The Zionist Party in the USA

A rather brief, albeit synthetic, new article has been published by US sociologist James Petras, describing the reality of the Zionist Lobby or, as he prefers to call it, the Zionist Power Configuration (ZPC) in the USA. A must-read.

James Petras, The State and Local Bases of Zionist Power in America (PDF).

The ZPC, a true political party on its own right, even if it works within both mainstream US electoral machines, can hence be divided in two sections: the government section (presence of key operatives in strategic positions in the government) and the mass movement section (the activities of local Zionist organizations affiliated with mainstream Jewish organizations and religious orders).

They are organized into 52 organizations, associated in the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations (CoP or Presidents' Conference for short), an institution promoted by Eisenhower in the 1950s.

The grassroots membership ranges from several hundred thousand militants in the Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA) to one hundred thousand wealthy contributors, activists and power brokers in the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

AIPAC, the most visible and impressive face of the Zionist Party, is special in the sense that, as we learn from Wikipedia, its board of directors is the same as that of the CoP, so there is no real distinction between both.

In addition scores of propaganda mills, dubbed think tanks, have been established by million dollar grants from billionaire Zionists including the Brookings Institute (Haim Saban) and the Hudson Institute among others. Scores of Zionist funded political action committees (PAC) have intervened in all national and regional elections, controlling nominations and influencing election outcomes. Publishing houses, including university presses have been literally taken over by Zionist zealots, the most egregious example being Yale University, which publishes the most unbalanced tracts parroting Zionist parodies of Jewish history (Financial Times book review section August 28/29 2010). (...) Jewish billionaires and the Israeli state foot the bill.

The activities of the mass movement section are impressive: from recruiting and indoctrinating young Jewish students, favoring selected sympathizers in ethnic minorities... to directly influencing US foreign (and maybe domestic) policy in favor of a foreign power (Israel) by means of the most powerful lobby in Washington D.C. (and every other seat of power).

Petras' dissension with Chomsky goes open:

Those who deny Zionist power over US Mid East foreign policy are left-Zionists namely Noam Chomsky and his acolytes.

I must say that I became really aware of the oppression of Palestine and, crucially, of how the media impacts our perceptions of the world by means of selectively highlighting or hiding information and by means also of the choice of words, by a booklet of Chomsky more than 20 years ago. However, it is very true that Chomsky does not want to fully accept the criminal (colonialist, genocidal, imperialist) nature of the state of Israel nor he admits to the importance of the Zionist Party in the political and media reality, specially in the USA.

Back to the main theme:

Zionist policymakers in strategic positions depend on the political backing and work closely with their counterparts in the “lobbies” (AIPAC) in Congress and in the national and local Jewish Zionist organizations. Many of the leading Zionist policymakers rose to power through a deliberate strategy of infiltrating the government to shape policy promoting Israel’s interest over and above the interests of the US populace.

This is critical to understand. Indeed all lobbies have to some extent this potential and now and then do exert it successfully but the influence of the Zionist Lobby can only be said to be all pervading. Not just Jews (most of them Zionist) are disproportionately represented in all sectors of power but most non-Jews in such positions are also Zionists and may have needed the blessing of the ZPC to reach such offices.

Additionally foreign relations of a sovereign country, specially if this country is the only global superpower, are supposed to take place essentially through diplomatic channels and not via internal lobbies/parties/networks. Sure that there is room for the cultural and even political recognition of minorities within a state's border but these are not supposed to significantly influence foreign policy, which is first of all, the external projection of the country's own interests. In fact, it is technically illegal to act as an agent of a foreign power in the USA as the Israel Party does.

Not that such a technical legal issue means much, it seems.

Interestingly:

In 2004, AIPAC successfully pressured the Bush Administration to create the office of Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence (UTFI) and to name its protégé Princeton graduate Stuart Levey to that position. Before, but especially after his appointment, Levey was in close collaboration with the Israeli state and was known as an over the top Zionist zealot with unbounded energy and blind worship of the Israeli state.

I had not heard this name before, I will try to remember it.

But, as said above, it's not just Washington what matters. The Zionist Party could not achieve its goals without a much wider network of strategical control and pressure.

Other active divisions of the ZPC mentioned are active at all local and intermediate levels. A key sector is of course the media, full of Zionist propaganda, Zionist investors, Zionist CEOs and Zionist journalists.

The level of infiltration the Senate subpoenaed Zionist documents in the 1960’s reveal has multiplied a hundred fold over the past 50 years in terms of financing, paid functionaries and committed militants and above all in structural power and coercive capability.

They have whole networks of committed activists sending mails and writing opinions for all levels of media influence and policymaking, they organize Zionist speeches with no second opinions and make all they can to impede anti-Zionist acts or impose a Zionist counterpart.

Local militant Zionist is very strong and powerful:

Local Zionist functionaries form rapid response committees to visit and threaten any local publisher and editorial staff publishing editorials or articles questioning the Israeli party line. Local leaders police (“monitor”) all local meetings, speaker invitations, as well as the speeches of public commentators, religious leaders and academics to detect any “anti-Zionist overtones’ (which they label “covert anti-Semitism”).

From the Conclusions section:

The power of Israel in the US does not reside only in the influence and leadership of powerful Washington based “pro-Israel lobbies”, like AIPAC. Without the hundreds of thousands of militant locally based dentists, podiatrists, stockbrokers, real estate brokers, professors and others, the “lobby” would be unable to sustain and implement its policy among hundreds of millions of Americans outside the major metropolises. As we have seen from the Senate declassified documents, over a half-century ago, local Zionist organizations began a systematic campaign of penetration, control and intimidation that has reached its pinnacle in the first decade of the 21st century.

...

Over the decades, the distinction between Zionist power exercised by a “lobby” outside the government and operatives “inside” the government has virtually vanished.

However Petras warns that this growing power relies on shaky grounds, as most US Jews now marry outside the ethnic community and are therefore less likely to support the colonial state of Israel and its continuous policy of ethnic cleansing and apartheid, specially not fanatically and acritically. For that reason they are more and more aggressive in recruiting anyone with Jewish ancestry or relations but they have also colluded with the US extreme right, as has become very apparent in the "Ground Zero Mosque" controversy.

In this sense I must say that they are actually inciting a new form of Antisemitism: the so-called Islamophobia.

A Spanish version of Petras' article is available at La Haine, site that also hosts his repository of articles in both English and Spanish languages.