Lebanese unity government collapses
Press TV – January 12, 2011
A Lebanese government cabinet meeting
Lebanon’s unity government has collapsed after 11 ministers led by Hezbollah and its allies resigned over tensions stemming from a US-backed probe into the assassination of former premier Rafiq Hariri.
Energy Minister Jibran Bassil told a news conference on Wednesday that Hezbollah ministers and their allies have resigned from the Cabinet.
Hezbollah made the decision after its demands on Tuesday for an urgent cabinet session over the tribunal’s crisis was rejected.
“If the cabinet fails to meet, it means there is no government and as such 11 ministers will tender their resignations this afternoon,” Health Minister Mohamad Jawad Khalifeh, whose Amal party is allied with Hezbollah, warned earlier on Wednesday.
The resignations came as Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri is in the US for a meeting with US President Barack Obama.
Former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri and 20 other people were assassinated on February 14, 2005, when explosives equal to around 1,000 kilogram of TNT were blown up in downtown Beirut.
The Washington-sponsored Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) was set up some two years later to look into the deadly incident.
Reports say that the court would likely issue an indictment against some Hezbollah members.
Hezbollah Secretary General Seyyed Hassan Nasrallah has vehemently rebuffed the allegations. He has described the tribunal as part of dangerous projects that are targeting the resistance movement.
‘Iran oil exports to India unaffected’
Press TV – January 5, 2011
India’s Petroleum and Natural Gas Ministry says Iran’s oil exports to the country will not be affected as alternative payment routes have been put in place.
“There has been no disruption in supply since [Reserve Bank of India] RBI issued new payment guidelines. A cargo for delivery on January 8 and 9 is currently being loaded in Iran and we have no problems sourcing crude from Iran,” India Today quoted India’s Petroleum Secretary S. Sundareshan as saying on Tuesday.
He also said that the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) is willing to accept payments from Indian oil firms through the Europaisch-Iranische Handelsbank (EIH Bank) in Hamburg, Germany.
Oil companies working with Iran like Hindustan Petroleum Corp Ltd (HPCL) and Mangalore Refinery and Petrochemicals Ltd (MRPL) will make payments to NIOC’s EIH Bank account in Hamburg via the State Bank of India (SBI).
According to Sundareshan, the two central banks will meet in Tehran from January 14 to 16 to find a permanent solution to the matter.
Part of the meeting will involve choosing a payment currency, such as the Iranian Rial, Dirham and Yen, which are not susceptible to US pressure.
The problem arose when the Indian Central Bank said import payments to Iran would have to be settled outside the existing Asian Clearing Union (ACU) mechanism.
Under the ACU mechanism, every two months imports by the nine member-nations are settled by every member paying for its import surplus.
‘Charlie Rose’ transcript saves Hoenlein from on-air allegation he served as Netanyahu’s emissary
By Philip Weiss on January 4, 2011
Watch this Charlie Rose episode from last night to hear Rashid Khalidi soberly explain reality: Palestinians were promised a state 63 years ago and the check is still in the mail; and meantime, there is only one sovereign political entity between the river and the sea and it is or will be majority Palestinian but ruled by Jews. Palestinian statehood without the ability to keep Israeli soldiers from entering any one’s home in the West Bank whenever they like is meaningless. Ramallah is an “excrescence” on Palestine, it is a bubble of prestige and sink of international dollars where, yes, you can get a cappucino for $12.
Also watch it to see
Aluf Benn of Haaretz say at 11:00 or so that rumor has it that Malcolm Hoenlein of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Orgs went to Syria at the behest of Netanyahu to negotiate with the Syrians… Hoenlein has admitted going to Syria and meeting President Assad but said that it was not at the behest of Netanyahu, a humanitarian mission. I imagine there could be an issue of needing to register the Conference of Presidents under the Foreign Agents Registration Act?
Then read the official transcript at Charlie Rose, the name Malcolm Hoenlein does not appear in the transcript, though it’s in the interview. Nor the name Ron Lauder. Despite my headline, I don’t know if there’s a rat here. These transcripts are not all that great. Note that the transcriber dropped some other language later in the answer, of a trivial character. Transcript, with dropped words in [BRACKETS]:
CHARLIE ROSE: My understanding and my impression is notwithstanding everything you just said that very recently there’s been some suggestion that they’re prepared to do [Turkey is prepared to play intermediary role between Israel and Syria]–
ALUF BENN: They’re always prepared to do it. Israel is not so happy about that, but, again, unless there’s something secret going on that we don’t know about, Prime Minister Netanyahu to this day has not shown signs of taking the Syrian threat seriously. Every other week there’s a story about a messenger. Only tonight [IT WAS PUBLISHED THAT MALCOLM HOENLEIN] one of the American Jewish leaders went to Damascus and met Syrian officials and obviously the rumor is that he was sent by Netanyahu in a similar way to — an [THAT RONALD LAUDER, ANOTHER] American Jewish leader[,] mediated 12 years ago. But it takes time to see these things are serious. But there is strong voice, especially among the Israeli security establishment which says the [BEST WAY AND THE SHORTEST WAY AND] surest way around Israel’s strategic problems is making peace with Syria.
Goldberg’s next war sure sounds a lot like his last one
By Philip Weiss on January 3, 2011
Four months back, Jeffrey Goldberg published a long piece in the Atlantic called “The Point of No Return,” making the Israeli case for the United States to attack Iran in Never-again terms: Iran is threatening the existence of “the Jewish people,” Israel is bound to act if the U.S. fails to, the U.S. will do a better job. The piece has stirred a lot of discussion. Goldberg has gone on national media and panels at thinktanks to promote these bellicose ideas.
But no one has pointed out that the piece makes the same argument Goldberg marshaled eight years ago for the U.S. to attack Iraq, that time with an article in the New Yorker magazine under the headline, “The Great Terror.” Iraq too was bent on the destruction of the Jewish people, and was developing a nuclear weapon to do so.
The language in the pieces is eerily similar. The last time the concentration camp Goldberg invoked was Bergen-Belsen. This time around it’s Auschwitz.
Both times the enemy is “three years” away from going nuclear. Last time:
He [August Hanning of German intelligence agency] does not equivocate. “It is our estimate that Iraq will have an atomic bomb in three years,” he said.
This time:
Iran is, at most, one to three years away from having a breakout nuclear capability (often understood to be the capacity to assemble more than one missile-ready nuclear device within about three months of deciding to do so).
The last time round Goldberg was flat wrong.
“The Great Terror” stated that Saddam had links to Al Qaeda, and the article was cited by both Bush and Cheney as proof of the threat posed by Iraq (Muhammad Idrees Ahmad has told me). As it turned out, Saddam Hussein didn’t possess weapons of mass destruction and didn’t attack Israel and wasn’t making a nuclear warhead or an aflatoxin/chemical/biological one and wasn’t importing canisters of mysterious nerve gases, as Goldberg had affirmed. But meantime, the U.S. was at war with Iraq, in some measure because of the bad ideas that Goldberg proliferated, and we and the Iraqis and its neighbors are still suffering the consequences.
This time around, the question is, Why is anyone listening to Goldberg? Why are prestige news organizations giving him the microphone?
But let’s compare similarities in the casus belli pieces.
In both cases, Goldberg turned Koran scholar to support his views. Last time, Saddam’s rage against the Kurds was based in part on
a chapter in the Koran that allows conquering Muslim armies to seize the spoils of their foes. It reads, in part, ‘Against them’—your enemies—‘make ready your strength to the utmost of your power, including steeds of war, to strike terror into the hearts of the enemies of Allah…’
Now Iran is the problem, Goldberg writes that “the depth of official Iranian hatred of Israel and Jews” can only be explained by looking to
a line of Shia Muslim thinking that views Jews as ritually contaminated, a view derived in part from the Koran’s portrayal of Jews as treasonous foes of the Prophet Muhammad.
In both cases, Goldberg alarms readers with Holocaust-tinged fears that a Muslim country is planning to wipe Jews out.
[T]he experts say, Saddam’s desire is to expel the Jews from history
That was last time. And this time—
[A] nuclear Iran poses the gravest threat since Hitler to the physical survival of the Jewish people.
The last time Saddam was the first leader since “the Holocaust” to use poison gas to “exterminate” women and children, and Goldberg cited an expert on Iraq with Holocaust fears.
as a child she lived in Germany, near Bergen-Belsen. “It’s tremendously influential in your early years to live near a concentration camp,” she said. In Kurdistan, she heard echoes of the German campaign to destroy the Jews.
This time around it’s the Shoah, and the camp is different, but the lesson of destruction is the same:
Many Israelis think the Iranians are building Auschwitz… “Iran represents a threat like the Shoah,” an Israeli official who spends considerable time with the prime minister told me….
“In World War II, the Jews had no power to stop Hitler from annihilating us. Six million were slaughtered. Today, 6 million Jews live in Israel, and someone is threatening them with annihilation.“
All the talk of annihilation from Israelis. In fact, Israeli journalist Noam Sheizaf has shown here, Goldberg echoed the hysteria of one element of Israeli society to justify the idea of the U.S. going on another Middle East joyride so as to forestall the Israelis from doing so.
The views of Israeli generals and senior officials in the Defense Department on Iran are of great interest, but they should be put in the right context. There are many in Israel who don’t see Iran as an existential threat, or, more precisely, they don’t see it as a different threat than those Israel faced in the past. There are even more who think that the risk in attacking Iran is far greater then the possible benefits. Israeli Generals have a tendency for creating mass hysteria.
The seamless stoking of hysteria is the most obvious impression one gets from reading Goldberg’s two casus belli pieces in sequence: Goldberg’s paranoia exists out of time; the very same themes and lines about the destruction of Jews appear several years apart, shifted from one enemy to the other (much as the State Department 60 years ago was the anti-Semitic enemy in his book Prisoners…).
Why is Goldberg still taken so seriously? The answer has to do with the strength of the Israel lobby inside the American establishment. That is how a former Israeli soldier–Goldberg immigrated to Israel in the 80s then came back a few years later– hops from one prestige magazine to another.
Indeed, Goldberg’s core concern, which also extends seamlessly eight years from the first piece to the second one, from Iraq to Iran– is not the fear of destruction, but of Israel losing hegemonic power in the Middle East. I have held out the two most similar and important phrases in the pieces for last, the phrases that reflect this root concern:
[T]here is no disagreement that Iraq, if unchecked, will have them [nukes] soon, and a nuclear-armed Iraq would alter forever the balance of power in the Middle East”
Goldberg warned the last time. And this time:
The challenges posed by a nuclear Iran are more subtle than a direct attack, Netanyahu told me….“You’d create a great sea change in the balance of power in our area”.
Does America want to go to war to preserve Israel’s power edge in the Middle East?
How Zionist lobby shapes UK politics
Press TV – December 31, 2010
The wealthy Jewish lobby in Britain working under the title of the Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI) has been tipped as the Conservative Party’s paymaster.
The CFI as described by British political analysts is beyond doubt the most well- connected and probably the best funded of all Westminster lobbying groups. It works in support of the interests of the Israeli regime.
The CFI’s finances may be legal but they are hardly transparent as the lobbying group is an unincorporated association. This is how the British media report on the CFI’s financial transactions.
The register of MPs’ interests shows that CFI board members and their businesses gave the Conservatives over 2 million pounds in the last 8 years.
The reports also say more than 30,000 pounds from CFI members went to campaign funds of the members of Prime Minister David Cameron’s team when he was first elected as the party leader in 2005.
Also in 2005, Cameron himself had received 15,000 pounds from a pro-Israeli lobby facilitator. The facilitator had also donated 50,000 pounds to the Conservative Central Office.
“Donations from all CFI members and their businesses to the Conservative Party of Britain have topped over 10 million pounds over the past 8 years”, according to reliable sources inside the UK.
Here’s an example of how the pro-Israeli lobby works in the UK.
After the 22-day Israeli war on the Gaza Strip a fact-finding team was appointed to conduct an inquiry into the war and identify the culprits.
A few weeks after the UN was to vote on a resolution following judge Goldstone’s report which condemned Israel for abusing human rights in Gaza, the CFI ran to now foreign secretary William Hague’s office and after consulting with them David Cameron gave them this quote:
“Unless the draft resolution is redrafted to reflect the role that Hamas played in starting the conflict we would recommend that the British government vote to reject the resolution”.
But, it was under former Prime Minister Tony Blair that the Israel lobby first acquired real influence in government.
Former chairman of the Labour friends of Israel John Mandelson boasted:
“Zionism is pervasive in new Labour, it’s automatic that Blair will come to Labour friends of Israel’s meetings”.
Shortly before Blair became Labour party leader in 1994 he met Michael Levy the pop music millionaire at a social event arranged by the Israeli embassy. They became friends, played tennis and Levy became Blair’s fundraiser. It’s estimated that he raised almost 15 million pounds for Labour before the row over cash for peerages.
When Tony Blair became prime minister in 1997, he awarded Michael Levy a life peerage and made him his special envoy to the Middle East, but because Levy was unpaid and working directly with the prime minister, what he negotiated between the Israeli entity and Arabs on behalf of Britain was kept secret.
NATO sees no end to Afghan war
Press TV – December 27, 2010
A spokesman for the US-led military alliance says the war in Afghanistan will escalate in 2011 as militants step up their attacks against the foreign forces in the country.
NATO spokesman Brigadier General Joseph Blotz says there is no end to the war and NATO needs to keep pressure on the Taliban all over Afghanistan.
“There is no end to the fighting season; we need to keep pressure on the Taliban all over the country.”
The remarks come as war has taken the lives of over 705 US-led foreign troops so far in 2010, making it the deadliest year for NATO since 2001.
This is while another NATO service member was killed on Monday. The Western military alliance says the soldier lost his life in a roadside blast in the south, without providing further details.
Southern Afghanistan has seen an escalation in violence this year.
A recent comparison of internal maps of the UN indicates “deterioration of the security situation” in Afghanistan despite the United States’ recent claim of progress in the Afghan war.
Fighting has recently spilled over into the previously peaceful regions in northern Afghanistan.
The Wall Street Journal compared two confidential “residual risk accessibility” maps and found that violence has worsened in northern and eastern provinces.
UN personnel use the maps to estimate the dangers of travel and running programs.
US President Barack Obama in his Afghan war strategy review claimed that the US-led forces had made progress in the war-battered country.
Obama had pledged a major drawdown from Afghanistan by July 2011. But Washington has confirmed that American troops will remain in war-ravaged Afghanistan for at least four more years.
The US military adventurism comes as the United Nations recently announced that Afghan civilian deaths had soared by over 30 percent in 2010 compared to the same period last year.
The UN says more than 2,400 civilians died in the crossfire across the country in the first 10 months of 2010.
The 2001 US-led invasion was launched with the objective of bringing peace and stability to Afghanistan. After nine years and despite the presence of over 150,000 foreign troops across Afghanistan, militancy is still high.
Israeli firms operating in Iraq
Press TV | December 24, 2010
The head of an Iraqi clerical association, Harith al-Dhari, says companies affiliated with the Israeli spy agency Mossad are freely operating all over Iraq.
Al-Dhari, the head of the Association of Muslim Scholars, says Israeli companies are particularly concentrated in the countries northern Kurdistan region.
“The companies are directly working with Zionist spy agencies,” said al-Dhari, Iraq’s most influential Sunni cleric and a prominent anti-American figure.
“Israeli companies infiltrating Iraq work under Arabic, English and Turkish names,” he added.
Reports say at least 70 Israeli firms operate in Iraq, using proxy Arab or European companies.
Earlier this year, Syrian customs officials seized several trucks loaded with Israeli goods heading to Iraq.
In 2008, Iraq’s Yaqen News Agency unveiled that more than 55 Israeli companies were working in Iraq under assumed names. The agency added that the Zionist firms operate in a variety of fields, including infrastructure and marketing. It also said that Israel exports more than $300 million in goods to Iraq annually.
The companies, the report said, won contracts for construction projects in Iraq, thanks to help “the US Agency for International Development that oversees the allocation of building contracts in Iraq.”
WIKILEAKS — WHOSE AGENDA?
By Jeff Gates | Intifada Palestine | December 19, 2010
Those tracking the agenda now advancing behind the WikiLeaks façade should check for the undisclosed bias among editors at the four newspapers chosen to select what was leaked. And when it was leaked.
The pro-Israeli bias of The New York Times needs no citations. In London, WikiLeaks releases are overseen by Deputy Editor Ian Katz at The Guardian. What about Le Monde in Paris and Der Spiegel in Berlin?
The tipping point for German media dates to 2003 when Haim Saban purchased ProSiebenSat1, Germany’s second largest media conglomerate. Why this particular acquisition? Because “Germany is critical to Israel” conceded Steve Rattner, Saban’s investment banker—now under indictment in New York for fraud.
Saban’s support was key to putting Angela Merkel in office in 2005. Thus Netanyahu’s comment on November 29th about Germany becoming Israel’s new ‘partner for peace’ in the Middle East—while Tel Aviv collapsed U.S.-sponsored peace talks.
On December 10th, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton chose the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution in Washington to announce the end of this latest charade of talks.
Saban has long been close to the Clintons. Ex-President Bill Clinton helped him sell advertising. Though Saban paid for the building now housing the Democratic National Committee, he is doubtless thrilled that Republican Congressman Eric Cantor, a Jewish-Zionist, will take the reins in January as House Majority Leader.
Both political parties are critical to Israel.
Entropy — Again
The collapse of peace talks marked the success of yet another Israeli entropy strategy. When negotiating with Zionists, the relevant question is always: What’s Next From Israel: Entropy or Outrage? Take your pick: perpetual delay or another well-timed provocation. Or both.
In 2007, Saban, a self-described Zionist, acquired control of Univision, the most popular U.S. media outlet for Latinos. As America’s fastest-growing voting bloc, their support is also critical to Israel. This latest acquisition confirms the systematic imbedding of pro-Israeli influence in opinion-shaping domains, including media, think tanks and politics.
Israel is waging war on the U.S. by way of deception. That strategy can only succeed if this war is waged in plain sight by its adept game theory war planners.
Tel Aviv’s agenda requires a critical mass of control over key “in between” domains — between “the mark” (that’s us) and the facts that We The People require for a system of governance reliant on our informed consent.
The modus operandi on display at every turn: displacement of facts with false beliefs.
Thus the role of media, think tanks and pro-Israeli policy-makers in selling Americans on consensus beliefs around Iraqi WMD, Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda, Iraqi meetings with Al Qaeda in Prague, Iraqi mobile biological weapons laboratories and Iraqi uranium from Niger. All were false yet all were widely believed.
The entirety of the phony intelligence that induced the U.S. to invade Iraq is traceable to Israeli or pro-Israeli sources. The invasion was marketed to a trusting American public by a mainstream media dominated by those sharing the same undisclosed bias.
In the Information Age, if that’s not treason, what is?
With Friends Like This….
When in human history were fabricated beliefs first deployed to deceive? At the heart of this ancient craft one finds proponents of the oldest of the three “religions of the book” promoting a “Clash” between its two derivatives: Christianity and Islam.
Displacement is the key to this mental and emotional manipulation. Within hours of WikiLeak’s November release of diplomatic cables, peace talks were displaced by renewed talk of war with Iran. WikiLeaks concedes it had those cables since May.
Barack Obama has no better grasp of this long-running treachery than George Bush, Bill Clinton, G.H.W. Bush, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy, Eisenhower, Truman, FDR, Coolidge, Harding or Wilson.
Only with clarity on the common source of this duplicity can a long-deceived global public ensure accountability for the many conflicts engineered by those skilled at pitting two sides against the middle while profiting off the misery of both.
By wielding their influence in key in-between domains, those complicit prey on the good faith of others. We Americans will remain unwitting players in a fabricated drama (The Clash of Civilizations) so long as we believe a narrative sustained in plain sight by those skilled at deception.
To betray, one must first befriend; to deceive, one must first create a relationship of trust. No one can persuade Americans to forfeit their freedom. We must be induced to freely embrace the forces that, step-by-step, displace our freedom. That’s called Zionism.
To restore the true self to self-governance requires that Americans recover enough self-confidence to follow facts wherever they may lead. And trust in themselves enough to act consistent with those facts — despite what those complicit would deceive them to believe.
Our freedom now depends on it.
Jeff Gates is author of Guilt By Association—How Deception and Self-Deceit Took America to War. See www.criminalstate.com
US House passes anti-Palestine bill
Unless the US Congress takes a tougher line on lobbyists, Israel will continue building settlements on Palestinian land.
MJ Rosenberg | Al-Jazeera | 16 Dec 2010
At last the United States is responding to Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s refusal to freeze settlements and re-start negotiations with the Palestinians.
Congressman Howard Berman (D-CA), chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, rushed to the House floor with a resolution drafted by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee [AIPAC] condemning the Palestinians for publicly suggesting that, in the wake of Netanyahu’s refusal to freeze settlements and negotiate, they will consider a unilateral declaration of statehood.
Congress passed the Berman bill, drafted only this week, on Wednesday. When it comes to pleasing AIPAC, there are simply no limits.
This remains true even though AIPAC is embroiled in an espionage/sex scandal that has it scrambling to find $20m to pay off a former top employee who is threatening to produce documents exposing the lobby.
Washington lobbying
The Berman bill passed overwhelmingly because that is how things work in a city where policy is driven by campaign contributions — and not just on this issue.
The only difference between how AIPAC lobbyists dictate US Middle East policy and pretty much every other major lobby is that AIPAC works to advance the interests of a foreign country.
In other words, comparisons to the National Rifle Association [NRA] would only be applicable if the gun owners that the NRA claims to represent lived in, say, Greece. Oh, and NRA-backed bills usually take longer than a day to get to the House floor.
And here you have the root of the problem. And it is not just an American problem. It is just as much an Israeli problem, a Palestinian problem, and an international problem.
There is only one reason that Israeli-Palestinian negotiations collapsed. It is the power of the “pro-Israel lobby” (led by AIPAC) which prevents the United States from saying publicly what it says privately: that resolution of a conflict which is so damaging to US interests is consistently being blocked by the intransigence of the Netanyahu government and its determination to maintain the occupation.
Unequal power
This is not a situation where responsibility attaches equally to both sides. The Israelis hold all of the disputed territories. Yes, the Palestinians have administrative control of some parts of the West Bank but its authority — and it is very small — derives from the Israelis.
Gaza is controlled by Hamas but it is a reservation or ghetto, not a free entity. Its borders are entirely blocked by the Israelis (and the Egyptians who do whatever Israel demands on their border with Gaza).
It remains under Israeli blockade, lightened only a bit since Prime Minister Netanyahu admitted that the blockade was not necessary for Israel’s security. And then there is Arab East Jerusalem, where the Netanyahu government has expanded efforts to push Palestinians out of their homes and replace them with settlers.
The Palestinians have no power at all although they have done everything that Israel and the United States demanded.
The Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) fully recognised Israel and pledged itself to fighting terrorism and resorting exclusively to negotiations to achieve a state. They agreed that their state would be limited to the 22 per cent of historic Palestine that is the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem — recognising that Israel would have the other 78 per cent.
Even Hamas, which still insists that Israel has no right to be there, says that if the Palestinian Authority negotiates a deal with Israel that is accepted by the Palestinian people, it too will join in and end its war with Israel.
And what has Israel offered in exchange for these historic concessions? Absolutely nothing.
Yes, it has played at negotiations.
Losing Palestine
Israel’s advocates argue that, at Camp David in 2000, it offered the Palestinians 94 per cent of the 22 per cent or 98 per cent or whatever.
Netanyahu’s current offer is 60 per cent of the 22 per cent. But the supposed offer came with the standard conditions and caveats when there should be only one condition. In exchange for a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, the Palestinians must agree to absolute security for Israel with ironclad guarantees backed up with surveillance systems to ensure that there are no violations.
In fact, the Palestinians agreed to those terms as far back as the Yasser Arafat era, when, in the late nineties, Israelis and Palestinians adopted a security plan brokered by the CIA to combat terrorism.
President Arafat’s efforts were so thorough, fighting a virtual civil war with Hamas, that Prime Minister Netanyahu told Arafat both in person and by telephone how much he appreciated Arafat’s help.
But neither Arafat nor his successor, Mahmoud Abbas, got anything in return.
That nothing is easily defined. During the entire 17-year period since the historic Rabin-Arafat agreement — and the famed handshake on the White House lawn — the Israelis never ceased confiscating land and building settlements in the areas that are supposed to constitute the Palestinian state.
That was and is the clearest measure of Israel’s intentions. The Israeli government does not intend to give up territory it wants; it gave up Gaza because it decided that it better served Israeli interests to just blockade it.
Why would Palestinians believe that Israel is negotiating seriously when it keeps building inside the future Palestinian state?
All this is obvious to anyone paying attention — especially since Prime Minister Netanyahu absolutely refused to freeze settlements for even 90 days in exchange for the United States doubling the aid package. Really, if he won’t freeze for 90 days for $3.5bn, only a fool would believe that he would ever actually give up any land permanently.
Marching to Israel’s tune
And yet the United States government keeps playing this game. No matter what Israel does, it is fine by America.
It does not have to be that way. If the administration and Congress put US interests (and Israel’s too) over the craving for campaign contributions, the United States could tell the Israeli government that, from now on, our aid package comes with strings.
Like a loan from the International Monetary Fund (although aid to Israel is a gift, not a loan), the US could say that in exchange for our billions, our UN vetoes of resolutions criticising Israel, and our silence in the face of war crimes like Gaza, we want Israel to end the occupation within, say, 24 months. And Israel would have to comply because our military assistance is, as AIPAC likes to call it, “Israel’s lifeline”.
If we did that, many Israelis would be very angry (just as many would appreciate America forcing an end to the occupation).
But the lobby would be furious because, above all else, it needs to feel that it controls US policy in the Middle East. Not for America’s sake. Not for Israel’s. But for its own. As with most Washington lobbies, it is not in business to make the world a better place. It is not pro-Israel; it is pro-AIPAC.
When will all this change? Who knows?
The AIPAC scandals are weakening the group, although not enough to prevent Congress from passing its latest bill condemning Palestinians. And younger American Jews, especially progressives (which is most of them), simply don’t buy the AIPAC line. American Jews are, after all, Americans.
But, for now, the bottom line is money. The US government dances to Israel’s tune because it is afraid to risk campaign contributions from a few dozen fat cats. That is the whole story.
Meanwhile, as General David Petraeus has said, US interests — including the lives of our men and women in uniform — are threatened by the belief in the Middle East that United States is Israel’s puppet. Petraeus’ view is common throughout the military which, unaffected by politics, manages to actually see the obvious. When will the rest of our government allow itself to do the same?
MJ Rosenberg is a senior foreign policy fellow at Media Matters Action Network. The above article first appeared in Foreign Policy Matters, a part of the Media Matters Action Network.
Featured Video
Did the 9/11 Hijackers Really Fly the Planes?
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
Book Excerpt
Biden’s Closed Circle on Russia
An excerpt from ‘The Great Betrayal’
By James W. Carden | The Realist Review | June 14, 2026
Joe Biden’s presidency may ultimately come to be seen as a cautionary tale. Here was a president who showed little interest in entertaining arguments that might have contradicted his most deeply held assumptions.[1] And there were precious few within the upper ranks of the administration who might have attempted to do so, after all, only policy hands and political operatives who had come up through the ranks of the Clinton and Obama administrations or had longstanding ties to the citadels of the foreign policy community were invited into the fold. … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Historic blow to South Korea’s military intelligence agency
- Russian frigate fires warning shots in English Channel
- Radio Free Europe, the Cold War ‘Weapon’ Congress Still Funds
- UN: Israel continues to violate Lebanon airspace in defiance of Iran-US MoU
- Araghchi: Israeli occupation of Lebanese land a violation of MoU
- Hezbollah fighters confront intruding Israeli forces in southern Lebanon
- The Straight of Hormuz is Open for Iranian Business… Oil is Moving and Iran is Getting Paid
- Biden’s Closed Circle on Russia
- Lebanon Accuses Israel Of Violating The Chemical Weapons Convention By Spraying Toxic Herbicide Over Farmland
- Did the 9/11 Hijackers Really Fly the Planes?
- If Americans Knew
- Israeli army ‘murdered child’ in Gaza and then dumped body on a roadside
- The Forward’s Hit Piece on Thomas Massie and USS Liberty Veterans
- Israel’s former defense minister compares settler ideology to Nazism
- The Pro-Israel Lobby’s Quiet Cash Shuffle
- Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN) Propagandizes for Israel’s Wars
- A grim milestone: Gaza’s death toll surpasses 73,000 – Daily Update
- Jared Kushner’s Israel-linked island, and other dubious projects
- Why Are Crypto Billionaires and AIPAC Spending $8+ Million to Elect Adrian Boafo?
- Why the Mainstream Media Should Stop Using the ADL as Their Go-To Antisemitism Source
- Censorship and Thuggery Won’t Save Israel’s Reputation
- No Tricks Zone
- Beyond The Pitch: Why FIFA’s World Cup Is One Of Humanity’s Best Investments
- Climate Alarmists Now Using Natural Phenomena To Support Their Claims
- New Study: Significant CO2 Fluxes From Non-Volcanic Sources Are Largely Neglected In Carbon Budgets
- Women Climate Scientists Being Harassed, Insulted By Skeptics, Claims Berkeley Earth Researcher
- Germany’s Longterm Spring Climate Data Show “No Climate Trend”
- New Study: Solar Photovoltaic, Wind Power Fail To Meet Annual Energy Demands 62% Of The Time
- Germany’s Die Welt: “Too Much Is Too Much” … Green Energies Are Cannabalizing Each Other!
- Germany’s Ecological Holocaust… Once Fairy Tale Forests Getting Cleared For Wind Turbines
- A Grand Solar Minimum Has Arrived…Global Cooling Of At Least 1°C Is Expected By The 2030s, 2040s
- European “Expert Commission” Urges COVID-19-Like Global Climate State Of Energency!
Aletho News 