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CounterPunch
January
7, 2003
Blame Yourself:
American Power and Jewish Power
By MICHAEL NEUMANN
Sometime around the 1940s or 1950s it was cool
to talk about the capitalist power structure, and in the 1960s
to speak of a white power structure. In both cases one could
say, in annoying-geezer talk, "Now that was a power
structure!" Because if you looked at what the capitalists
or the whites controlled, well heck, it was everything! And as
a measure of just how everything it was, both the capitalist
and the white power structure contained the entire Jewish power
structure. Has something changed? Have the white folks been dethroned
by the Jews?
Talk of a Jewish power structure is increasing
at two levels. In the nether regions of the internet, there's
more about Jewish control of the US' Israel policy, or perhaps
of the US itself. Higher up, one hears about a Jewish lobby,
or a Jewish-Israel lobby, or, more often, about mean-spirited,
unpleasant people who control the government, and who, it is
said or coyly suggested, are Jews.
There is inconclusive but considerable
evidence to support these claims. Jews loom large among the high
ranks of government policy advisers, and in influential non-governmental
policy organizations. Most media push a Zionist line; many are
owned by Jews. And there are well-documented cases of senators
and congressmen who have learned to regret, come election time,
wavering in their support for Israel. Some suggest that Jewish
pressure groups had a role in the downfall of Bush the First.
It is clear that American Jews are deeply
involved in the formation of US policy towards what they call
the Jewish homeland, the self-styled Jewish state of Israel.
It is also clear that the interests of Israel are not identical
with those of the United States. This naturally raises questions
about the ultimate loyalties of these policy-makers, so the collection
and distribution of such evidence is quite justified.
But another question arises: evidence
for what, exactly? To my mind, it is evidence for the
enormous, disgraceful complicity of American Jews in Israeli
crimes, a complicity which includes very serious sins of omission
throughout the Jewish left. The evidence also supports the notion
that Jews have considerable political influence. But it does
not support the claim that Jewish power somehow amounts
to Jewish control of America or Americans, or even of American
foreign policy. Whether or not the claim is antisemitic, it is
annoying, because it lets the real culprits for American policy
off the hook. Their identity is no dark secret. They are the
Americans.
The notion that Jews control America
stems from a couch-potato school of political analysis. If your
world is the TV screen, the Jewish-control theory makes some
sense, because Jews really do pervade the entire range of your
remote. And if you should look at the newspaper during commercials,
you may find something similar. But contrary to popular belief,
the sinews of reality are not found in the media. They reside
in armies, oil fields, auto plants, factories, farms, mines,
forests, oceans, roads and airports. Here the Jews do not prevail,
nor do they prevail even in the financial world. Even in the
media, their power is exaggerated.
The exaggeration comes from looking only
at the activities and assets of Jews, which is a bit like looking
at Paris and saying, correctly, that it contains a large number
of Arabic-speakers: yes, but what about the French-speakers?
It is not just that there are other powerful lobby groups like
the Christian coalition. It is also that one needs to ask: what
proportion of the "petroleum, steel, motor vehicles, aerospace,
telecommunications, chemicals, electronics, food processing,
consumer goods, lumber, mining" sectors of the economy--the
list is from an almanac--is owned or controlled by gentiles?
I await a table with two columns,
Jewish control non-Jewish control
sector1 xx yy
sector2 zz vv
arranged by market capitalization of
firms or by some other significant indicator of control, which
indicates that Jews dominate in any sector. Until then, I can't
help noticing that most of the captains of industry I hear about
aren't Jewish. They have many times more dollars to spend than
the Jews have put into influencing US policy.
One might reply: ah, but the Jews control
such crucial elements of American life. This is another
couch-potato hypothesis, that media control is all. The claim
would be that, despite non-Jews and like Ted Turner, Steve Chase
and Rupert Murdoch, Jews control enough of the media to control
our minds and their decisions.
The inherent implausibility of this hypothesis
has two components. The first is that it must postulate Jewish
control over all the gentiles in a position to have some media
influence of their own. Oil company execs, agri-business magnates
and lumber potentates must have succumbed to the subtle messages
of Seinfeld re-runs and become incapable of pursuing their own
interests, unable to withstand Jewish media despite all their
riches. If so, one can only marvel at the merciful generosity
of the Jews, who appear from the goodness of their heart to have
left non-Jews with an inexplicably enormous remnant of power
and wealth.
The second implausibility lies in the
presupposition that Americans are deluded media slaves. (Saying
this to a leftist is like telling Virginia there is no Santa
Claus.) Briefly--the issue is too large to cover here--media
bias does not take the form of censorship as often as many love
to think. The mainstream media, for instance, provide more than
enough information to build a conclusive case for Israel's criminality,
and no one has to stick to the mainstream media. Equally important,
the media may at times play a role in forming opinion, but at
least as often they are anxious or happy or simply so unoriginal
as to reflect opinion. Perhaps the reason so many people
believe what the media tells them is that the media tells them
what they already believe. Finally, there is a huge difference
between media influence and media control. SUV ads may make some
men (and perhaps some women) fantasize that they have a large
penis, and desire to purchase 4-wheel proof of this, but it never
makes them actually believe they have a large penis. Similarly,
teenagers know that smoking won't make them as cool as Joe Camel,
and that cigarettes aren't risk-free fun. No guy thinks that
drinking Pepsi really gets you a shot at Britney Spears. So the
idea that Jewish influence in the media could turn us into helpless
robots is simply a non-starter. Were Jewish media influence as
important as many would have us believe, the Jews have had done
with it a long time ago. Israel would already have wiped out
or expelled every single Palestinian. A Zionist US government
would have suppressed all anti-Israel material as 'hate literature'
or terrorist propaganda, overthrown every pro-Palestinian Arab
government, and used American troops to deal with the consequences.
That this hasn't happened is symptomatic of a deep incoherence
within the view that Jews don't control everything, but only
the crucial things. If the things were really crucial, Jews really
would control everything after all.
Jewish control was no more telling in
the past than it is in the present: when they worked to turn
America towards Israel, the Jews never overcame any serious opposition.
The historical record shows that, far more than Jewish lobbyists
or the Jewish vote, worries about communism pushed the US into
an alliance with Israel. The alliance developed in lock-step
with growing alarm about Soviet inroads in the Middle East.
From before 1948 on, the US was concerned
to counter Soviet influence by helping BOTH Zionists AND Arabs.
This was the objective of all US policymakers regardless of their
religion or personal sympathy for Zionism. The Soviets initially
did the same. The shifting alliances had everything to do with
great power rivalries, and very little to do with the machinations
of American Jews or with any concern for the fortunes of Israel.
In the early 1950s, Israeli-Soviet relations
soured and Arab-Soviet relations prospered. But despite Zionist
pressure, the US did not rush to back Israel, nor indeed the
Soviets to abandon her. As late as 1956 the Soviet Union was
supplying Israel with cheap oil to circumvent the Arab boycott,
and Israel refused to supply NATO with military bases to counter
a Soviet threat. The US imposed an arms embargo on Israel in
1948, and maintained it with minor exceptions until the Hawk
missile sale of 1962. (Even then, according to some authorities,
the sale was to be linked to the repatriation by Israel of some
100,000 to 150,000 Palestinian refugees!) The American-Israeli
alliance was forged only when American attempts to keep the Arab
world onside foundered.
The great motivator in this process was
not love or fear of the Jews. It was fear of Nasser. (Who? For
judaeocentric Americans, the idea that an Arab or Egyptian could
put his stamp on modern history just isn't on the radar.) He
sought, quite naturally, to improve his position by exploiting
great power rivalries. In March 1955, he refused to join the
anti-communist Baghdad Pact. A month later, at the Bandung Conference,
he moved to form a neutral bloc of exactly those nations the
West was trying to recruit against the Soviet Union. Immediately
after the conference, he announced a sale of cotton to Communist
China, a country then embroiled in a frightening confrontation
with the US over Quemoy and Matsu. Next he built on barter agreements
with the Soviet bloc to conclude, in September, a major arms
deal whose impact was felt throughout the Arab world and beyond.
In May 1956, while the Quemoy-Matsu crisis
was still smouldering, Nasser recognized China. With his modern
weaponry and vigorous diplomacy, he was widely seen as the leader
of the entire Arab world. The West became dismayed enough to
withdraw financing for his most important development project,
the Aswan Dam. In response, Nasser nationalized the Suez canal.
In the 1956 Suez war, America sided with Egypt, but only to co-opt
the Soviet Union, which had stated that any further Franco-British
advances into Egypt would be met *by force*. This was the end
of attempts by the great powers to play both sides of the street.
The 1956 war for the first time showed
Israel as a militarily capable power which could, on its own,
defeat Arab forces armed with Soviet weaponry. And to the US,
communist-backed Arab forces began to seem worth defeating. Nasser
maintained increasingly close relations with the Soviet Union,
and the launch of Sputnik in October 1957 increased American
anxieties about a worldwide Soviet threat. Egypt's union with
Syria in February 1958 made its ties will the USSR all the more
disturbing.
By October 1958, when the Soviet Union
announced it would provide financing for the Aswan Dam, the lines
were clearly drawn. The Arabs, led by Egypt, were on the Soviet
side, and the Israelis became the very useful proxies of the
West. (One of the first services Israel rendered to the West
was when, in July 1958, it allowed "a British and American
airlift of strategic materials through Israeli airspace to prop
up the embattled Jordanian monarchy that was being challenged
by a radical nationalist uprising fomented by Egypt's Nasser."*)
This is the origin of the United States' deep commitment to Israel.
Though Zionist influences were at work throughout this process,
they were never decisive, and in the end it was American security
concerns that cemented the US-Israel alliance. With the fall
of the Soviet Union, the rationale for the alliance ceased, but
the alliance itself rolls on, its inertia abetted by the disinclination
of Americans to put any obstacle in its course.
None of this changes the facts that (a)
Jews, either individually or through their 'leaders' or collectively
or in some combination of these, play a huge role in the making
of policies that consistently and blindly favor Israel, (b) anyone
anywhere in government who opposes these trends seems to get
dumped or ignored. To explain this it is helpful to conceive
of Jewish power in America somewhat like eunuch power in the
Ottoman Empire.
In the Ottoman Empire, eunuchs were of
course slaves or servants, yet at times their influence was pervasive.
Sometimes they became key government advisers, sometimes even
generals and admirals. At times it would not have been at all
implausible to suggest that eunuchs were 'running things'. But
in the end, no one could take such a claim too seriously. The
Ottoman Empire never looked like some great machine turning out
treats for eunuchs. The eunuchs simply took a certain limited
advantage of the power vacuums appeared in a decaying, increasingly
ignorant and feckless ruling circle. If anyone trembled before
these neutered potentates, it was only at the good pleasure of
the society that bought or castrated them in the first place.
No, the Jews aren't quite the eunuchs
of the American Empire. But Jewish power does exist at the good
pleasure of non-Jewish Americans, both in government and throughout
the general population. This holds even where Jews exercise the
most effective control, in Hollywood. That's why you don't see
Arnold Schwarzenegger playing the widowed, retired Israeli paratrooper,
raining fire and death on the leering Palestinian thugs who killed
his children and gang-raped Selma Hayek, their beloved Israeli
Arab nanny. Max Weber said that "'power' [is] the chance
of a man, or of a number of men to realize their own will in
communal action even against the resistance of others who are
participating in the action." Whatever sway Jewish Hollywood
moguls hold over their actors, elsewhere they have much influence,
but little power. Jewish lobby groups constitute, not a separate
power structure, but the department of Jewish affairs within
the American power structure. Their will is realized, and the
will of Jews is realized throughout the US government, but it
is not "against the resistance of others". What
resistance? By and large, American gentiles have either been
pushing in the same direction, or watching from the sidelines.
It is not, after all, as if America aches
with compassion for the Palestinians, but has been crushed by
the mighty Jews. If the Jewish lobby has defeated a few maverick
black congressional candidates, it is not because mountains of
American dollars have been dwarfed by even bigger mountains of
Jewish shekels. And if non-Jewish leftists have failed to condemn
the diffidence of their Jewish counterparts, it is not because
the Big Jewish Money police are prowling around in black leather
trench-coats. The real culprits in the story of Jewish influence
in America are the people who let it all happen. These are the
non-Jewish Americans who, in their opposition to Israel, are
so timid that a couple of words from Alan Dershowitz would send
them all scuttling like cockroaches back to their dark corners.
The few who go further are not 'silenced' by Jewish power. One
hears from them all the time: ask a Chinese or Iraqi or former
Chilean dissident what 'silenced' means. They are ineffective
because they haven't even tried to organize themselves, shrinking
from the unpleasantness of offending the 'courageous' Jewish
left. One thinks of the immortal words of George Carlin: "Take
a fucking risk, for Christ's sake!"
That Americans have let the Jews have
their way doesn't mean that reporting on Jewish activities in
America should stop. But what is needed is not yet another list
of the Jewish court jesters hired by the American establishment,
or the groups that lobby for policies the US government anyway
wants to promote. Nor do we need more dark hints based on collections
of scattered facts rather than serious comparative data. Far
more revealing and just as damning would be the story of how
ordinary Jews either applaud the worst Israeli crimes, or deplore
them and support Israel anyway, or denounce them with rhetoric
that somehow never gets around to advocating anything that would
stop them. It is a story that just lies there, ready and waiting
to be told.
Jewish tribalism is real and strong,
but it does not enslave Americans. For all its prestige, it is
not something 'special' or specially powerful. It is just another
instance of the ordinary, vulgar racism and nationalism found
all over the world. It is immoral, but not as contemptible as
the whining of those who supposedly want to do something about
Israel, yet are astounded to encounter Jewish opposition and
slink off, muttering about 'being in the grip of Jewish power'.
These people should themselves get a grip, and do something about
it.
Do what? How about an experiment? It
involves an unprecedented and essential first step towards real
change in America's Middle East policies--actually asking for
measures that would hurt Israel.
Right now, what passes for radicalism
is a call to stop military aid to Israel, despite the fact that
hardly any country in the world is more capable of doing its
killing unaided. That this represents the most daring opposition
to the American-Israeli alliance is both shameful and absurd.
It all but proclaims to the whole world that even the American
left would rather moan about the agony of the Palestinians than
try to stop it. Publishing something like the following statement
would test for the presence of a backbone among American radicals:
Israel has, on many well-documented occasions,
committed war crimes and crimes against humanity. It has violated
international law and defied numerous UN resolutions. It manufactures
chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, as well as a sophisticated
technology for delivering them anywhere in the world. Its settlement
policies in the illegally occupied territories endanger the continued
existence of the Palestinian people. For all these reasons, Israel
is a rogue state and should be treated accordingly. We therefore
demand that all nations should:
-- immediately cease all assistance to
Israel, military, economic, and 'humanitarian';
-- impose a total trade embargo, including
a ban on all transfer of funds to Israel;
-- freeze all Israeli accounts abroad;
-- sever diplomatic relations;
-- cut air links;
-- and cut all cultural, academic, and
scientific exchanges.
In addition,
The United States should inform the Israeli
government that any use of nuclear weapons, strategic or tactical,
will be met by an overwhelming response in kind.
The United States should form a coalition
including Arab and Muslim states to contain Israel along the
lines of the coalition to contain Iraq during the Gulf War.
Notice how moderate this is: nothing
questioning Israel's right to exist, nothing about the Palestinians'
right of return, nothing about prosecutions for war crimes, no
endorsement of Palestinian violence. How many leftish Jewish
notables would sign such a statement? My guess is two, at most.
But how many non-Jewish notables would do so? My guess
is ten, proportionately fewer than among the Jews. If so, it
is a testimony, not to Jewish power, but to American insularity,
laziness and cowardice.
Michael Neumann
is a professor of philosophy at Trent University in Ontario,
Canada. He can be reached at: mneumann@trentu.ca
(*) Michael Rubner, review of Decade
of Transition: Eisenhower, Kennedy, and the Origins of the American-Israeli
Alliance, by Abraham Ben-Zvi. New York: Columbia University Press,
1998, Middle
East Policy, Volume VI, Number 3, February 1999.
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