By Wayne Allensworth
I highly recommend watching Tucker Carlson’s interview with Professor John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, noted foreign policy realist and author, along with Harvard’s Stephen Walt, of a very important book, The Lobby: The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy. As Carlson notes in the podcast, it is remarkable that the book was ever published, but as Mearsheimer says, Israel’s lobbyists and agents are losing control of the narrative that has always painted the Jewish state as the perpetual victim and its enemies as subhuman. The real story is much more complicated. The interview is long and detailed, and that makes it even more worthwhile.
Mearsheimer repeats a number of points that I have made here, but his comments are worth considering. First, U.S. foreign policy is influenced and manipulated by Israel and its minions here, as I recently observed:
“The special interests that have controlled our politics — globalist trans-national business, the neocons and neo-liberals, the Zionist lobby, the military industrial complex, the Deep State, the Swamp bureaucracy — have zero interest in winding up the American Empire to deal with our own problems. All want the United States to remain the Blob’s aircraft carrier, capable of world-wide force projection. And that means that they will act in concert, as there is considerable overlap among the strands of the web of special interests that run Washington DC, to sabotage the MAGA agenda if it makes too much headway.”
Carlson commented that many of the same people who support continuing the war in Ukraine are also Middle East hawks. The professor agreed and added that the most powerful and influential foreign lobby in Washington, the Israel lobby, generally backs every foreign adventure the US embarks on precisely because Israel wants the United States to maintain a vast military machine capable of projecting power all over the world — and, therefore, capable of protecting Israel. The Lobby wants the United States to remain the global policeman for its own reasons, not ours. In fact, regarding the Middle East, Washington routinely carries out actions that are not in its own interests — such as invading Iraq, toppling the Assad regime in Syria, and supporting Israel’s war in Gaza, a war he does not shy away from calling genocide. Israel has ruthlessly pursued its aims. In fact, as Mearsheimer observes, from its earliest days, Zionism foresaw ethnically cleansing “Greater Israel” of Palestinians, killing them, pushing them out, denying that they were a people, destroying their identity and absorbing their homeland.
It’s a remarkable situation. Just who is the subordinate power in the US-Israel relationship? True, Israel is heavily dependent on US support. But it exerts a massive degree of influence over policy by manipulating public opinion in the U.S. through its supporters on Capitol Hill and the White House, as well as in U.S. media and academia. The propaganda campaign is so thorough that even the American Christian Zionists — an important player in The Lobby’s efforts — seldom question Israel’s treatment of Christians, its attacks on churches in Gaza, or the fate of Christians in Iraq and Syria after “regime change.” What neither Mearsheimer nor Carlson mention is just how effective the Holocaust narrative has been in cowing Americans, who have feared that questioning Israel’s policies will be labelled “antisemitism.” I would add another point, one Carlson and Mearsheimer avoid: The shadow of the Good War narrative, one that in many respects is highly questionable, also hangs heavy over the American psyche. Nazism provided and still provides scores of bad guys for Hollywood movies. Adolf Hitler is a perpetual, seemingly indestructible demon. And nobody wants to side with the demons over the angels.
Notably, Hollywood has never shown the same degree of interest in another evil, bloodthirsty and anti-Christian totalitarian ideology, Communism, or its bloody demigod, Josef Stalin, much less in its tens of millions of victims, many of them Christians. Our Soviet allies overran half of Europe, including Poland. The division of that country between Hitler and Stalin was the reason the war started in the first place. Yet we don’t hear much about that, either. I hypothesize that one reason for that state of affairs is that Zionism and Jewish identity, as well as left-liberal politics, have been hugely influential in Tinseltown since its establishment as the most influential pop culture center in modern America. Sympathy for Communism was part and parcel of that set of circumstances. So, we don’t hear much about Stalinism, or, judging from the Venona intercepts, that the anti-Communists of the 1950s, including GOP Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, were largely correct in their assessment of Soviet penetration of the U.S. government, the bureaucracy, and Hollywood. One can’t separate the Holocaust narrative and popular media’s skating over Stalinism from assessing how the Lobby has wielded so much power in America. The Christians who died under Communist persecution have not been graced with victim status. No special word equivalent to “antisemitism” describes hatred of Christians. Do the Christian Zionists know that they are viewed as dupes by the Israeli hardliners who have benefited so much from their support?
Yet Mearsheimer sees the tide turning in some respects. As Israel under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has become more extreme, treating the Palestinians as subhuman, the Lobby has been losing control of the narrative internationally. The internet and social media have opened channels for a counter-narrative that the Lobby and its allies cannot fully suppress or control. Regarding criticism of Israeli policies, Israel’s U.S. allies are raising the bet, passing legislation to label all such criticism “antisemitic” or “pro-Hamas.” The Trump administration has not allowed itself to be sucked into a ground war against Iran. Yet it has been no slouch in attacking “antisemitism.”
It’s not working. Mearsheimer correctly attributes that fact to the alternative narrative available via the internet. He also observes that young people are far less wedded to the Lobby’s Israel First narrative than older Americans, weaned on the Good War, the Holocaust, and the “Exodus” stories that delegitimized alternative views and cast dissenters as Nazi and terrorist sympathizers. I would add that the left has been divided on that narrative for some time. Many leftists view Israel as a European colonial power that is repressing a non-European people.
What’s more, Mearsheimer notes that a significant number of Israelis and Jews in the U.S. have been shaken by the ruthless war in Gaza and are swinging against it. He reports that the number of suicides and cases of post-traumatic stress disorder in the Israeli Defense Force are increasing. But the hardliners hold sway in Jerusalem, and he believes that even if Netanyahu is replaced, his policies would continue. There is no way out of this as long as the goal is a Greater Israel that includes parts of Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, and Sinai. But something will inevitably give as things come to a head. It’s an untenable situation. As Mearsheimer notes, the rage in the Muslim world is intense. Islamic terrorism will likely increase. And he further avers, as yours truly has, that the 9/11 attacks were motivated by U.S. Middle East policy and unlimited support of Israel. They didn’t attack us because “they hate our freedom,” as the loutish George W. Bush claimed. The attack was blowback.
Mearsheimer notes that some Israeli leaders such as Yitzhak Rabin wanted Israel to halt expansion and seek accommodation with the Moslem world. That view has not prevailed. The terrorist attack on October 7 of last year gave Netanyahu and company a perfect opportunity to seek the expulsion of the Palestinians from Gaza. Their plan has been working — the U.S. had helped topple Saddam, Assad, and Khadafi. The next target is Iran. Israeli hardliners want to split up Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Iran to weaken them permanently as well as to create Lebensraum, as Mearsheimer says, for Greater Israel. And they want the U.S. to help expel what Mearsheimer estimates to be about 2 million Palestinians. No one knows how many have been killed, though an estimated 400,000 are missing, or where those remaining would go. Libya? Ethiopia? Indonesia? A significant number of them would likely turn up in the good ol’ US of A. Bomb ’em and give ’em visas is yet another reason the Lobby will probably not support U.S. immigration reforms beyond deporting criminals, stopping the invasion at the southwest border, and banning travelers from some Islamic states. What’s more, the administration, which pledged to put America First, is discussing leading an international administration of Gaza, which would deepen U.S. complicity in the slaughter.
The irony of Israel seeking the destruction of the Palestinians while screaming “Nazi!” at critics is not lost on a lot of us. Mearsheimer correctly states that ending the war would be good for Israel and, more importantly, good for America, if we really want to put America First. What’s more, the Gaza war is undermining American moral authority. It’s shameful. Besides that, what the hell does the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have to do with the future wellbeing of our country, our children, and our grandchildren? Ideology, foreign lobbying, and superpower hubris have, again as Mearsheimer so eloquently says, addicted us to war. War eats away at our soul and blinds us to our own errors. It feeds the Deep State, the Swamp, and the vast National Security apparatus that we so desperately need to dismantle. That vast, unaccountable machinery is beyond repair. We must turn inward and deal with the terrible problems that plague our own society. It’s time to detox, to end our addiction to war.
Ending our addiction means challenging the Blob’s propaganda. Many Americans, in spite of scoffing at “mainstream media,” persist in believing what the Blob’s media minions tell them: it’s always 1939, and we have to perpetually remain on a war footing. Until we refuse to believe that any longer, the “forever wars” will continue, and “America First” will remain a slogan.
Chronicles contributor Wayne Allensworth is the author of The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood.
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