When I began subscribing to Lies of Our Times in 1990, I did not know who Ed Herman was. I had only heard of Noam Chomsky for the first time the year before. But I began learning fast at their scholarly feet. As with Howard Zinn, they all focused on the USA, because they were Americans. I soon began accumulating Chomsky’s and Herman’s books, and I learned early on that they also took Israel to task. Herman called Israel a terrorist state. Herman believed that he had been blackballed from the editorial pages of the Philadelphia Inquirer because of his published observations about Israel.
What I noticed, in general, was that Chomsky called Israel a strategic asset of the USA. Here is one of his last interviews on the subject and how that dynamic has been changing, and here are his views in 1992, in which he called the USA/Israeli relationship a marriage of convenience, as long as American interests were served. Here are his 2021 views. Noam was always worth reading on these issues, and his passing will be the end of an era.
Herman stated that Israel was the tail that wagged the American dog at times. Ed mentored Diana Johnstone, and she also wrote that Israel was much more than an American pawn. Sam Husseini, whose father was Palestinian (and driven from his home in 1948, along with hundreds of thousands of other Palestinians), has been writing nearly non-stop for the past year about the genocide in Gaza. Sam challenges dominant narratives about Israel and Middle-East dynamics.
Those authors expressed views that rarely appear in the American mainstream media. Any discussion of Israel and the USA that ignores views such as theirs will be nonsensical, if not an exercise in propaganda. The people who founded Israel worked closely with the Third Reich and even proposed that the Nazis could create a racist empire in Europe and they would create a racist empire in the Middle East. That idea has manifested in the concept of a “Greater Israel.” What is called Zionism today was originally a revival of the Biblical “Promised Land” and “Chosen People” ideology, which was a marginal effort among the world’s Jews before World War II. Israel would not exist if not for the Jewish Holocaust.
Israel is only the latest example of settler colonialism, similar to the Anglo-American “settling” of temperate North America under “Manifest Destiny.” Hitler’s Lebensraum policy and plans for Eastern Europe were directly influenced by the Anglo-American experience in North America. Wiping out societies and taking their land goes back to chimps.
As I have noted, I have been in the middle of the “Israel did it” hypothesis of JFK’s murder for a generation. I recently reviewed the latest book that I am aware of on that issue. Israel was definitely a beneficiary of JFK’s murder, as Lyndon Johnson almost immediately reversed JFK’s Israel policies, among many of JFK’s policies that Johnson reversed.
Sam has been discussing the issue lately, and noted that it was only recently that he learned what JFK’s policies toward Israel were, especially JFK’s attempt to stop Israel’s nuclear weapons program and to bring the Israeli lobby to heel in the USA. Mickey Cohen was a common denominator between JFK’s murder and Israel, with his close relationships to Jack Ruby and Menachem Begin. Sam is correct that the possible Israel connection to JFK’s murder has been largely ignored in the USA. Well, all scenarios other than “Oswald did it” have been largely ignored in the USA, at least in the mainstream media and officialdom.
That recent “Israel did it” book was poorly done, in my opinion, but the issue is worthy of investigation and discussion. My stance is that if Israel was involved, it was more muscle than mastermind. I think that the JFK hit was initiated by the MIC and Eastern Oligarchy, who wanted JFK dead, and they had the wherewithal to cover it up. There are many JFK-hit theories out there and the proponents of them marshal their evidence. I think that the two operations – the fake assassination attempt and the real one – have served to muddy all theories that do not take that issue into account.
E. Howard Hunt, who ran the operation that got JFK killed, told the original Watergate attorney that JFK was killed over the ET issue, which makes strange sense to me. My guess is that it was related to JFK’s planned joint mission to the Moon with the Soviet Union, which was related to his attempts to end the Cold War. NASA expected that it might encounter ETs on the Moon, and the Apollo 11 astronauts may well have. I don’t see what Israel has to do with that likely scenario. The CIA had very strange bedfellows, from James Angleton’s love affair with Mossad to his boss’s protection and hiring of Nazis, so all sorts of bizarre scenarios can involve the CIA, and many could be true. For me, it is enough to know that Oswald did not do it and that the cover-up announced to all subsequent presidential aspirants that they were expendable imperial puppets. To me, that is the greatest lesson of the JFK hit.
But any discussion of Middle East activities has to start and end with the fact that in that region is history’s greatest material prize. Winston Churchill converted the British Navy from coal to oil in 1911, oil politics has dominated the region ever since, and everything else is ancillary. If that part of the world was not sitting on most of the world’s remaining easy oil, very little of what we see today there would be happening. The British and French carved the region into controllable oil states after World War I. The USA overthrew Iran’s government on behalf of oil companies, the catastrophic invasion of Iraq had the virtue of privatizing its oil, and Libya had Africa’s highest standard of living before the American-led overthrow of its government and the murder of Gaddafi.
As my longtime readers know, I see only one permanent solution to the Israel issue and nearly all of this world’s woes: the arrival of the Fifth Epoch on the back of free energy. The world as we know it will end, and among the first things to go will be nations. Fighting over land and resources will go into the dustbin of the bloody human journey, and it cannot come too soon.
I have been writing about Israel publicly since 1998, and I could write a great deal more about it, but that ends my discussion for now of my complex relationship to the Israel issue, especially regarding the USA’s involvement. It is an odd and often horrific topic.