreign country.

Nations, as DeGaulle said, are “cold monsters” and as some English gent said, a nation “has no eternal friends, only eternal interests”. While it is a lovely thought, there is no ‘family’ of nations and probably never could be. Though given the radical feminist revulsion at ‘family’ as a basic concept, it’s mickle curious that the ever-Correct Beltway elites continue to pretend that the Israeli State is American’s BFF and indeed closer to the heart of the Beltway banditti than any State in the Constitutional family, such as Louisiana (still minus a major city after Katrina) or the Great State of (fill-in-the-blank).

Indeed, DeGaulle’s greatest problem was that it seemed hard to love humanity and still remain faithful to La France. Somehow, the Beltway has cut that Gordian knot of DeGaulle’s, although I’m of the opinion that a ‘perennial’ problem is perennial precisely because it is insoluble, and anybody who brays that they have ‘solved’ it is probably trying to sell you something.

The consul-general had written in an internal memo that “the settlement dispute was doing ‘strategic damage to Israel’ because it was alienating the American administration”. Obama, famously, has started to try to correct the domestic-politics driven Beltway preferential subservience to the Israeli State and its interests.

Israel, of course, is not technically an “ally”, much as the Beltway would like Us to simply believe that it is. A treaty of alliance – especially a defensive alliance – would require a precise statement of the official boundaries of the respective treaty-nations, so that it would be crystal clear when those boundaries were violated by some other nation, thus triggering the military assistance. But the Israeli State has always refused to do that, because deep down its perennial objective is to take over Biblical Israel, lock stock, and barrel, and clear away any life-forms already living on the property.

And in this, the Israelis have modeled themselves upon two recent Great Powers.

First, America, whose violent and thorough dispossession of the native tribes proves to the Israelis’ satisfaction that their own plans are as American as apple-pie.

Second, not quite as completely: the government of Germany immediately following the Weimar era, whose quest for what it saw as its rightful Lebensraum to the East was ruthlessly – though unsuccessfully – carried out with much blood and iron. Although that German plan envisioned the enslavement of the subject Untermenschen; the Israelis, to their great satisfaction, are far too moral to enslave anybody. They will go the American route, eliminate the offending lives, and claim that it was God’s will. Or, from a secular point of view, a (charmingly Darwinian) ‘existential imperative’.

Plus ca change, as DeGaulle would no doubt have said.

Oy.

With the exception of Eisenhower, every American President starting with Truman has played to the domestic Jewish vote by embracing Israel. JFK, of course, did not at all approve when he heard of Israel’s illegal top-secret program to build its own nuclear weapons, but then – some might say Providentially – he was suddenly taken from the stage.

LBJ, addled and desperate as he saw his war in Vietnam going to hell and his civil-rights initiatives going up in the smoke of a hundred urban riots, reached out to Israel with an indomitable will to truckle in friendship. Did they attack and kill US sailors on a Navy vessel in broad daylight and try to leave no evidence in the form of survivors? LBJ preferred that all of the sailors would have died and gone to the bottom with the ship rather than “embarrass our Israeli frens”.

Since the formation of that (in the acute if distasteful Nazi argot) Blutbund, the Beltway – first the Dems, then the Republicans, and then the indistinguishable nomenklatura into which the un-diselectable lump of pols and bureaucrats has now congealed – has pandered to the interests of the Israeli State, following as slavishly, if more stylishly, than a demented basset hound.

All to Our great damage and lasting detriment.

I can’t help recalling that in when the first Arab oil-embargo in 1974 came along, it struck me as perfectly predictable, considering that the Arabs would have probably been upset at Our giving the Israelis so much military and financial support. Especially when it was clear that We could no longer pump enough oil from domestic American sources and would have to rely on other folks’ oil. And then when you added in the size of some of those early-1970s cars, it sort of screamed out to you that it would very much be in America’s interests not to piss-off anybody sitting on big reserves of the stuff.

But no.

As the presence of Israel – especially given its insidious ultimate objectives in the region – inflamed the neighboring nations (precisely as had been predicted in 1948 by the many competent sources familiar with the Middle East and the dynamics of nations) this country just bulled ahead, driven by domestic politics. Originally, that meant the Democratic Party’s desperate need to woo and ‘lock-in’ reliable voting blocs, but then also by newly-invented (by the Democrats) PAC money funneled to the pols by the shrewd Israeli gambit of forming its own PAC to reward Congressional supporters. Later, the Republicans would be allowed to ‘buy in’, which they did.

And where the Israelis took advantage of the Democrats’ ‘secularizing’ of American culture in the 1960s and 1970s (most likely on the assumption that the less ‘Christian’ America was, the less ‘anti-Semitic’ or at least anti-Israel it would be), yet in the 1980s, with the Reagan-era embrace of a militant and militarily-aggressive Fundamentalism, the Israelis suddenly became BFFs with the rabid Fundamentalist Right. An overture that was paid for by the Fundamentalists’ suddenly ‘discovering’ that the fulfillment of all their expectations of Jeezuzzz would require the faithful to fully support Israel first.

And on and on.

I also can’t help thinking that the militarization and regimentation of American society over the past decades has been in no small part* a result of a ‘migration’ of Israeli society’s own militarization. The American Right has always been liable to a corporatist and militarist conformity, and the Left embraced a ‘revolutionism’ that equally called for government intrusion (as for example, the radical feminists bringing government police power not only into the hearths but the very bedrooms of the citizenry).

The consistent stoking of ‘fear’ and the sense of being ‘threatened’, coupled with the valorization of a ‘victimhood’ whose awfulness would justify ‘whatever means necessary’ to counter an ‘existential threat’, could as easily apply to the radical feminists’ characterization of women in a 'patriarchal' society as it could an Israeli state surrounded by numerous threats that its own existence and actions had inflamed. And such driving of the public mood toward both ‘fear’ and the desire for ‘vengeance’ – creating a stampede almost literally – also mirrors precisely the tactics of Goebbels’s propaganda objectives in a long-ago 1930s that now seem never to have gone away.

The integrity of Our own political principles is now deeply compromised in a densening matrix of ways. Congress is now enwhored to the Israeli state, and most pols are now so indentured and compromised that it is hardly inconceivable that they dare not change course for fear of their long treachery being exposed.

Worse, as Obama, having had to accept numerous old school pols onto his team in order to secure election, tries now as President to re-introduce some of the ‘balance’ that was last seen in the suddenly-stopped Administration of JFK, he is being undermined by precisely those pols – such as Joe Biden and Hillary – who have for their entire careers made their indenture to Israeli policy objectives a remunerative badge of honor. It is not inconceivable that they both will seek to oust him in the next presidential election. And if anything happens to cut short Obama’s Administration, as happened to JFK, then Biden will even more quickly return America to a full indenture.

None of this makes for a good night’s sleep.

But if the 1930s are baaaack, then nobody should be expecting to get one anyway.

NOTES

*The corporations' desire for a more disciplined workforce, and then for a workforce that could be controlled as it saw its jobs and benefits dissolved through ‘globalization’, and the Left’s inherent predisposition to increased governmental intrusiveness in pursuit of the demands of its Identities, were even larger factors.