1. Israel and Democracy

In December 2005, in the most democratic election ever organized in the Arab East, the Hamas Party was elected to power by the majority of Palestinian voters. Even President Bush, before he was chastened by the Jewish Lobby, publicly conceded the democratic character of the Palestinian election process. The Israeli State rejected the outcome and orchestrated a massive well-financed international campaign through its US and European Jewish lobbies to isolate and undermine the newly elected regime. Instead of recognizing the democratic mandate, Israel labeled the regime 'terrorist'; it ignored Hamas unilateral ceasefire and escalated its murderous military attacks. Above all it succeeded in establishing an economic blockade, exercising its hegemony over the US and through the latter over the European Union. Israeli animus to Palestinian democracy and its citizens' role in freely electing its representatives clearly marks Israel an enemy to an open pluralistic Arab society. Obviously the same applies to the major Jewish organizations in the US - AIPAC, ADL, the Presidents of the Major Jewish Organizations, which parroted Israel's attack on Palestinian democracy, as they have done on every other policy, no matter how unconscionable, as in the murder of Palestinian children and families. The Israeli animosity to Arab democracy is widely transmitted into the US body politic by their Zionist followers in the lobbies, government, mass media and business.

2. Israel and Peace

The week prior to the Israeli invasion, Hamas and the PLO agreed to negotiate with Israel, giving tacit recognition to the State of Israel. Most of the mass media published reports of the accord and the European Union welcomed the agreement, stating it was the beginning of a process. The Financial Times reported: "The crisis (Israeli invasion of Gaza) has overshadowed a vital agreement reached by Hamas and Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinian Authority President, on Tuesday that includes an implicit Hamas acceptance of a two state solution to the Middle East conflict. A copy released by Hamas...refers to the Palestinian goal of a state on all the land occupied in 1967..." (my emphasis) (FT June 29, 2006. p.8). Israel responded by rejecting negotiations and launched the new war to destroy the Palestinian State. In fact the Israeli State never at any point even recognized the elected Hamas government as a negotiating adversary let alone a partner.

As Noam Chomsky has documented, at every point since the 1980's, that the PLO have carried out a ceasefire, proposed a two state solution and explicitly recognized the State of Israel, the Jewish state launched the invasion of Lebanon, assassinated prominent leaders or launched military assaults, killing activists and civilians, in order to force the Palestinians to withdraw their offer.

The Israeli regime absolutely refuses to accept a negotiated prisoner release and exchange proposed by Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, US client Mubarek and most of the European Union. Israel holds at least 9,000 Palestinian political prisoners including 335 children and several hundred women, most of whom have not been charged, almost all have been tortured, and the great majority are civilians seized in their homes or in the street. In a word, most civilians are kidnap victims of the Israeli Defense (sic) Forces, not captured combatants as is the case of the lone Israeli soldier. The Palestinians have repeatedly called on Israel to free the five hundred kidnapped Palestinian children and women hostages in exchange for their captured soldier. Israel responded by intensifying its military assaults and widening the net to include all Palestinians. At a cabinet meeting on July 2, Olmert stated, "I have given instructions to intensify the strength of action by the army and security services to hunt down these terrorists, those who sent them...and those who harbour them" (Aljazeera July 2, 2006). In other words, the resistance organizations (dubbed 'terrorists') combating Israeli military incursions include all major Palestinian organizations; those who "send them" - includes all the elected political authorities; and those "who harbour them", includes hundreds of thousands of families, friends, neighbors, community and civic groups, doctors and nurses - in a word, civil society. This is a totalitarian order to criminalize and target almost the entire political and civil society of Palestine.

3. Israel and Political Rights

Israel's re-occupation of Gaza and imposition of martial law is accompanied by the criminalization of the entire electoral political class: cabinet ministers, parliamentarians and party activists. Israel's Deputy Prime Minister Shimon Perez told CNN (July 2, 2006), "They (Palestinian government officials) will be put on trial and they will be accused of participating and supporting terrorist acts against the civilian government (sic)." To make its point in the best traditions of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, the Israelis bombed the executive offices of the Palestinian Prime Minister, setting the building on fire. As if to demolish even the memory or thought of a Palestinian government, the Israeli military juggernaut is destroying the entire Palestinian infrastructural basis for political life: buildings, leaders, parties and elections.

Systematically and with a bureaucratic efficiency, which would have won the admiration of Adolf Eichmann, the Jewish State proceeded with daily demolitions of every conceivable structure necessary for civilized life. On July 3, 2006 it bombed the university in Gaza City. On July 4 it bombed the Ministry of the Interior. On July 5 Israelis invaded Northern Gaza and the criminal story continues. For those who believed that this invasion was merely an episode in search of a prisoner of war, Yuval Diskin, head of Israel's secret police, Shin Bet, stated that the "...operation in Gaza could last months."(Aljazeera July 2, 2006). With monumental cant and hypocrisy, Major General Amos Yadlin, Israeli Army Chief of Intelligence, having arrested or driven underground the entire Palestinian leadership declared that "...mediation efforts were stymied because no one knows whom to talk to about Shalit (the Israeli POW)."

4. Israel and Terror

While Israel was destroying the very basis of Palestinian existence as a people, it was launching 24 hour artillery assaults, continual sonic booms by low flying jets, forcing the dehydration of the entire population in scorching heat by destroying drinking water supplies, living in darkness, deprived of food and confined to their homes or shelters. An entire people, without an army of their own, under military siege is holed up in an ever shrinking territory. This is the State of Terror in its most expressive and malignant form: "Collective Punishment" is not directed at securing the release of the Israeli POW; it is directed at making life for the Palestinian people so unbearable, so lacking in the most basic conditions for survival, that they will either be forced to flee or rise up in a heroic last stand, to which Israel will respond with all its murderous military might or as the distinguished academics, journalists, ideologues and Presidents of the Major Jewish Organizations will describe it : "a vigorous Israeli response to Palestinian terrorism".

5. The Jewish Lobby: The Central Issue

While the Israeli assault on Gaza grinds on so does the propaganda and activism in its favor by all the major Jewish/Zionist organizations in the US andEurope. In a review of the Daily Alert (the daily organ prepared for the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations in the US) since the beginning of the invasion of Gaza, one finds automatic and uncritical support for every single Israeli assault on Gaza: electrical power plants because they have "dual use"; water supplies and sewage treatment plants are "military targets" because they are used by the captors; terrorizing children and civilians is to "let them know what Siderot (an Israeli border community and home of the Defense Minister) have been going through"; intensified and prolonged Israeli repression of the Palestinian population because "Hamas and Fatah are terrorist organizations and they must be treated as terrorists and crushed by all means necessary". (Daily Alert July 3, 2006).

There is a Zionist international division of labor: the military assassins operate in Israel, the verbal assassins operate out of the plush suites of the head offices of the Presidents of the Major Jewish Organizations.

Nothing captures the power of the Jewish lobby as much as the Euro-American response to Israel's full scale assault on Gaza. Bush supports Israeli action even when it grossly violates Washington's 'rules' for the IDF offense: it destroyed a US financed power plant, it blew up bridges, roads and water lines contrary to Bush's admonition to "avoid damaging infrastructure and harming civilians". Israel can stick their fingers in both of Bush's eyes and have his backing because it knows that the Jewish lobby will mobilize a near unanimous Congressional endorsement, a favorable media focus on the Israeli 'hostage' and a virtual blackout on massive Palestinian suffering. Thanks to the Jewish lobby, Israel's totalitarian terror directed toward a 'Final Solution' only elicits laughable proposals from the United Nations to negotiate a peaceful resolution, when the only legitimate elected negotiators are in jail or hiding and threatened with assassination.

On July 5 the European Union (EU) castigated Israel's "disproportionate measures" and not Israel's invasion and violation of the United Nations Charter on the rights of nations to self-determination. This meek, shameful betrayal of the EU's own principles is exacerbated by its equating Israel's invasion with the Palestinian capture of an active military combatant. (La Jornada (Mexico City), July 6, 2006). The difference between Lobby-dominated US backing of Israel's invasion and the EU boils down to the "appropriate amount of force" which Israel should apply in invading Gaza.

What accounts for US support for Israeli ethnic cleansing, despite impudently and blatantly repudiating the US "moderate" guidelines on destroying Palestinian democracy? No one in their right mind can claim that the Israeli assault on Gaza is because of US policies, interests or US imperial power. The entire campaign from the beginning to end to destroy the democratically elected Hamas government was made and packaged in Israel and executed with the willing complicity of the executives among the Presidents of the Major Jewish Organizations in America - including but not confined to AIPAC. The daily assaults and assassinations in Gaza and the West Bank were carried out under the direction of Israeli Generals, Shin Bet and Mossad, approved by the Israeli Defense Minister and Prime Minister without consulting or even feigning to advise Washington. The campaign to isolate and destroy Hamas was overwhelmingly organized by the Jewish Lobby; it succeeded in securing a near unanimous endorsement in the US Congress and complete backing in Washington. It successfully got the Bush Administration to pressure the European Union to boycott the Hamas government.

There is no evidence that implicates Big Oil in the Israeli drive to 'cleanse' Palestine of Arabs. There is no evidence that Israel was acting on behalf of US strategists. There is a wealth of reports, documents, statements and actions taken by the Israeli regime and its US transmission belts that they imposed US complicity, engineered the entire operation in accord with their own totalitarian methods at the service of their own designed strategy to secure the 'Final Solution': Jewish rule over the entire Palestinian territory.

The Jewish Lobby has dutifully followed every twist and turn in the Israeli propaganda line on its devious road toward a purely Jewish Palestine.

For example, Israel claimed it couldn't negotiate with the Palestinians because they refused to recognize Israel (even Arafat publicly and categorically proclaimed he favored a Two State solution in the 1980's). The Lobby ignored Arafat's pledge, then labeled his proposal as unreliable, then turned around and endorsed his role as a legitimate interlocutor at the Oslo meeting after Israel passed the line that he was a statesman and not a terrorist. With Sharon scuttling the agreement, the Lobby switched to re-labeling Arafat a terrorist and blamed the PLO for failing to accept the creation of separate Palestinian Bantustans.

The Jewish State claimed that it couldn't deal with an illegitimate undemocratic regime. The Lobby parroted the line, calling Israel the "only democracy in the Middle East", while it exercised colonial rule over 3.5 million Palestinians. Subsequent to the free elections which were won by Hamas, the Israeli State rejected the democratic outcome; the Lobby "forgot" about its democratic rhetoric and again parroted the line of its Israeli masters - democratically elected authorities who are not approved by Tel Aviv are not acceptable.

Israel launched a series of measures to destroy the Palestinian economy and blockade trade and financial life; the Lobby automatically endorsed it, promoted US complicity and supported the collective punishment of the Palestinian people for having been so irresponsible as to support a nationalist government inclined to eliminate corruption.

Israel blew up US financed power plants; the Lobby supported Israel over their own government.

Israel built the segregation wall. The World Court condemned it. The Lobby defended it repeating the Israeli State line: It's a 'Security Fence'.

In other words, the evidence of the Lobby acting as a transmission belt for Israeli state policy under all conditions is overwhelming. In the face of all rational considerations, the Lobby automatically gives unquestioned support to Israel's violations of peace, democracy, human rights, international court rulings, United Nation's resolutions. This is especially true even when the Israeli State blatantly ignores US policy. There is no question that the Lobby's primary political loyalties lay with the State of Israel.

The Jewish Lobby's whole-hearted backing of Israel's assault of Gaza illustrates once again that there is no crime, no matter how terrible and perverse, which Israel commits, which will not be supported by the respectable professors, investment bankers, journalists, surgeons, policy advisers, real estate moguls, lawyers, school teachers and other ordinary folk who make up the activist base of the Major Organizations.

6. Israel and Prisoner Exchanges: The Record

The Israeli government and all its principle spokespeople have repeatedly rejected negotiations directed toward a prisoner exchange, calling the demand "outrageous", "extortion" and likely "to encourage terrorism". The Jewish State's line was predictably echoed and amplified by its representatives in the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations (CPMJO) repeatedly throughout the Israeli invasion in their propaganda sheet, Daily Alert. The editorial pages of the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times were full of opinion pieces supporting the Israeli line opposing prisoner exchanges written by members or supporters of the (pro-Israel) Jewish Lobby.

The historical record provides a totally different account of Israel's policy on prisoner exchange and extortion. Israel has on numerous occasions negotiated with so-called 'Palestinian terrorists' the exchange of prisoners and consummated deals. As Esther Wachsman, the mother of an Israeli soldier who died in an operation to release him, emphatically stated (and as everyone in Israel knows), "All this talk about not speaking to the terrorists is nonsense, in the end they released Palestinian prisoners with blood on their hands for three dead soldiers and they released Sheikh Ahmed Yassin for two Mossad agents." (BBC News July 1, 2006).

Equally the misplaced indignation of Israeli officials and the officials of the Jewish lobby against "extortion" is laughable, were it not so tragic. Israel systematically holds family members, relatives and entire neighborhoods of suspected activists hostage, some are even imprisoned and tortured in order to extort information or force the suspects to turn themselves in.

The practice of accusing the victims of the crimes which the executioners are about to commit, as Albert Camus once noted, is the hallmark of totalitarian regimes.

Beyond the Jewish State and Lobby's hypocrisy, cant and outright lies accompanying the refusal to negotiate a prisoner exchange is an equally important question: Why has the Israeli regime, contrary to its past practices, refused to negotiate? The explanation for Israeli intransigence is that it does not want their soldier released, at least not until they have devastated and re-occupied Gaza. The refusal to negotiate this time is a coldly calculated and cynical move to prolong the invasion and increase their stranglehold on the Gaza economy in order to accelerate the "voluntary" departure of the Palestinians. The lowly corporal is being sacrificed to the Greater Good of Greater Israel; for all the sentimental photos of the lad published in the Lobby influenced mass media, there is no accompanying concern with the cynical refusal of the Jewish State to negotiate his release.

The danger is that Israeli fundamentalism is implicating not only the US mass media and state, it's happening in US civil society, which already is suffering from police state regulation from our own rulers in the White House. Beyond the terrible plight and injustices of the Palestinians in Gaza, and US complicity is the larger question of a new air war against Iran. If Israel, through its Jewish lobby and backers in the government, can induce a US invasion of Iraq, if it can secure US and EU complicity in destroying a democratically elected government in Palestine in the course of ethnic cleansing, could the same power configuration lead to a full scale attack on Iran? The precedents have been established. The political machinery is in place. Is it a question of timing or pretext? Can some as yet unforeseen or unpredictable event or political force intervene to forestall the Zionist juggernaut? The first step is to explain the problem: to name the pro-Israel power bloc at work, to expose the issue of dual loyalties, to face down the vicious slander campaigns emanating from the agents of the Israeli state and to begin a nationwide educational and political campaign to end Israeli crimes against humanity and its Lobby's shameful apologetics for the 'Final Solution'.