US policy and pro-Israel lobbyists: Who actually runs the show?
US policy and pro-Israel lobbyists: Who actually runs the show?
The best retort to the question: “What about 7 October?” - still used by the media to silence and confuse people speaking from a Palestinian or human perspective, particularly in the US political context - might be: “What about 6 August?”
That’s when the first atomic bomb used in war was detonated over the Japanese city of Hiroshima in 1945. Three days later, on 9 August, the US detonated a second atomic bomb over Nagasaki. The attacks together are estimated to have killed close to 200,000 people.
This is not even to mention “Operation Meetinghouse”, better known as the firebombing of Tokyo, in March 1945, which killed tens of thousands of people and left more than one million homeless.
The politics of numbers, so familiar from the present genocide in Gaza, are chilling.
US General Curtis LeMay, who led the bombing campaign over Tokyo, was well aware of what his change in strategy - unleashing napalm on crowded Tokyo neighbourhoods - would mean. As he himself put it: “If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.”
Nor did LeMay stop in Japan. In a 1984 interview, he said US bombs “killed off 20 percent of the population” of North Korea, and “targeted everything that moved”.
As historian Bruce Cummings told Newsweek: “Most Americans are completely unaware that we destroyed more cities in the North than we did in Japan or Germany during World War II … Every North Korean knows about this, it’s drilled into their minds. We never hear about it.”
Collective punishment
LeMay was stymied by former US President John F Kennedy when he advocated for the use of nuclear weapons against Cuba, but the general still believed fully in the doctrine of bombing people back “into the Stone Age” during the war against Indochina, when Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia were decimated and defoliated by napalm from the air.
LeMay died before the Gulf War of 1991, but with the Afghanistan conflict, the war in Iraq, regime change in Libya, and so many other US-led imperial campaigns, his doctrine lives on.
The overpowering and cowardly reliance on mass terror from the air relegates native populations to the category of sub-human. Neither individuals nor civilians exist; all are presumed guilty and must be punished collectively, to force any resistance into full submission.
Does the US control its own foreign policy on Israel and Palestine, or is it dictated by pro-Israel lobbying groups?
Recent statements do not disappoint in this regard. Following the 8 September attack by two Palestinians at a bus stop in Jerusalem, in which six Israelis were killed, US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee declared: “We stand with Israel against this savagery.”
World leaders solemnly chimed in with declarations of sympathy, while what analyst Mouin Rabbani calls “the Hasbara Symphony Orchestra” continued its serenade in the background, droning on about “breeding grounds”, “terror towers” and a host of other propagandistic and racist tropes meant to obfuscate and deflect from the daily drumbeat of escalating war crimes and genocide carried out by Israel, with unwavering US support.
This begs several questions: does the US control its own foreign policy on Israel and Palestine, or is it dictated by pro-Israel lobbying groups? Can two things be true or plausible at the same time?
And what is one to make of President Donald Trump’s erratic statements and so-called initiatives to end the slaughter in Gaza, before segments of his constituency fully revolt against his policies?
Plausible deniability
Prior to the transformation of mainstream journalists into stenographers, along with the corporate and ideological capture of the Fourth Estate, “plausible deniability” was a key element of US doctrine, both domestic and foreign. But with the revelations of Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange, along with the flood of available information, “knowability” itself has become problematic and contentious.
And yet, the elephant in the room - the completely outsized presence of Israel in the US on all levels, both at home and abroad - may present an even more elaborate structure of “plausible deniability” than those we became accustomed to in the Cold War and even in the self-declared “war on terror”.
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While the Biden/Harris administration resorted to elaborate neoliberal gaslighting techniques, accompanied by seemingly quixotic and absurd initiatives such as the Gaza pier project, the Trump/Vance team continues its grotesque, kabuki-style manoeuvres, such as the Witkoff plan and Trump’s Truth Social ultimatums - all the while constructing the precursor to mass concentration camps in the guise of “humanitarian aid” centres.
Both administrations vetoed ceasefire resolutions at the United Nations, and both administrations provided all the arms needed by Israel, as well as pressure and cover for allied support, both material and political.
Given all this, there is an almost laughable absurdity in the idea that the US, as a global hegemonic power arming and providing all means of cover for Israel, could not simply shut the genocide in Gaza down with one phone call or executive order.
Nevertheless, the US is dominated by Israeli interests, whether though Aipac and its campaign contributions keeping US politicians in line, or other more covert means. US and Israeli policies and institutions are joined at the hip, from the training of US police forces in Israeli methods, to the adoption of surveillance technologies that will only increase in the new era of technofeudalism.
The change of administration signals more a shift in approach than a change in policy. Could the whole Israeli Zionist ideological, technological and political superstructure represent an elaborate form of “plausible deniability” for US policy in the region itself?
Given the recent regime change in Syria; the attempt to assume “protectorship” over Lebanon; the targeting of Iran, both militarily and through sanctions; the political asphyxiation of Egypt through classic World Bank/International Monetary Fund means; the Abraham Accords, and so many other policies, how could one think otherwise?
This begs even further questions: where does such a scenario put the American Jewish community, whether those supporting Israel and Zionism or those opposing its policies? In this sense, Benjamin Netanyahu, who lived for years in Philadelphia, serves as the ideal Israeli prime minister. He can be vilified by progressives, and lionised by Zionists.
But in many ways, the present structure simply enables and maintains the status quo, domesticating and trivialising Israel’s role as an American proxy in maintaining US global hegemony, while preventing a deeper look at the current and historical role of the US in the world.
At the same time, it seems plausible that being placed in, and assuming such a proxy role, presents inherent dangers that the US Jewish community has hardly begun to address.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
