The Fertile Crescent - The Cradle of civilisation

Was Israel ever legitimate?

By Jeff Gates

6 April 2010

Jeff Gates views the fraud that underpins Israel’s claim to “legitimacy” and argues that the perpetuation of the myth of Israel’s legitimacy constitutes a real and present danger to United States national security and wellbeing.

The history of Israel as a geopolitical fraud will fill entire libraries as those defrauded marvel at how so few deceived so many for so long. Those duped include many naive Jews who – even now – identify their interests with this extremist enclave.

Israeli leaders are wrong to worry about “delegitimization”. They are right to fear that a long-deceived public is fast realizing that Israel’s founding was key to an ongoing deception.

The Invention of the Jewish People did not begin with Shlomo Sand’s 2009 bestseller by that title. There was no Exile, says this Jewish scholar. Nor was there an Exodus. So how could there be a Return, the core premise of Israeli statehood?

If this patch of Palestinian land never rightly belonged to a mythical Jewish people, what then for the legitimacy of the “Jewish homeland”. And for that depiction by British Foreign Secretary Alfred Balfour in his November 1917 letter to Lord Rothschild?

Were Christians likewise seduced by Sunday school teachings reliant on the phony findings of Biblical archeologist William Albright? Shlomo Sand chronicles how in the 1920s Albright interpreted every excavation in Palestine to "reaffirm the Old Testament and thereby the New”.

In 1948, President Harry Truman, a Christian Zionist, was advised by Secretary of State George Marshall not to recognize this enclave as a state. This World War II general assured Truman that he would vote against him – and did.

That military tradition resurfaced in January 2010 when the head of the US Central Command (CENTCOM), General David Petraeus, dispatched a team to brief Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the perils that Israel still poses to US national security. Mullen was reportedly shocked. (To see “The Petraeus Briefing”, click here.)

He should not have been surprised. Such insights are hardly new. More than six decades ago the Joint Chiefs of Staff cautioned Truman about the “fanatical concepts of the Jewish leaders” and their plans for “Jewish military and economic hegemony over the entire Middle East”.

In December 1948, Albert Einstein and 27 prominent Jews urged us “not to support this latest manifestation of fascism”. They warned that a “Leader State” was the goal of the “terrorist party” that has governed Israel over all but a handful of the past 62 years.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff foresaw the “Zionist strategy will seek to involve [the US] in a continuously widening and deepening series of operations intended to secure maximum Jewish objectives”.
Soon after Truman recognized Israel, his presidential campaign train was “refuelled” by Zionist Jews with 400,000 dollars in contributions (the equivalent of 3.6 million dollars in 2010). Soon thereafter, Israel betrayed the US by allying with the British and the French to invade Egypt.

Though London and Paris soon abandoned the operation, months more were required to dissuade Tel Aviv from pursuing their expansionist agenda then – as now – for Greater Israel.

Outraged by Israeli duplicity, President Dwight Eisenhower sought help to rein them in. He soon found that even then (as now) the Israel lobby dominated Congress. Thus, the former Supreme Allied Commander appeared on television with an appeal directly to the American people. Then – unlike now – a US commander-in-chief threatened to reduce assistance to Israel.

To revamp Israel’s tattered image, New York public relations expert Edward Gottlieb retained novelist Leon Uris to write Exodus. Jewish Zionists have routinely proven themselves skilled storytellers and masterful mythmakers.

This 1958 bestseller was translated into dozens of languages and quickly made into a movie for the 1960 Christmas season starring Paul Newman and featuring Peter Lawford, brother-in-law of the just-elected President John F. Kennedy. See: “Time for an American Intifada?”

The myth of a loyal ally

Phil Tourney survived the 8 June 1967 Israeli attack on the USS Liberty that left 34 Americans dead and 175 wounded. The region-wide dynamics accompanying that provocative Six-Day land grab guaranteed the conflicts that remain so perilous to US national security.

It was during this Israeli operation that Tourney gave a one-fingered salute to armed Israeli troops as they hovered in helicopters over the USS Liberty while preparing to rappel to the deck and, he surmises, kill the survivors and sink the ship.

Just then the captain aboard a nearby US carrier scrambled jets to assist a vessel under attack by an “ally”. When Israeli intelligence intercepted the transmission, the helicopters fled only to have President Lyndon Johnson and Defence Secretary Robert McNamara recall our fighters.

Soon thereafter, Israeli torpedo boats pulled alongside the USS Liberty to inquire if those aboard needed assistance. Those same boats had just blown a hole in the hull, killing 25 Americans. Israeli machine-gunners had then strafed stretcher-bearers, firemen, life rafts and even the fire hoses – all clear war crimes. Only then did his ally display the chutzpah to ask if our servicemen required assistance.

Had that notorious land grab failed to advance the narrative of Israel as the victim, what might be the condition of US national security today? Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu recently conceded the duplicity that continues to typify this “special relationship”.

As he confessed: "Our policy on Jerusalem is the same policy followed by all Israeli governments for 42 years, and it has not changed. As far as we are concerned, building in Jerusalem is the same as building in Tel Aviv."

In other words, the 1967 war was neither defensive nor preemptive but an outright taking of land that, one year later, Tel Aviv acknowledged as precisely what concerned the Pentagon 62 years ago.

In effect, Netanyahu confirmed that this relationship reflects multi-decade premeditation. The US has since discredited itself by protecting this “ally” from the rule of law for its taking and brutal occupation of land that rightly belongs to others.

Even now, few know that Mathilde Krim, a former Irgun operative, was “servicing” our commander-in-chief in the White House the night the 1967 war began. Her husband, Arthur, then chaired the finance committee for the Democratic National Committee.

Even now, few Americans know the role in that cover-up played by Admiral John McCain, Jr. Or the role still played in this sordid history by his son, Republican Senator John McCain III. See “McCain Family Secret: The Cover-up”.

Are those who champion this “state” the same belief-makers responsible for the myth of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction? Iraqi meetings in Prague? Iraqi mobile biological weapons laboratories? High-level Iraqi contacts with Al Qaeda? Iraqi yellowcake uranium from Niger?

Was any of that intelligence legitimate? Whose interests were served by deceiving the US to wage war in the Middle East? By the Suez Crisis? By the Six-Day War? By covering up the attack on the USS Liberty?

Adhering to an enemy?

How are US interests served by treating Israel as a legitimate state? When was Israeli behaviour anything other than duplicitous? At what point do we concede the common source of the storylines foisted on an imperilled global public?

Who created the narrative that saw us segue seamlessly from a global Cold War to a global War on Terror? Remember the promise of a post-Cold War “peace dividend”? Who induced the US to wage a war whose costs could total 3 trillion dollars, including 700 billion dollars in interest?

Why is debt always the prize? At the end of World War II, the US was home to 50 per cent of the world’s productive power. Were we induced to hollow out our economy by the same consensus-shapers that induced us to wage war in the Middle East?

Do these devastating dynamics trace to a common source?

Who benefits from the “Islamo” fascist narrative? Whose storyline – really – is The Clash of Civilizations? Who has long spied on the US and routinely transferred to other nations our most sensitive defence technologies?

Who had the means, motive, opportunity and, importantly, the stable national state intelligence required to perpetrate such a debilitating fraud from inside the US government? And from inside other governments that joined the “coalition of the willing”?

If not Israel and its supporters – who? In effect, are those now advocating an “unbreakable bond” with Israel giving aid and comfort to an enemy within?

Israel is right to worry. It was never legitimate. As both an enabler and a target of this fraud, the US has an obligation to concede its source – and to secure the weapons of mass destruction now under the control of this enclave.

Jeff Gates is a widely acclaimed author, attorney, investment banker, educator and consultant to government, corporate and union leaders. His latest book is Guilt By Association – How Deception and Self-Deceit Took America to War (2008), his first release in the Criminal State series. His previous books include Democracy at Risk: Rescuing Main Street From Wall Street, and The Ownership Solution: Toward a Shared Capitalism for the 21st Century. For two decades, an adviser to policy-makers worldwide.