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israel lobby
How the US and Israel Destroyed Syria and Called it Peace
American interference, at the behest of Netanyahu’s far-right Israel, has left the Middle East in ruins, with over a million dead and open wars raging in Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine, and with Iran on the brink of a nuclear arsenal.
Dec 12, 2024
In the famous lines of Tacitus, Roman historian, “To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.”
In our age, it is Israel and the U.S. that make a desert and call it peace.
The story is simple. In stark violation of international law, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ministers claim the right to rule over seven million Palestinian Arabs. When Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands leads to militant resistance, Israel labels the resistance “terrorism” and calls on the U.S. to overthrow the Middle East governments that back the “terrorists.” The U.S., under the sway of the Israel Lobby, goes to war on Israel’s behalf.
The fall of Syria this week is the culmination of the Israel-U.S. campaign against Syria that goes back to 1996 with Netanyahu’s arrival to office as Prime Minister. The Israel-U.S. war on Syria escalated in 2011 and 2012, when Barack Obama covertly tasked the CIA with the overthrow of the Syrian Government in Operation Timber Sycamore. That effort finally came to “fruition” this week, after more than 300,000 deaths in the Syrian war since 2011.
Syria’s fall came swiftly because of more than a decade of crushing economic sanctions, the burdens of war, the U.S. seizure of Syria’s oil, Russia’s priorities regarding the conflict in Ukraine, and most immediately, Israel’s attacks on Hezbollah, which was the key military backstop to the Syrian Government. No doubt Assad often misplayed his own hand and faced severe internal discontent, but his regime was targeted for collapse for decades by the U.S. and Israel.
Since 2011, the Israel-U.S. perpetual war on Syria, including bombing, jihadists, economic sanctions, U.S. seizure of Syria’s oil fields, and more, has sunk the Syrian people into misery.
Before the U.S.-Israel campaign to overthrow Assad began in earnest in 2011, Syria was a functioning, growing middle-income country. In January 2009, the IMF Executive Board had this to say:
Executive Directors welcomed Syria’s strong macroeconomic performance in recent years, as manifested in the rapid non-oil GDP growth, comfortable level of foreign reserves, and low and declining government debt. This performance reflected both robust regional demand and the authorities’ reform efforts to shift toward a more market- based economy.
Since 2011, the Israel-U.S. perpetual war on Syria, including bombing, jihadists, economic sanctions, U.S. seizure of Syria’s oil fields, and more, has sunk the Syrian people into misery.
In the immediate two days following the collapse of the government, Israel conducted about 480 strikes across Syria, and completely destroyed the Syrian fleet in Latakia. Pursuing his expansionist agenda, Prime Minister Netanyahu illegally claimed control over the demilitarized buffer zone in the Golan Heights and declared that the Golan Heights will be a part of the State of Israel “for eternity.”
Netanyahu’s ambition to transform the region through war, which dates back almost three decades, is playing out in front of our eyes. In a press conference on December 9th, the Israeli prime minister boasted of an “absolute victory,” justifying the on-going genocide in Gaza and escalating violence throughout the region:
I ask you, just think, if we had acceded to those who told us time and again: '"The war must be stopped"– we would not have entered Rafah, we would not have seized the Philadelphia Corridor, we would not have eliminated Sinwar, we would not have surprised our enemies in Lebanon and the entire world in a daring operation-stratagem, we would not have eliminated Nasrallah, we would not have destroyed Hezbollah's underground network, and we would not have exposed Iran's weakness. The operations that we have carried out since the beginning of the war are dismantling the axis brick by brick.
The long history of Israel’s campaign to overthrow the Syrian Government is not widely understood, yet the documentary record is clear. Israel’s war on Syria began with U.S. and Israeli neoconservatives in 1996, who fashioned a “Clean Break” strategy for the Middle East for Netanyahu as he came to office. The core of the “clean break” strategy called for the Israel (and the US) to reject “land for peace,” the idea that Israel would withdraw from the occupied Palestinian lands in return for peace. Instead, Israel would retain the occupied Palestinian lands, rule over the Palestinian people in an Apartheid state, step-by-step ethnically cleanse the state, and enforce so-called “peace for peace” by overthrowing neighboring governments that resisted Israel’s land claims.
The long history of Israel’s campaign to overthrow the Syrian Government is not widely understood, yet the documentary record is clear.
The Clean Break strategy asserts, “Our claim to the land—to which we have clung for hope for 2000 years—is legitimate and noble,” and goes on to state, “Syria challenges Israel on Lebanese soil. An effective approach, and one with which American can sympathize, would be if Israel seized the strategic initiative along its northern borders by engaging Hizballah, Syria, and Iran, as the principal agents of aggression in Lebanon…”
In his 1996 book Fighting Terrorism, Netanyahu set out the new strategy. Israel would not fight the terrorists; it would fight the states that support the terrorists. More accurately, it would get the US to do Israel’s fighting for it. As he elaborated in 2001:
The first and most crucial thing to understand is this: There is no international terrorism without the support of sovereign states.… Take away all this state support, and the entire scaffolding of international terrorism will collapse into dust.
Netanyahu’s strategy was integrated into U.S. foreign policy. Taking out Syria was always a key part of the plan. This was confirmed to General Wesley Clark after 9/11. He was told, during a visit at the Pentagon, that “we’re going to attack and destroy the governments in seven countries in five years—we’re going to start with Iraq, and then we’re going to move to Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran.” Iraq would be first, then Syria, and the rest. (Netanyahu’s campaign for the Iraq War is spelled out in detail in Dennis Fritz’s new book, Deadly Betrayal. The role of the Israel Lobby is spelled out in Ilan Pappé’s new book, Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic). The insurgency that hit U.S. troops in Iraq set back the five-year timeline, but did not change the basic strategy.
The U.S. has by now led or sponsored wars against Iraq (invasion in 2003), Lebanon (U.S. funding and arming Israel), Libya (NATO bombing in 2011), Syria (CIA operation during 2010’s), Sudan (supporting rebels to break Sudan apart in 2011), and Somalia (backing Ethiopia’s invasion in 2006). A prospective U.S. war with Iran, ardently sought by Israel, is still pending.
Strange as it might seem, the CIA has repeatedly backed Islamist Jihadists to fight these wars, and jihadists have just toppled the Syrian regime. The CIA, after all, helped to create al-Qaeda in the first place by training, arming, and financing the Mujahideen in Afghanistan from the late 1970s onward. Yes, Osama bin Laden later turned on the U.S., but his movement was a U.S. creation all the same. Ironically, as Seymour Hersh confirms, it was Assad’s intelligence that “tipped off the U.S. to an impending Al Qaeda bombing attack on the headquarters of the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet.”
Operation Timber Sycamore was a billion-dollar CIA covert program launched by Obama to overthrow Bashar al-Assad. The CIA funded, trained, and provided intelligence to radical and extreme Islamist groups. The CIA effort also involved a “rat line” to run weapons from Libya (attacked by NATO in 2011) to the jihadists in Syria. In 2014, Seymour Hersh described the operation in his piece “The Red Line and the Rat Line”:
“A highly classified annex to the report, not made public, described a secret agreement reached in early 2012 between the Obama and Erdoğan administrations. It pertained to the rat line. By the terms of the agreement, funding came from Turkey, as well as Saudi Arabia and Qatar; the CIA, with the support of MI6, was responsible for getting arms from Gaddafi’s arsenals into Syria.”
Soon after the launch of Timber Sycamore, in March 2013, at a joint conference by President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu at the White House, Obama said: “With respect to Syria, the United States continues to work with allies and friends and the Syrian opposition to hasten the end of Assad’s rule.”
To the U.S.-Israeli Zionist mentality, a call for negotiation by an adversary is taken as a sign of weakness of the adversary. Those who call for negotiations on the other side typically end up dead—murdered by Israel or U.S. assets. We’ve seen this play out recently in Lebanon. The Lebanese Foreign Minister confirmed that Hassan Nasrallah, Former Secretary-General of Hezbollah had agreed to a ceasefire with Israel days before his assassination. Hezbollah’s willingness to accept a peace agreement according to the Arab-Islamic world’s wishes of a two-state solution is long-standing. Similarly, instead of negotiating to end the war in Gaza, Israel assassinated Hamas’ political chief, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran.
To the U.S.-Israeli Zionist mentality, a call for negotiation by an adversary is taken as a sign of weakness of the adversary.
Similarly in Syria, instead of allowing for a political solution to emerge, the U.S. opposed the peace process multiple times. In 2012, the UN had negotiated a peace agreement in Syria that was blocked by the Americans, who demanded that Assad must go on the first day of the peace agreement. The U.S. wanted regime change, not peace. In September 2024, Netanyahu addressed the General Assembly with a map of the Middle East divided between “Blessing” and “Curse,” with Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Iran as part of Netanyahu’s curse. The real curse is Israel’s path of mayhem and war, which has now engulfed Lebanon and Syria, with Netayahu’s fervent hope to draw the U.S. into war with Iran as well.
The U.S. and Israel are high-fiving that they have successfully wrecked yet another adversary of Israel and defender of the Palestinian cause, with Netanyahu claiming “credit for starting the historic process.” Most likely Syria will now succumb to continued war among the many armed protagonists, as has happened in the previous U.S.-Israeli regime-change operations.
In short, American interference, at the behest of Netanyahu’s Israel, has left the Middle East in ruins, with over a million dead and open wars raging in Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine, and with Iran on the brink of a nuclear arsenal, being pushed against its own inclinations to this eventuality.
All this is in the service of a profoundly unjust cause: to deny Palestinians their political rights in the service of Zionist extremism based on the 7th century BCE Book of Joshua. Remarkably, according to that text—one relied on by Israel’s own religious zealots—the Israelites were not even the original inhabitants of the land. Rather, according the text, God instructs Joshua and his warriors to commit multiple genocides to conquer the land.
Against this backdrop, the Arab-Islamic nations and indeed almost all of the world have repeatedly united in the call for a two-state solution and peace between Israel and Palestine.
Instead of the two-state solution, Israel and the U.S. have made a desert and called it peace.
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AIPAC Goes Transatlantic
The Israel Lobby has set its sights much further afield than the halls of power in Washington.
Nov 29, 2024
Like the US, Britain has long been captive of the Zionist lobby, which wields much influence in the country through access to ministers, donations to the parties, and the repression of public opinion critical of Israeli policies of apartheid and genocide.
The Starmer government purged Labour’s ranks of people sympathetic toward the Palestinians, taking cues from the Israel lobby by labeling the critics of Israel as anti-semites. Starmer himself declared a few months before taking over the leadership of Labour, “I support Zionism without qualification.”
He also stated on LBC radio in the UK that Israel has the right of siege in Gaza, including its cutting off of water and power (McShane 2023). This coheres with the view of retired Major General Giora Eiland, who called for a starvation policy in Gaza and told Israeli media: “Creating a severe humanitarian crisis in Gaza is a necessary means to achieve the goal. Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist.”
Starmer put into practice the next phase of his Zionist program by arresting critics of Israel through the employment of the draconian “Terrorism Act 2000, Section 12” which covers materials posted online. A journalist and pro-Palestinian activist, Sarah Wilkinson was arrested under the Act (originally enacted under the Tony Blair government) in August 2024 after a raid on her house by 12 police who confiscated all her electronic devices (Wilkins 2024). She was threatened with a long prison sentence for posting online remarks about the “incredible” way that Hamas was able to launch its assault on 7 October.
The same month, an independent British foreign affairs journalist Richard Medhurst, who is sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, was arrested at Heathrow Airport and charged under the same act, which bans any writing regarded as favorable to proscribed entities, such as Hamas. There is no conceivable applications of this law to Jews or Israelis living in Britain who express even bloodcurdling support for terrorism and torture employed by the IDF against Palestinian civilians.
Israel exercises direct power connections to British electoral politics and Parliament through such groups as Labour Friends of Israel (LFI), founded in 1957, and Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI), founded in 1974, both of which lobby for Israel.
For the Tories, upon election to Parliament, one almost automatically becomes a member of CFI. As a result, Conservative cabinet members have come to expect regular donations from the Israel lobby, which has amounted to hundreds of thousands of pounds going to at least one-third of all current sitting members of the party.
Large numbers of Labour MPs have also been feeding at the trough. Twenty percent of Labour’s sitting MPs have been funded by pro-Israel groups or individuals – including 15 who have been directly financed by the Israeli state.
The 2017 Al Jazeera documentary, “The Lobby,” exposed the fact that the Israeli government, working through its embassy in London, has had a direct hand in managing the various friends of Israel groups, including its many city branches. The Union of Jewish Students in the UK, which receives money from the Embassy, sends student delegations to Israel for propaganda immersion. Just prior to the 2024 general election, some 15 MPs took money from pro-Israel lobby groups, the LFI and CFI.
Twelve successful Labour candidates and three winning Conservatives took advantage of the Israeli largesse by accepting the travel invitations and expressing solidarity with Israeli apartheid and genocide policies.
Parallel with the U.S. but on a smaller scale in the UK, elections are open doors for contributions from wealthy individuals and corporate elites. The Zionist lobby is able to exploit these openings to block those Anglo-American politicians from interfering with the apartheid state. Suppressing Palestine rights is fully consistent with neo-conservative foreign policy and fits the long trajectory of western imperialism.
As the Al Jazeera documentary also disclosed, the Israeli main propaganda unit, the Ministry of Strategic Affairs, regularly funnels talking points to British MPs to get them to serve as spokespersons for Israeli interests, such as during Prime Minister’s Question Time.
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) as well is channeling money to universities in Britain to promote propaganda through the efforts of the campus-based think tank, the Pinsker Centre, whose role is to construct a narrative of Jewish student victimhood without a word of condolence for Palestinian students whose relatives are being starved and slaughtered by Israeli Jews.
Beyond the campuses, AIPAC seeks to create a stronghold in Parliament similar to the power it wields in the U.S. Congress. The documentary also exposed plots in the Israeli Embassy in London to take down public officials who are seen as critical of the apartheid policy or insufficiently pro-Zionist.
Israel and its modern day maccabees have made their mark. Members of Labour Friends of Israel have used the (now increasingly discredited) tactic of labeling anyone who brings up Israel’s repression as “anti-semitic.” It was very successful in purging Labour of pro-Palestinian MPs and party members, particularly during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership period (2015-2020).
The “anti-semitic” tag is equivalent to the use of “heretic” during the Inquisition. Though today’s heretics raising such issues may not be burned at the stake, they may lose their position in the party or their jobs or their university matriculation status. The militant attitude of LFI incites fear and intimidation among those concerned about social justice.
Stuart Roden, hedge fund manager and chairman of the Israeli venture capital firm Hetz Ventures, [based in Tel Aviv] “has given the Labour party over half a million pounds ahead of the UK’s [2024] general election,” part of the £1 million he’s donated to Labour since 2023.
Roden is also the principal funder of a Zionist educational program, “I-gnite,” which teaches British children that “the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) are acting proportionately in Gaza” (McEvoy 2024c). In October 2023, he was filmed confronting pro-Palestinian protesters but was not taken to task for interfering with the speech rights or feelings of Palestinian Britons or others involved in the demonstration.
AIPAC is just the newest of a number of pro-Israel influencers in the UK. These include the Jewish Leadership Council, the Zionist Federation, and the Board of Deputies of British Jews, all elite organizations amongst the Jewish population of Britain.
It was under Tony Blair, a member of Labour Friends of Israel, that the Israel lobby began to seriously make political inroads in the government, according to a (UK) Channel 4 2009 investigative news program. The video also revealed that a press “watchdog” group on behalf of Israel, “Honest Reporting,” regularly challenged the Israel coverage in The Guardian and BBC. The organization is headquartered in Jerusalem with another branch in New York City.
Its managing editor at the time, Simon Plosker, had previously worked for the pro-Israel propaganda unit, Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (Bicom) as well as for the Israel army press office.
Bicom acts as an influencer upon the British public, largely by issuing press releases to the British media, funding trips to Israel for British journalists, and giving talks at British universities. Funding sources for Bicom have major investments in the occupied West Bank.
The heavy hand of Zionism International helped to build a coalition of leaders, including Trump’s CIA director Mike Pompeo, Trump himself, and Benjamin Netanyahu, dedicated to blocking Corbyn from becoming prime minister and removing him as Labour Party leader. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Starmer will be hard pressed to continue defending Israel’s genocidal policies in Gaza and the West Bank as “the right of self-defense.”
From the Jordan to the Sea: Turning the Tide?
By May 2024, a Data for Progress poll indicated that 70% of likely American voters, including 83% of Democrats, favored a permanent ceasefire and de-escalation of violence in Gaza. A similar YouGov poll found that 56% of Britons favored cutting arms shipments to Israel and an immediate ceasefire (66%). Despite these findings, neither of the leading political parties in the US or UK have taken action to end human slaughter in Palestine.
In November 2024, the U.S. vetoed a UN Security Council resolution to demand a ceasefire in Gaza. The vote was 14 to 1. The Biden government, which had already given Israel over $20 billion in military support for the Israeli assault on Gaza and the West Bank, remained super-hawkish to the end.
Based on his actions as a first-term president, it is unlikely that Trump will use leverage on Israel to back away from its subjugation and slaughter of Gazan and West Bank civilians, confiscation of the remaining Palestinian state, and its “final solution.”
Unless the Gulf states, western Europe, and the UN take a more interventionist role in forcing the U.S. to end its complicity in the incomprehensible Israeli atrocities, there appears to be only two possible outcomes: extermination of the Palestinian people or a regional war involving Israel, the US, and UK against Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and Iran, with the possible material backing of Russia and China.
For Israel there can never be a win-win diplomatic solution. One way or another, the Zionist project may have met its Waterloo.
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Make Deal Not War!: Obama's, and Washington's, Absurd Choice of a Nuclear Deal or War on Iran
Aug 08, 2015
I don't know which is worse: President Obama asserting, in defense of the nuclear deal he and Secretary of State John Kerry negotiated with Iran, that "The choice we face is ultimately between diplomacy and some form of war, maybe not tomorrow, maybe not three months from now, but soon," or the fact that most Americans and most American pundits seem to accept that limited choice of options as a given.
Nothing could be more ridiculous, of course. We already know because the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors have repeatedly inspected Iran's nuclear energy programs and reactors and verified the fact that no bomb-making work has been going on in Iran for years. Iran has no weapons-grade uranium 235 and no plutonium. Even the US intelligence services and Israel's Mossad leaders, past and present, have said that Iran has no nuclear weapons program underway.
If the existence in a country of scientists capable of making a bomb were a cause for going to war, the US would have to be attacking Saudi Arabia, Egypt, South Africa, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brazil, Argentina, Canada, all the countries of Eastern Europe and all the former Soviet states now referred to as "the Stans" in central Asia, as well as a host of others whose students have performed admirably as engineers and physics majors in US and European universities. Any of these countries could work out the science and engineering issues needed to design and build a bomb, and if they didn't have nuclear reactors that could churn out the necessary fissile material (most do), they could buy it on the black market.
So, for that matter, could Iran, if its leaders wanted The Bomb. How hard would it have been for Iran to buy a nuke surreptitiously or three from ally and fellow Muslim state Pakistan, which has a bunch of them, or from financially strapped North Korea, or just to buy the ingredients for a bomb from them? But Iran has not done this, and despite years of unprovoked Israeli threats to send bombers to attack Iran, a fairly impressive and vicious cloak-and-dagger Mossad campaign to assassinate Iranian nuclear scientists, a US/Israeli-orchestrated cyber attack called Stuxnet, that destroyed most of Iran's nuclear centrifuges and supercomputers, and covert US support of terrorist actions inside Iran, Iran's leaders have not reconsidered their decision back in 2003, a full 12 years ago, to halt the country's research on developing a nuclear bomb, which Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has declared to be a "sin" under Islam.
Anyone who is convinced Iran plans to build a bomb and create Mideast mayhem by using it should ask themselves how that would benefit Iran. The country has been battered by sanctions and an oil embargo that have hampered all of its efforts to grow its economy and to improve the lives of the Iranian people. Iran also experienced firsthand the horrors of war in the prolonged and horrific struggle it had against Iraq's Saddam Hussein (who had US backing). Even if there are people who occasionally still shout "death to America" at demonstrations in Tehran, it would be hard to find someone in that country who would want a war with the US, or with Israel either for that matter -- a country that has at its disposal some 400 nuclear weapons (and which, unlike Iran, has never signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, does not allow international inspectors on its territory, and most importantly, has never ruled out using nukes first or against a country that has no nukes).
Iran, if it were nuts enough to go ahead and build a bomb, would never be nuts enough to use it against Israel, which would be certain to respond all out by incinerating Iran.
So what the heck is Obama talking about? The choice is not a nuclear agreement with Iran or a war with Iran! The choice is a nuclear agreement, reached between the US and six other countries on the one side and Iran on the other, under which Iran agrees to take no steps towards developing a nuclear weapons capability for at least 10 years and, in return, has the sanctions and embargo on oil sales lifted, or there is no agreement. The negotiators will have to return to the table at some point, only this time with a pissed-off Iran angry at having been betrayed by a double-crossing US.
It's a choice between a good deal and a future worse deal.
Why worse? Because if the pathetic US Congress, buckling under pressure from the Israel lobby, kills this agreement, it is highly unlikely that the other countries party to the negotiations, the so-called P5+1 (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, China, Britain, France, Russia, and the US, plus Germany), would go back to supporting tough sanctions on Iran if the US backed out of the agreement. And if Russia, China, and any of the European members of the group back out of sanctions, that would only strengthen Iran's hand in the next go-round at a deal.
Certainly, Obama knows this is the real alternative. He has even said so. But he is also making the "deal or war" threat. The disgusting thing about that is that he can even take it seriously.
It is taken seriously, though, because that is the Cro-Magnon level of thought of the average American and of the craven politicians -- like Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) -- who take the poison shekels of the pro-Israel lobby.
The danger is that this kind of "thinking," if it can be called that, could be self-fulfilling, leading to mass murder in Iran and to even more chaos in the Middle East than we already are seeing.
There was a time when the world ran on oil, and controlling the main source of oil -- the Middle East -- might have at least made some kind of sick sense, but that time is or will soon be over. As it becomes increasingly clear that the world will have to move away from carbon-based fuels and fast, with predictions of sea-level rise of 10-15 feet happening by 2050 if we don't, oil and other climate change-causing fuels will soon be on the way out. If so, fairly soon, the Middle East will be a backwater, with demand for its blood-soaked petrochemicals and the price people will pay for them sinking. (If that doesn't happen, all the earth's coastlines will be sinking, making this whole issue moot!)
Instead of casually raising the specter of yet another war in the Middle East as Obama is doing in his confusing and increasingly desperate campaign to win support for the negotiated agreement with Iran, he should stick to talking about how it's the best deal the US is going to get. And once he gets that agreement with Iran approved, if he manages to do it, and has let Israel know in no uncertain terms that if it tries anything unilaterally against Iran, he should move on and start seriously tackling climate change.
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