|| -----Original Message-----
|| From: Nathan Newman
|| There are plenty of bad things to say about Israel as a state without
|| jumping to link it to Jews in American society. Even the issue of the
|| "Jewish lobby" is pretty irrelevant-- most of the support for
|| Israel comes
|| from military hawks and Christian fundamentalists. Jews just don't have
|| either the votes or the money to outbid oil interests who could
|| easily go
|| the other way if other concerns didn't exist.
I think limiting it to the Pentagon and the messianic right obscures the origins and present nature of the US-Israeli entanglement, which dates back to when the US replaced GB as the imperialist power in the ME - and elsewhere. Inheriting the British divide-and-rule structure of dual support for Arab and Jewish client states, the US soon found itself in the same predicament as the Brits, when Jabotinski's followers decided it was time to put Jews first and Brits became fair game. Although the blowback from Israel occasionally erupted in overt military action against the US, as in the 1967 USS Liberty incident and the incidents between the USMC and the Israeli invasion forces in Lebanon in 1981, its primary form has been covert. Israel controls US electoral politics through AIPAC and the ADL-B'nai Brith, and the US executive through widespread penetration of US intelligence and the military bureaucracy. The Jonathan Pollard affair revealed that Pollard had been acting on the instructions of much higher-placed moles, who have never been apprehended. And AIPAC's effectiveness is not just a function of the money it spends (it doesn't endorse pols), but its network of assets within the government, media, academia, etc., forming a cohesive, centrally controlled cadre.
E.g. Turkey found out what an effective magic wand AIPAC was for unlocking the doors to the IMF, the DoS, and the EU, as well as for ending Western support for the PKK, when it entered a defence pact with Israel and found IMF support, the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline, and EU accession all falling into its lap in rapid succession.
Finally, as I posted earlier, Jews get the sharp end of this wretched mess as much as anyone else, even though they may be ideologically subject to Likud[1] hegemony or the more radical messianism exported from the US. The early socialist settlers of the first two aliyahs got swept aside by the Ben-Gurion crowd, who in turn got sidelined by the Haganah and Stern terrorists, who consolidated their hold on Israeli politics by, among other things, flying in millions of new constituents from Ethiopia, Russia, etc., and are now getting Jews killed at a record rate. So the issue is not Jews, but as Jewish religion is the main component of Israeli colonialism, just as Islam is of jihadism, confusion easily - and intentionally - arises, giving ammunition to slanderers like Max and Chip.
Hakki