YNet's Giulio Meotti likes to cut and paste

Update: Marc Tracy reports today that YNet and Commentary have severed their relationships with Meotti as a result of his plagiarism. Il Mondi Di Annibale, the Italian foreign policy site, has also taken Meotti to task. What will Meotti’s employers at Il Foglio do?

Meotti responds by accusing me of placing his life in danger, or at least causing him to “suffer.” But so far, any suffering that Meotti has endured has been self-inflicted. Meotti: ”But this is a personal attack against my person and work of ten years, a demonization, a witch hunt against one of the last and few pro-Israel journalists in Europe. An attack in which arrogant and failed journalists didn’t hesitate to call me ‘hasbarist’ and ‘zionist’ in Arab newspapers. It seems that they don’t understand the consequences and the severe risks that an author like me in Europe can suffer because of their incitement.”

Italian columnist Giulio Meotti’s book, “A Second Shoah,” earned abundant praise from a Who’s Who of neoconservatism, from Victor Davis Hanson to Norman Podhoretz to John Bolton. George Weigel, the right-wing Catholic intellectual, hailed Meotti as a modern day Truman Capote, while the pro-Israel travel writer Michael Totten described the book, which contends that Israelis are victims of an ongoing Holocaust, as “very moving.” “We must be grateful to Giulio Meotti for his magisterial work,” wrote self-described Muslim apostate Ibn Warraq in the National Review.

This week, Marc Tracy at Tablet revealed several instances of plagiarism by Meotti, who is a columnist for YNet and the pro-Berlusconi Italian daily Il Foglio. According to Tracy, the plagiarism occurred in a recent piece by Meotti wrote contrasting Israel’s supposedly flawless record on gay rights with the record of the barbaric Arabs, who are portrayed through the increasingly popular pro-Israel tactic of pinkwashing as not culturally enlightened enough to enjoy their liberation. In the column, Meotti lifted entire paragraphs from writings by two fellow pro-Israel cadres, Jamie Kirchick and Brett Stephens.

Meotti’s penchant for plagiarism was not limited to a single column, however. Google a paragraph at random from any column and you are likely to find that he has lifted much of it, if not the whole thing, from someone else. Here are some examples (thanks to Michael Moynihan for pointing a few of these out):

On April 30, 2012, Meotti authored a column attacking advocates of the BDS campaign as anti-Semites and neo-Nazis. Meotti wrote:

Will the European Union, many of whose prominent members either participated or acquiesced in the destruction of European Jewry 70 years ago, put a stop to this obscurantist conspiracy of the grandchildren of those Max Weinreich called “Hitler’s Professors” to expel the Israelites (again) from the family of nations?

On January 3, 2003, Edward Alexander wrote in a column attacking BDS supporters:

More importantly, will the European Union, many of whose prominent members either participated or acquiesced in the destruction of European Jewry 60 years ago, put a stop to the conspiracy of these spiritual descendants of those Max Weinreich famously called ”Hitler’s Professors,” to expel the Jews (once again) from the family of nations?

On May 12, 2012, in a piece assailing Islam as a genocidal religion of violence and hatred, Meotti wrote:

Islam’s supersessionary doctrine catalyzes destruction, oppression and hemorrhaging of Christians in eastern lands. While there were moments of laxity in applying this domination, Islam did not recoil from razing churches in ancient Damascus and slaughtering Christians in the Sub-Saharan plateau, inflicting atrocities in Aleppo or Mesopotamia.

Back in April, 2004, Mordechai Nisan wrote a remarkably similar column for the Jerusalem Post. It included the following passage:

Islam’s supersessionary religious doctrine catalyzed relentless destruction, oppression, and abuse of Christians in eastern lands. While there were moments of laxity and civility in applying the robust strictures of domination, Islam did not recoil from razing churches in ancient Damascus and slaughtering Christians in Mesopotamia, inflicting atrocities in Aleppo and exterminating Armenians in their homeland.

In an April 1, 2012 column attacking mainline Protestant church efforts to divest from Israeli companies — surprisingly the churches were portrayed as hotbeds of Jew hatred — Meotti wrote:

The Episcopal Church has two million members and 7,200 churches in the US and is part of the 77-million member Anglican Communion. Because of the relative wealth of its members, and its connections to the Church of England throughout the world, the Episcopal Church is in a strategic position to influence attitudes toward Israel on both a national and global scale.

Over five years earlier, in a September 6, 2006 piece for the pro-Israel media monitoring organization CAMERA, Dexter Van Zile wrote:

The Episcopal Church has approximately 2 million members and 7,200 churches in the U.S. and is part of the 77-million member Anglican Communion. Because of its presence in the U.S., the relative wealth of its members, and its connections to Anglicans throughout the world, the Episcopal Church is in a strategic position to influence attitudes toward Israel on both a national and global scale.

In an exceptionally bizarre attempt at hasbara, on May 3, 2012, Meotti asserted Israel’s cultural superiority by contrasting its alleged treatment of the handicapped with that of Arab societies. Meotti wrote:

The Weizmann Institute had led to the development of promising new therapies for acute spinal cord injuries. Indeed, the late actor Christopher Reeve described Israel as the “world center” for research.

This passage was lifted straight from a 2007 press release by the US-based Israel advocacy group, Israel 21c. The press release read:

Research by a professor at the Weizmann Institute has led to the development of promising new therapies for acute spinal cord injuries. The late actor Christopher Reeve described Israel as the ‘world-center’ for research on paralysis treatment.

Meotti is so bereft of originality that he even plagiarizes himself: He pasted a long section from a February 24, 2012 column about how “music can be a platform for anti-Semitism” into a piece he published two months later about anti-Semites in Hollywood working to destroy Israel.

The remarkable thing about Meotti’s plagiarism scandal is that it is not being treated as much of a scandal at all. Yedioth Aharanot, the parent company of YNet, has apparently not taken any punitive measures against Meotti. And neither Kirchick nor Stephens expressed any outrage about being plagiarized. Instead, Kirchick dismissed Meotti’s stealing as “a form of flattery” and Stephens, who also said he was “flattered,” said Meotti’s column “makes a point worth repeating.” Their startling reactions reflect a neoconservative culture in which the cause of Greater Israel supersedes everything else, from journalistic ethics to intellectual originality.

Because Kirchick, Stephens and Meotti draw their arguments from the same storehouse of recycled Likudnik hasbara, their columns are virtually indistinguishable and completely interchangeable. If any one of them disappeared, some other pro-Israel cadre could step into their shoes without anyone noticing. As Meotti demonstrated, it takes little more than cutting and pasting press releases from Israel advocacy groups to succeed in the world of neoconservatism.

This piece was cross-posted at Al Akhbar English

The Israeli daily Maariv recently reported [in Hebrew] that BTS, a mercenary firm run by a former Israeli army colonel and veteran bodyguard, Beni Tal, proposed to Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai a plan to violently expel thousands of African migrant workers and refugees living near Tel Aviv’s central bus station.

According to Maariv, Tal told Tel Aviv municipal representatives he would gather intelligence on the African migrant population before sending in hundreds of security guards to cuff them and ship them away on buses or trucks. “This should be a very violent action,” Tal said.

“I have never seen a place so violent, not even in the roughest parts of New York,” Tal remarked. “So we need to bring in guys who are not afraid of anything, put people on trucks, and within six months return the bus station to its residents… This population [Africans] is very problematic.”

Though the Tel Aviv municipality ultimately rejected Tal’s proposal, Maariv reported that a municipal official brought the plan up in a meeting of the Israeli Knesset’s Special Committee regarding Foreign Workers. The representative claimed he raised Tal’s proposal merely to highlight the supposed severity of the situation in southern Tel Aviv.

I have spent countless hours in Tel Aviv’s central bus station and in the surrounding Neve Shaanan neighborhood, where much of the city’s migrant worker population lives. The only people who have ever threatened me there were plainclothes agents from Israel’s Oz Unit, which routinely accosts and arrests migrants around the bus station, and who once stopped me by the bus station to demand proof I was in the country legally.

The neighborhood may be impoverished and overcrowded, but it is hardly dangerous by urban American standards. When a Maariv reporter confronted Tal with the fact that crime in Neve Shaanan was no higher than anywhere else in the city, he protested that the statistics were false, but was unable to produce evidence to support his point.

Some migrants from Africa have arrived in Israel to occupy the menial jobs that Palestinians performed before they were tucked behind a separation wall and Gaza was completely besieged. They are the glue that holds Tel Aviv together, washing dishes, cooking food, cleaning bathrooms, and changing children’s diapers so the city’s Jewish residents can enjoy the First World, Eurocentric lifestyle they have come to expect. Others arrived from Africa fleeing war and civil strife. By some estimates, 60 percent of Sudanese migrants are eligible for asylum status.

David Sheen’s devastating video documentary [above] illustrates how Israel’s draconian approach to African refugees is rooted in deeply ingrained racist attitudes and an official policy of countering demographic threats. Sheen’s report highlights how security concerns were manufactured to establish a pretext for enforcing the state’s exclusivist priorities against those condemned as “infiltrators.”

The recently passed “Prevention of Infiltration Bill,” which mandates a three year prison sentence without trial for illegal migrants, was nothing more than an amendment to the pre-existing 1954 “Prevention of Infiltration Law” enacted after the Nakba to prevent Palestinian refugees from reuniting with their family members inside the newly created state of Israel. As Israeli human rights activist Leehee Rothschild wrote, “At the end of the day, the justification for both the 1954 Prevention of Infiltration Law as well was the new amendment is one and the same – the maintenance of the Jewish character of the State of Israel.”

Last month, Israel began construction on what will be the world’s largest detention center. Labeled by none other than Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin as a “concentration camp where people are warehoused,” the prison will sit in the Negev Desert on the grounds of what was once Ketziot Prison, a detention camp for Palestinian detainees staffed by the Atlantic Magazine’s Jeffrey Goldberg. The new super-jail is being erected for the sole purpose of containing migrants and asylum seeking refugees fleeing from Africa.

Describing the desert prison as a “humanitarian solution,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu justified its construction on the grounds that African refugees threaten to “change[] the character of the state.”

This was originally published at Al Akhbar English

The publication of German Nobel Prize Laureate Gunter Grass’s poem, “Was gesagt werden muss” (What Must Be Said), has triggered a predictable avalanche of outrage, from Benjamin Netanyahu’s vitriolic condemnation of the poem to accusations by the Israeli Embassy to Germany and former Israeli prison guard Jeffrey Goldberg (the two are virtually indistinguishable these days) that Grass is guilty of a “blood libel.” Last weekend, the campaign against  Grass reached its crescendo when Israeli Interior Minister Eli Yishai designated him “persona non grata,” thus ranking the octogenarian scribe right behind Arab babies as one of the greatest existential threats to the Jewish state.

Grass’s service at age 17 in the Nazi regime’s Waffen SS has provided an easy line of attack for those seeking to dull the impact of his poem. New York Times Jerusalem Bureau Chief Ethan Bronner quoted Israeli columnist Anshel Pfeffer’s claim that Grass’s service in the Nazi regime’s Waffen SS “disqualified him from criticizing the descendants of those Jews for developing a weapon of last resort that is the insurance policy against someone finishing the job his organization began.” Pfeffer, by the way, is the same writer who boldly declared almost a year ago that “Israel must stop overplaying the Holocaust card.”

Like the rest of Grass’s assailants, Pfeffer omitted the fact that Grass was forcibly conscripted into the German military in 1944 (just as Pfeffer was drafted into the IDF, an occupying army to which Bronner’s son volunteered), serving as a Panzer tank gunner during the last stages of the war. Grass may be no more of a Nazi than Pope Benedict XVI, who was conscripted against his will into the Hitler Youth, but when have Zionists ever let historical nuance get in the way of a campaign to muzzle critics of Israeli policy?

Like Jimmy Carter and Desmond Tutu before him, Grass stands to suffer serious damage to his legacy for daring to say what must be said. But his poem will endure simply because he has opened up a debate of unprecedented scale on the perverse special relationship between Germany and Israel. Grass wrote:

my own country,

guilty of primal and unequalled crimes,

for which time and again it must be tasked –

once again in pure commerce,

though with quick lips we declare it

reparations, wants to send

Israel another submarine –

one whose specialty is to deliver

warheads capable of ending all life

where the existence of even one

nuclear weapon remains unproven…

Here Grass referred to Germany’s sale of a Dolphin class submarine to Israel at a deep discount subsidized by German taxpayers. As I wrote at Al Akhbar English, Israel requested that Germany widen the torpedo tubes of its submarines to accomodate the launching of tactical nuclear missiles at Iran’s nuclear facilities. So Grass was essentially correct: German citizens were corralled into providing Israel with a mobile delivery platform for its massive nuclear weapons arsenal, which it maintains without any international supervision. And they were compelled to do so out of Holocaust guilt — as Reuters’ Israel correspondent Dan Williams wrote, “as part of Berlin’s commitment to shoring up a Jewish state founded in the wake of the Holocaust.”

If Grass got anything wrong, it was the difference between tactical nuclear missiles, which are designed to deliver a massive blow to a concentrated area, and the kind of nuclear bombs that killed hundreds of thousands in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Tactical nuclear weapons may not be “capable of ending all life,” as Grass wrote, but they would represent the first deployment of nuclear missiles since World War II. On the other hand, as the Center for Strategic and International Studies noted in a study on the consequences of an Israeli strike on Iran, “Any strike on [Iran's] Bushehr Nuclear Reactor will cause the immediate death of thousands of people living in or adjacent to the site, and thousands of subsequent cancer deaths or even up to hundreds of thousands depending on the population density along the contamination plume.”

—————–

Today is the 64th anniversary of the massacre carried out in Deir Yassin by the Stern Gang/Irgun militias led by future Israeli Prime Ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir. Since a theme of this post is Zionist exploitation of the Jewish genocide in Europe, here is a little known fact: According to Shimon Tzabar, a journalist, artist, and leading figure in the anti-Zionist Israeli group Matzpen, the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Aharanoth claimed Nazi troops were present in the Palestinian village at the time. “In Deir-Yassin there were soldiers of regular foreign armies, including Nazis with swastika emblems,” Yedioth Aharanoth reporter Eliahu Amikam wrote in August 1960. “Among the corpses there were Iraqis, Syrians and Yugoslavs lying in their military uniform. Swastika ribbons were torn off their sleeves.”

This was originally published at Al Akhbar English.

Update/correction: I received the following note today from Peter Beinart explaining why his East Bay appearance was cancelled: “[The East Bay JCC] pulled out because a JVP person was moderator and then when there were no sponsors who were Zionist and anti-full BDS, I pulled out. I did that sadly–cause I agree with JVP on the awfulness of the occupation–but given my strong opposition to BDS targeting all of Israel, it didn’t make sense for me to speak to a forum in which there was not one anti-BDS organization sponsoring.”

Last week, when Peter Beinart embarked on a tour to promote his new book, “The Crisis of Zionism,” leading pro-Israel figures initiated an assault that was as hysterical as it was predictable. The campaign scored its first victory on March 23, when Bay Area pro-Israel groups including the Jewish Federation of the East Bay successfully pressured the East Bay Jewish Community Federation (the same group that helped block a Gaza children’s art exhibition last year) to withdraw its sponsorship of East Bay Jewish Community Center to cancel Beinart’s scheduled appearance. The pressure began when Jonathan Wornick, a Jewish Federation board member, took to Facebook to urge his friends in the local pro-Israel community to call for pulling out the cancellation of Beinart’s talk. “Write or call the East Bay JCC and tell them to REMOVE THEIR SPONSORSHIP of this event,” Wornick demanded.

After trashing Beinart and the sponsors of his talk, Wornick opened a Facebook thread mocking the family of Trayvon Martin, the black teenager killed by a neighborhood vigilante for no apparent reason other than being black. At the end of the thread, Wornick offered a list of hypothetical situations that would provoke him to shoot someone to death. He added: “and of course i’d shoot anyone anywhere if they were yelling allahu akbar! [sic]”

Below is Wornick’s call to ban Beinart:

After extended ranting about Beinart, Wornick linked to an article reporting the vigilante-killer George Zimmerman’s claim that his teen victim punched him. “So now that the facts have come out…are you proud of yourselves for jumping to conclusions?” Wornick railed.

Several screeds later, Wornick descended into murderous fantasies:

Wornick seems to have a penchant for extreme tirades. In March 2011, he published the following rant on his Facebook page:

“When will it end? Kill or be killed? Radical Islam, or, maybe all Islam is the problem. It’s a backward, misogynistic, hateful, anti-democratic, ant-semetic, and corrupt. We need to expose this to the western world and get people to realize that NOT ALL CULTURES ARE EQUAL. Islam, if allowed will spread and destroy all Western values. In order to stop films like this we need to stop the spread of Islam. Period.”

Though Wornick’s Islamophobic screed was publicly exposed, the East Bay Jewish Federation took no action against him. There is no reason to believe they will do anything this time, either. Thus important pillars of the Jewish establishment continue to confirm Beinart’s trenchant critique of them.

By the way, I have substantial criticisms of Beinart’s book which I will make known in the days ahead and in a review for the Journal of Palestine Studies. Mark Levine seems to share my opinions. Read his excellent review at Al Jazeera English.

This was cross-posted at Al Akhbar English.

Israeli Channel 10 military anchor Alon Ben David stands beside a graphic reading, "Death toll: Gaza, 25; Israel, 0" (via Ami Kaufman at 972mag.com)

I discussed Israel’s real motives for its recent attacks on the Gaza Strip and talked about my reporting on Israel-Palestine with Citizen Radio hosts Allison Kilkenny and Jamie Kilstein.

Citizen Radio happens to be one of the most refreshing and authentically progressive radio shows I’ve listened to. Kilkenny and Kilstein deserve enormous credit for bringing the issue of Gaza to their listeners.

Listen to my interview here.

I recently spoke to Alternet’s Joshua Holland about law and politics in Israel. Our conversation focused on the image of Israel as a Western style democracy coping with legitimate security concerns versus the reality of Israel as an ethnocratic state managing its demographic peril through authoritarian measures approved by the Jewish majority. The discussion can be heard here. Below is a transcript via Alternet:

Joshua Holland: Max, I don’t want to talk about Iran today. I don’t want to talk about the Israeli lobby in the United States, and I don’t want to talk about the Occupation. I want to talk about something I don’t think gets enough attention in this country, which is the sharp rightward turn of the Israeli government.

One of the great non-sequiturs of our political discourse is that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. And I say it’s a great non-sequitur because it’s usually used as a response to, for example, criticism of the Occupation. You say this Occupation is terrible, and people say it’s the only democracy in the Middle East.

Anyway, Tzipi Livni, the leader of the opposition Kadima Party, accused Benjamin Netanyahu recently of, “an attempt to transform Israel into a type of dictatorship.” Kadima lawmakers said that recent legislation passed by the Knesset represented, “the gravest challenge to democracy since the establishment of the state in 1948.” Tell me about the sharp rightward lurch. When did this happen, because I remember when I was a kid Israel was almost a socialist country.

Max Blumenthal: Well, by not wanting to talk about Iran you’re an anti-Semite and I condemn that.

JH: Max, I’m a self-loathing Jew — please get this straight.

MB: Part of Netanyahu’s goal in focusing on Iran is taking the Palestinian question off the table, and so it’s good that you’re talking about this. Israel has never been a democracy in the sense that we think about a democracy. It’s a settler, colonial state that privileges the Jewish majority, which it created through violent methods of demographic manipulation over the indigenous Palestinian outclass.

That’s true even inside Israel. So when you hear people like Tzipi Livni — who is for now the head of the Kadima Party but soon to be ousted, and actually came out of the Likud Party and was aide to Ariel Sharon – when you hear liberal Zionists, people on the Zionist left, warning that Israel is turning into a fascist state what they’re talking is the occupation laws creeping back over the green line, and that these right-wing elements are actually starting to crack down on the democratic rights that have been afforded to the Jewish majority inside Israel. So Jews who are left-wingers, who are dissidents and speak out against state policy are actually beginning to feel a slight scintilla of the kind of oppression that Palestinians have felt since the foundation of the state of Israel. That’s where this criticism is coming from.

I think we really need to get beyond the discourse of occupation and the discourse of fascism, and instead to talk about institutional discrimination and apartheid, which is what has been present since the foundation of the state of Israel.

JH: Now I want to talk about some of the specific measures that have been proposed, some of which have passed. There are some things that have been pulled back or tabled temporarily due to international pressure, and other have actually gotten through and become law. Tell be about the crackdown on NGOs.

MB: Well first of all, all of these laws we’re going to talk about — there’s a new anti-democratic law every week, and these are mostly advanced by right-wing parties — are applying sinew to a pre-existing skeleton that was created upon the establishment of the state Israel and has maintained the colonial relationship between Jews and Palestinians.

One of the most extreme of these new laws, and there are several laws targeting human rights NGOs inside Israel like B’Tselem, is designed to force them to reveal who their foreign funders are, thereby making it easy to portray them as traitorous to the Jewish state of Israel. These are laws pushed mostly by Avigdor Lieberman’s mostly Russian Yisrael Beiteinu party, but Netanyahu has given a lot of verbal support, rhetorical support for punishing NGOs, even attacking NGOs like the Association for Civil Rights in Israel.

Then you have to recognize that these are organizations that really represent the Zionist left in Israel. These are people who believe in a Jewish state who run these NGOs, and they go to the occupied territories and document abuses by the Israeli army because they want Israel out of the West Bank. They want a partition, which I think is no longer possible. So the attack on them is really to consolidate Israel’s hold the West Bank, and in turn what they’ve done is create a sense among the Zionist left, among the enlightened public in Israel that they are victims of a kind of fascist onslaught.

JH: Now this measure specifically goes after leftist human rights organizations, but it is on its surface ostensibly content-neutral. My understanding is that the reason it effectively targets NGOs on the left is that they rely on overseer funding from organizations like the European Union, whereas the right-wing non-governmental organizations are generally funded by private donors and domestic sources.

MB: Right, but that’s false. I was actually a witness to a Knesset debate in which some left-wing members of the Knesset demanded that the bill be politically neutral, which would then force groups like Im Tirtzu, which is a right-wing student group which has created blacklists of supposedly traitorous professors on Israeli campuses, to disclose its funding from groups like Pastor John Hagee, who is the head of Christians United for Israel and the leading Christian Zionist figure in Israel. So these pro-settlement organizations and right-wing organizations are also getting foreign funding, but it’s clearly targeted politically at left-wing groups.

JH: What is the Nakba Law? Tell me about that.

MB: Well the Nakba refers to the ongoing dispossession of Palestinians, which began with the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians in 1947 and 1948 to make way for a demographically contiguous Jewish state. It is forbidden in Arab schools in Israel for teachers to teach about the Nakba or to teach the Palestinian narrative. Now through legislation proposed by Yisrael Beiteinu, this ultra-nationalist party run by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman which controls 18 seats in the Knesset out of 120, there’s been a proposal which has been approved and written into law that applies financial penalties for anyone associated with an NGO or a nonprofit organization who observes the ceremonies associated with the Nakba where Palestinians mourn this dispossession. This is an attack on the Arab sector and their civil society inside Israel. It’s designed basically to defund them and to consolidate their image even further as a fifth column or a Trojan horse for Arab nationalism inside Israel.

JH: There’s increasing calls to boycott the occupied territories. A law has been passed, I believe has been passed and is on the books, banning calls for boycotting Israel or, “any of its settlements built in occupied territory.” Tell me about the details on this one.

MB: There’s a movement called the BDS movement, the movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel, which has had a lot of success in forcing businesses to move out of the Occupied Territories. It also calls for Israel to obey international law, which challenges Israel’s status as a Jewish exclusivist state. It’s considered a threat to the Jewish state of Israel, and legislation has been enacted and approved by the prime minister after passing through the Knesset to establish civil penalties for anyone who calls for BDS who is a citizen of Israel.

So if I’m a citizen of Israel and I say that Israeli businesses who do business in the occupied territories should be boycotted; if I just say that or I write an op-ed in the newspaper about that, then any settler who runs a business in the West Bank, any Israeli, can sue me even without evidence in a civil court and seek financial penalties claiming that I damaged his or her business. So the law is designed to create a chilling effect and attack freedom of speech, and it’s been approved and it’s on the books. I’m not sure if there are any other laws like this in Western democratic countries.

JH: Now I want to talk about another measure that I believe is on hold. You can tell me the status. According to Adrian Bloomfield in the Telegraph, “Members of the Kadima, the principal opposition party, waved black flags to mourn the death of democracy after Israel’s Parliament passed two bills that will tilt the balance of the country’s Supreme Court sharply to the right. The legislators involved had their flags confiscated before being expelled from the chamber.”

Tell me what’s going on with the courts.

MB: Well, the court has been tilting to the right since Aharon Barak, who attempted to create some kind of basic laws that protected human rights in Israel and the occupied territories. Barak by the way had always sided with the army and given it carte blanche to pretty much do what it wanted in the occupied territories. So these rulings were always just kind of suggestions. Now you have a Supreme Court that is increasingly packed with right-wing figures. For the first time there’s a kippah-wearing settler on the Supreme Court.

One of the things the Supreme Court recently did was it made permanent a law, which it had validated in 2003 temporarily, and was passed through the Knesset, called the law of Entry and Return. This law bans Palestinians who live in the West Bank from marrying Palestinians who are citizens of Israel or uniting with family members who live there. Israel has always said these kinds of rulings are for security purposes. They need to limit their freedom of movement for security reasons. Really, for the first time the Supreme Court’s ruling on this law acknowledged that demographics were the reason. They can’t allow more Palestinians to marry and form families inside Israel and maintain Israeli citizenship because the greatest threat to the Jewish and democratic state is gestating Arab fetuses.

JH: You say that the court has tilted to the right, but at the same time there have been a number of decisions in terms of land use issues that have gone against settlers. The increasingly conservative Knesset has talked about proposals to seek limits for who can petition the court. This is court-stripping, basically, closing the courthouse doors to litigants. Another law would require justices to have served in the Israeli military. What does that do, effectively?

MB: By requiring justices to have served in the Israeli military you prevent any Arabs from serving on the court. There’s one Arab there who is there for symbolic reasons like Clarence Thomas replacing Thurgood Marshall, and his rulings carry very little weight as a representative of the Arab sector inside Israel.

There was another ruling recently — you mentioned land rights in the West Bank — the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that Israel can annex or expropriate Palestinian land in the West Bank to establish quarries and conduct mining that will profit companies that exist inside Israel proper. Another occurrence in the Supreme Court recently was the Arab justice I mentioned refused to stand for Hatikvah, the Israeli national anthem, because it is an anthem that really is an ode to Jewish nationalism, which does not acknowledge the Arab minority inside Israel. There are now efforts in the Knesset to strip him of his position on the Supreme Court for doing that.

JH: And of course the definition of democracy is not only majority rule, but also protection of minorities.

Tell me about land use. I think this is a poorly understood issue. William Quandt of the University of Virginia said on NPR, “Israel was established as a state for Jews. It has a minority who of course has citizenship rights, but the specific way in which land is owned in Israel is predominately that the Jewish agency purchases land on behalf of the Jewish people, and then leases it out to its Jewish citizens.”

Can you unpack that for me?

MB: This is very complex. To understand apartheid in Israel you have to understand the land laws, which do not specifically refer to Arab or Jew. First of all, Palestinian citizens of Israel are citizens, but they have no national rights. On their ID cards it will identify them as Arab. On an Israeli Jew’s ID card it will identify them as Jewish. There is no Israeli national identity. It’s one of the only countries in the world like that. Palestinians who live inside Israel are unable to lease land because the land is controlled by the Israeli Land Authority, which is itself controlled by the Jewish National Fund.

Through legislation passed by the Knesset the Jewish National Fund controls seven out of the 13 seats on the Israeli Land Authority’s Board, a majority. The Jewish National Fund’s mission, it says it on its Web site, is to provide land for the Jewish people, which means it’s Jews-only land. So the JNF, Jewish National Fund, officially controls only 20 percent of land in Israel, which is some of its best and most arable land. But through its control of the Israeli Land Authority, it actually controls far more.

The state of Israel has not allowed a single Arab town to be established since its foundation. The only Arab towns it has allowed to be created have been to, “concentrate the Bedouin population” after they ethnically cleanse them from their land in the Negev desert, something that the Jewish National Fund is currently doing right now with a village called Al-Araqeeb, a Bedouin village of people who are supposedly citizens of Israel. And their village has been demolished 32 times. I’ve seen it be wiped off the map. They’re planning to build a pine forest funded by an evangelical television station called God TV. In place of the Bedouins they will place small Jewish communities for army veterans who have just had children. The Knesset recently passed a law called the Communities Acceptance Law to kind of consolidate the exclusive nature of these communities. It allows communities of under 500 people in Israel to discriminate on the basis of ethnicity.

That’s a very condensed version of Israeli land law. To say that Palestinian citizens of Israel are second-class citizens really misses the point. They have absolutely no national rights and no property rights.

JH: That’s Max Blumenthal talking to us about the only democracy in the Middle East. Max, thank you so much for joining us, we’re about out of time.

On Al Jazeera’s The Stream, I discuss the Israel Lobby’s use of blackwashing tactics to stifle allegations that Israel engages in the crime of apartheid:

At Penn BDS, I discussed Zionist hasbara past and present during my panel with Sarah Schulman:

The Zionist Response to BDS from PennBDS on Vimeo.

This weekend’s One State Conference at Harvard University has prompted predictable cries of outrage and calls for cancellation from the Israel lobby and its allies in Congress. Senator Scott Brown, a Republican from Massachusetts, is the latest Friend of Israel to join the chorus of condemnation, calling for Harvard to ban the conference altogether. The campaign of intimidation and smears highlights America’s pro-Israel community as the political element most devoted to suppressing free speech and academic inquiry on campuses across the United States.

Abraham Foxman, the national director for the Anti-Defamation League, is at the helm of the campaign to censor the discussion at Harvard of equal rights in Israel-Palestine. In an op-ed for the Boston Globe, Foxman wrote, “Let’s be frank. The term ‘one-state solution’’ is a euphemism for the destruction of the Jewish state of Israel.” He attacked the conference participants for their ” alleged concerns about Israel’s ‘occupation’’ and treatment of the Palestinians,” claiming that their true goal was to “make anti-Semitism more acceptable and more likely.”

In light of Foxman’s assaults on the academic discussion of equal rights for all living under Israel’s control, it is worth recalling an angry letter he sent to the editors of the New York Times on June 20, 1984. In the letter, Foxman took issue with an editorial the Times published calling for a two state solution that would have required Israel to give up control of the West Bank. Foxman criticized the authors for casting Israel’s undemocratic control of the West Bank in a negative light, insisting that Israeli control of the Palestinians was not “deleterious to [Israel's] well being.” And in the end, he suggested that Israel should consider”fully integrating the Palestinian Arabs into the Israeli body politics.” This is the very concept that will be discussed and promoted at the One State Conference this weekend at Harvard.

Below the fold is the full text of Foxman’s letter, which I retrieved from Lexis-Nexis:

To the Editor:

The debate as to whether Israel’s control over the West Bank is irreversible or not is a legitimate and important one. Unfortunately, the writers you chose to conduct that debate on your Op-Page, David Shaham and Geoffrey Aronson, share the assumption that Israel’s control of the West Bank is bad.

The issue of reversibility aside, Times readers should not be given the impression that Israelis or those who write about Israel are united in thinking that Israeli control of the West Bank is deleterious to its well-being. Indeed, a vibrant and ofttimes emotional debate is taking place among the people of Israel as to what would be good for Israel – considering Israel’s narrow security options in that small area, considering the arms buildup of its neighbors, considering Israel’s historical and religious ties to the area and considering whether fully integrating the Palestinian Arabs into the Israeli body politic is the best thing for the country.

The tragedy of the West Bank has been the tragedy of the region for 35 years. While Israelis debate the wisdom of a particular regional policy, the Arabs continue to reject peace and negotiations, making the debate in Israel abstract rather than real.

Your biggest contribution would be to find people who would advocate that the Arabs finally come to the peace table. ABRAHAM H. FOXMAN New York, June 13, 1984

The writer is associate national director of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith.

“US President Barack Obama is ‘naïve’ and needs to face up to the threat presented by the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood across the Middle East, Israel’s National Security Council concluded during a strategic discussion several days ago,” Israel Hayom reported.

The Israeli National Security Council consists of Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu’s closest advisers. And Israel Hayom is not just another right-leaning Israeli tabloid. Referred to by Israelis as the “Bibiton,” or Bibi’s mouthpiece, the paper is an instrument that gives him extraordinary political leverage. The obviously planted article in Israel Hayom rang like a bell sounding the start of Netanyahu’s own campaign in helping the Republican Party oust Obama from the White House.

Israel Hayom’s genesis demonstrates the depth of Netanyahu’s connections in Republican circles. It was created by one of Netanyahu’s top financial supporters, a Las Vegas-based casino tycoon named Sheldon Adelson, who is also a major donor to the conservative wing of the Republican Party. Adelson’s closest relationship is with former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, a longtime ally of Netanyahu who has been running a rancorous campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.

Netanyahu’s less than subtle intervention has become an open issue in Israeli politics. Opposition leader Tzipi Livni of the Kadima Party has criticized Netanyahu for damaging the US-Israeli relationship. “Netanyahu spoke about consensus,” Livni said in May, “and if there is a consensus in Israel, it’s that the relationship with the US is essential to Israel, and a prime minister that harms the relationship with the US over something unsubstantial is harming Israel’s security and deterrence.”

But Livni’s warning has been ignored. Rather than hesitating, the prime minister and his inner circle are moving full steam ahead in their political shadow campaign whose ultimate goal is to remove Obama. Bibi’s war against Obama is unprecedented. While Israeli prime ministers have tried to help incumbent presidents, none have ever waged a full-scale campaign to overthrow them.

Netanyahu has engaged enthusiastic allies in the Republican Congress, led by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, and within the right-wing media. His neoconservative allies in Washington are launching a “Super PAC” to generate emotional attack ads against Obama and any candidate that might be an obstacle to his policies. And his campaign has even broadened into an attempt to discredit The New York Times, whose editorial page and foreign policy columnists, Thomas Friedman and Roger Cohen, have been critical of him.

Netanyahu’s shadow campaign is intended to be a factor in defeating Obama and electing a Republican in his place. He opposed Obama’s early demand to freeze settlements on the West Bank as a precondition for reviving the peace process, a process since the Oslo Accord that Netanyahu has attempted to stall or sabotage, despite his signing of the Wye Agreement under pressure from President Clinton. Since his adamant stand against the settlement freeze, Netanyahu has undermined every effort to engage the peace process. He appears dead set on consolidating Greater Israel, or what many Israelis call “Judea and Samaria,” and has signaled a strong desire to attack Iran.

By all accounts, Netanyahu’s personal chemistry with Obama is toxic. Obama bristles at his belligerence. But Netanyahu’s hostility has reaped rewards from him, having stopped the peace process in its tracks. The latest effort by the Quartet seems doomed to failure. And Netanyahu’s rejectionism has put Obama on the defense. Most of the US Jewish establishment has remained a bulwark for Bibi’s policies. Obama, meanwhile, has been forced to declare America’s “unshakable bond” with Israel, even as Bibi thwarts Obama’s initiatives and attacks him in the Israeli press.

As political strategy, by tainting Obama as less than full-throated in support of Israel, Netanyahu bolsters the Republican themes that the president “apologizes” for US power, is weak on national security, and is an agent of “decline.” By depicting Obama as “weak” on Israel, Netanyahu’s campaign excites right-wing Jews and evangelical Christians, who overwhelmingly accept the biblical claims of the Jewish state’s historical right to Greater Israel, Judea and Samaria. Bibi’s deepest attack line against Obama merges theology with ideology.
His campaign against Obama is a high-stakes gambit that will almost certainly color US-Israeli relations well past Election Day. Already, Netanyahu has succeeded in polarizing the political debate, as his agenda is singularly aligned with the Republican Party. Yet Bibi’s short-term objectives are rapidly turning the US-Israel relationship, at least under his aegis, into a partisan issue, another litmus test of conservative ideology rather than national interest.

The personal connection

Netanyahu’s American orientation is partly rooted in his personal history. Raised in suburban Philadelphia, his father, Benzion Netanyahu, was the former press secretary for the godfather of right-wing revisionist Zionism, Zeev Jabotinsky. Benzion Netanyahu (original name: Benzion Mileikowsky) spent his most consequential years in New York raising money for Jabotinsky and the rightist Irgun militia in Palestine. When he returned to Israel to launch a political career, the elder Netanyahu was rejected by Menachem Begin, the Likud Party leader, who, as right wing as he was, considered him dangerously extreme (Arabs are “an enemy by essence,” the elder Netanyahu said recently). But the son triumphed where his father failed, rising at first on his fluency in American political culture, a frequent guest on ABC News’ Nightline and other US broadcast news programs, eventually winning the chairmanship of the Likud Party in 1992.

The following year, Netanyahu published a political manifesto in the form of a memoir, A Durable Peace, edited with a helping hand from American neoconservative Douglas Feith. The book was tailored to the sensibilities of an American audience, particularly one with conservative Republican tendencies. In a revealing passage, Netanyahu warned readers that the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state could lead Latinos to establish a “second Mexico” in the American Southwest: “These [Latinos] would demand not merely equality before the law, or naturalization, or even Spanish as a first language,” he wrote. “Instead they would say that since they form a local majority in the territory [which was forcibly taken from Mexico in the war of 1848], they deserve a state of their own.”
In 1996, when Netanyahu launched an underdog bid for Prime Minister against the grand old man of the Labor Party establishment, Shimon Peres, he contracted the services of Arthur Finkelstein, a reclusive New York-based Republican political consultant. Finkelstein was infamous for orchestrating a come-from-behind victory in 1992 for Jesse Helms, a radical neo-Confederate senator from North Carolina, by race baiting Helms’ black opponent. Finkelstein earned a fortune working for anti-gay candidates like Helms, even while planning to marry his long-term boyfriend.

Netanyahu’s campaign against Peres was defined by Finkelstein’s trademark slashing tactics. Frightening imagery flooded Israeli airwaves. Among Netanyahu’s most successful Finkelstein-crafted attack lines was, “Peres will divide Jerusalem.” Even the positive slogans had a negative subtext. “Bibi is good for the Jews,” hinted darkly at the de facto coalition Peres had constructed with Arab-based political parties. Finkelstein’s media assault on Peres, with its suggestion that he and his assassinated predecessor, Yitzhak Rabin, had stabbed Israel in the back, propelled his client to a narrow victory.

The new Prime Minister relied on a kitchen cabinet of advisers from neoconservative think tanks, especially the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Shalem Center. In 1996, two of these advisers, former Reagan administration Pentagon officials, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith, produced a document for Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, a once influential base of neocon activity, called “A Clean Break.” The paper advocated overthrowing Saddam Hussein and attacking Syria “as a prelude to a redrawing of the map of the Middle East.” (Feith was appointed a Defense Department official in the George W Bush administration and became a fervent defender of the Iraq invasion, leading the effort to fabricate evidence of Saddam Hussein’s operational links with al-Qaeda. General Tommy Frank, who led the invasion, called Feith “the f**king stupidest guy on the face of the earth.”)

Backing down to Clinton

President Bill Clinton was, according to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)’s then-President Steve Grossman, “the most pro-Israeli [president] in America’s history” – and he was committed to fulfilling the Oslo Accords on his watch. He developed an unusually close relationship with Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, coming to see him as something of a father figure. When Rabin was assassinated by a right-wing Orthodox Jewish extremist, Peres briefly took over, but was soon defeated by Netanyahu. Clinton demanded that Netanyahu begin to withdraw Israeli troops from small portions of land in the occupied West Bank. With pressure mounting, Netanyahu flung himself into the American political wars.

In January 1998, at the beginning of the impeachment scandal, Netanyahu appeared at a rally organized by Reverend Jerry Falwell, a right-wing evangelical Christian icon, who had produced an elaborate conspiracy video accusing Clinton of drug trafficking and complicity in the murder of Vince Foster, his White House deputy legal counsel and old friend, who had, in fact, committed suicide.

Standing beside Falwell before an audience of hundreds of evangelical activists and right-wing Jews, Netanyahu vowed in his signature basso profondo voice never to “divide” Jerusalem, and proclaimed that the “Jewish people” were being “vilified and scorned and misrepresented.” After the rally, Netanyahu shuttled between meetings with conservative pundits and the broadcast studios of Fox News and right-wing Christian TV networks, stirring up his support among America’s most zealous opponents of the peace process.

The most prominent among Netanyahu’s newfound conservative allies was then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich, an instigator of the impeachment. That April, at a meeting of the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles, Gingrich condemned Clinton’s attempts to pressure Netanyahu into land-for-peace concessions. “The idea that the President can propose a US map [regarding Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank] for a country he does not know is a disaster,” Gingrich said. Then he complained, “The Clinton administration has not held [Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser] Arafat’s feet to the fire.”

But, by October 1998, Netanyahu had all but caved to Clinton’s pressure. The man who once mocked “advocates of capitulation” now clasped hands with Arafat after a protracted conference at Wye, Maryland. Netanyahu agreed to redeploy Israeli troops from 13 percent of the West Bank, including most of Hebron. His sudden turnabout cost him key support inside Likud, provoking a Knesset vote for early elections. His right-wing base shattered, paving the path for a decisive victory for the Labor Party’s Ehud Barak, a former Israeli general favored and quietly supported by the Clinton administration.

Suddenly in the wilderness, Netanyahu plotted his path back by cultivating the right-wing in the US — the pundits, the Republican politicians, the big donors, Fox News. In 2007, he held a meeting with a small group of conservative activists emerging as key players in the conservative blogosphere. Among those present was Andrew Breitbart, who became a notorious hatchet man staging wild stunts and whose myriad websites routinely carry conspiratorial, racially charged attacks on Obama. Other figures at the meeting included conservative bloggers Scott Johnson, Jim Hoft and Jeff Emmanuel. “At our meeting we talked mostly about the dangers of the Iranian regime acquiring a nuclear bomb,” Johnson recalled, revealing his newly acquired foreign policy expertise. “It was a subject to which Netanyahu had obviously devoted great thought.”

Two years later, Netanyahu returned to the Prime Minister’s office at the head of an even more decidedly right-wing coalition than before government and was determined not to repeat his previous mistakes of “capitulating” to the peace process at the behest of an American president. Now he turned to the movement he had courted to help him undermine and humiliate Obama.

Humiliating Obama

In March 2010, when Obama dispatched Vice President Joseph Biden to Israel in a futile attempt to restart negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, Netanyahu appeared in Jerusalem at a massive rally of 1,000 evangelicals organized by Texas mega-church Pastor John Hagee, a leading Christian Zionist and sometime Holocaust revisionist whose End Times theology committed him to the vision of Greater Israel. Seated onstage beside Netanyahu was Israel’s Ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren (a neoconservative former Shalem Center fellow), and Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon, who had just snubbed a visiting delegation of leading Democratic members of Congress. Before the rapture-ready audience, Netanyahu proclaimed that Jerusalem would remain “the undivided, eternal capital of the Jewish people.”

At once, he authorized the construction of 1,600 new settlement units in occupied East Jerusalem over the stringent objections from the Obama administration. Though the move angered the White House, Ron Dermer, a top Netanyahu aide with close ties to leading Republicans in Washington, reassured the Prime Minister that Republicans would retake Congress. Netanyahu simply rejected Obama’s plea to freeze settlements and then rejected overtures to restart the peace process. In the 2010 mid-term elections, Republicans gained control of the House of Representatives.

While on a trip to New York days after the Republican victory, Netanyahu authorized another 1,000 more settlement units in East Jerusalem, a direct rebuke of Obama. That same day, Netanyahu held a meeting with the incoming House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, the only Jewish Republican in Congress, and a leader of the right-wing in the House Republican Conference. Cantor’s office produced a summary of the meeting for the media that contained the remarkably crude statement: Cantor promised Netanyahu that “the new Republican majority will serve as a check on the [Obama] Administration and what has been, up until this point, one party rule in Washington.”

In April 2011, Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner personally invited Netanyahu to speak before a joint session of Congress. He was interrupted 36 times by standing ovations – more than Obama during his State of the Union address – despite making such mind-boggling false claims as that the “vast majority” of Israeli settlers live in “neighborhoods in Jerusalem and greater Tel Aviv.”

With a rancorous, multi-billion dollar US presidential campaign certainly looming on the horizon, Netanyahu continued his pattern of making friends in the radical right’s media machine. Among them was Glenn Beck, a Mormon convert and former Fox News host, who had compared a major liberal Jewish religious denomination to radical Islamists and claimed that Obama has “a deep-seated hatred for white people.” Beck was admonished by the Anti-Defamation League and other mainstream Jewish groups for his anti-Semitic rants against George Soros, a major funder of liberal and Democratic Party-related organizations. In July 2011, Beck traveled to Israel to deliver a diatribe against liberal Israelis demonstrating against Netanyahu’s economic policies, labeling them patsies in a secret Islamist-Communist plot.

When the right-wing Zionist Organization of America honored Beck this November with a prize named after Sheldon Adelson and his wife, Miriam, Netanyahu displayed his gratitude in a videotaped tribute. “Glenn, you can be sure that if Sheldon and Miri Adelson put their name to something, it must stand for a lot. You stand for a lot…And I want to tell you how deeply we appreciate this stand of courage and integrity.”

Dear Sasha

In December, Thomas Friedman, the Pulitzer Prize winning former Jerusalem Bureau Chief for The New York Times and one of the few American columnists whose opinions seriously register in the Israeli media, published an uncharacteristically pointed critique of Netanyahu’s leadership. In Friedman’s column were two lines that incited the wrath and fury of the Prime Minister’s office. “I sure hope that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, understands that the standing ovation he got in Congress this year was not for his politics. That ovation was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.”

Neoconservative opinion makers exploded with orchestrated rage accusing Friedman of being a self-hating Jewish anti-Semite. In response, The New York Times gave Netanyahu an opportunity to respond on its opinion page.

But rather than accept the Times’ offer, Netanyahu dispatched Ron Dermer, his key emissary to the American political scene, especially to the conservative movement, now serving as a senior advisor on his staff, to issue what amounted to a declaration of war against the American newspaper of record. Dermer’s letter was extraordinary in its vitriolic, hostile and contemptuous tone. Nothing like it had ever existed before — a vicious official attack from the Prime Minister of Israel on the credibility of The New York Times. Perhaps only a little less surprising was that this major event received nearly no coverage in the American press.

In his scathing letter, Dermer accused the Times of “cavalierly defam[ing] our country,” claiming that 19 out of 20 op-eds published in the Times were “negative” (Dermer did not challenge their factual basis). He concluded, “it would seem as if the surest way to get an op-ed published in The New York Times these days, no matter how obscure the writer or the viewpoint, is to attack Israel.”

One of the remarkable aspects of Dermer’s letter was that it was addressed, “Dear Sasha.” Who is Sasha? Sasha Polakow-Suransky, a staff editor at the Times editorial page, is in charge of assigning pieces on foreign policy. Why did Dermer address his letter to Polakow-Suransky instead of to Andrew Rosenthal, the director of the Times editorial page? Was he singling out Polakow-Suransky because he revealed in his 2010 book, The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship With Apartheid South Africa, that Israel offered to sell nuclear warheads to South Africa’s apartheid government, a bombshell revelation that prompted furious denials from Israeli President Shimon Peres and Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor, embarrassing a country that still refuses to discuss its nuclear program in any public forums, and punishes those who do?

Netanyahu’s attack on the Times represented a significant new stage in his shadow war. He was drawing sharp new lines. By rebuking the paper, Netanyahu attempted to define its liberal Zionist, pro-peace process editorial line as hostile to Israeli security needs. And by default, he positioned Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, with its relentlessly anti-Obama, pro-Bibi op-ed page, as the only respectable forum for true friends of Israel.

Bibi’s man in Washington

More than any other candidate in the Republican presidential contest, Newt Gingrich has hewed to Netanyahu’s line on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In an interview with the cable TV Jewish Channel, Gingrich declared, “We’ve had an invented Palestinian people who are in fact Arabs and are historically part of the Arab community and they had a chance to go many places.” He added, “I see myself as, in many ways, to be pretty close to Bibi Netanyahu in thinking about the dangers of the world.”

In May 2010, when Gingrich’s presidential campaign was no more than the subject of guarded speculation, Israel Hayom, Bibi’s house organ, provided Gingrich with a Hebrew-language forum to assail Obama’s policies. The tabloid splashed a full page photo of a smiling Gingrich on its front page accompanied by the caption: “The former Chairman of the House of Representatives attacks the blindness of the Western Elites: ‘Evading the confrontation with Evil may bring a second Holocaust, the mistakes made by the White House will exact a terrible price.’”

Israel Hayom’s owner, Las Vegas Sands casino corporation chairman Sheldon Adelson, is America’s eighth wealthiest man. At the same time he was bankrolling Netanyahu’s career, Adelson also became Gingrich’s leading financial angel. The casino kingpin was introduced to Gingrich in 1996 through George Harris, a right-wing anti-tax activist and Clark County, Nevada Republican chairman who helped Adelson block a unionization bid at one of his casinos. Gingrich resigned from Congress in disgrace in 1999, forced out by Republicans, hiding his extramarital affair with a congressional staffer. Adelson stepped in as his financial godfather, pumping millions into the coffers of American Solutions for Winning the Future, an independent political committee that covered Gingrich’s extravagant travel expenses.

When Gingrich embarked on the presidential trail, George Harris became his campaign finance co-chair, representing Adelson by proxy. (Adelson’s Sands corporation is currently facing a federal criminal probe for allegedly bribing foreign officials). And when Gingrich provoked a hailstorm of criticism for claiming the Palestinians were “invented,” Adelson publicly defended him. “Read the history of those who call themselves Palestinians, and you will hear why [Newt] Gingrich said recently that the Palestinians are an invented people,” Adelson told a group of American Jews visiting Israel on a program he funds, Taglit-Birthright Israel.

Despite Gingrich’s dismal finish in the Iowa caucuses, the opening contest in the Republican contest, Adelson has staunchly remained on his side, donating US$5 million to a Super PAC created to support Gingrich’s campaign in the key primary state of South Carolina, his Armageddon.

Bibi’s Super PAC

When Gingrich quits the race, Netanyahu will not be without a candidate. He can count on former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney to carry the neoconservative banner all the way to Election Day. Of Romney’s 22 campaign foreign policy advisers, 15 worked in the administration of George W Bush, and six were original members of the Project for the New American Century, the neoconservative group that called for regime change in Iraq.

Romney’s own Super PAC, Restore Our Future, credited with destroying Gingrich’s hopes in Iowa through a relentless barrage of negative ads, is financed in part by Mel Sembler, a Florida-based a multi-millionaire shopping mall developer and veteran Republican fundraiser, appointed the US ambassador to Italy by President George W Bush. Sembler was mired in scandal when the federal government revoked the license of a chain of adolescent treatment centers he founded after former teenage patients complained they were sexually abused, psychologically tortured and humiliated during sadistic behavior modification programs. Less well known is the financial largesse Sembler has bestowed on neoconservative outfits supporting Netanyahu’s policies. He is also a close friend of Adelson.

In November 2011, President Obama and French President Nicolas Sarkozy commiserated about Netanyahu, unaware that their voices were picked up by a live microphone. “You’re fed up with him, but I have to deal with him even more often than you,” Obama complained to Sarkozy. Romney seized on the episode as proof of Obama’s disqualifying leadership and proof of his own fitness for office. “We have here yet another reason why we need new leadership in the White House,” Romney declared. (Joining the chorus of pro-Bibi attacks on Obama were the Netanyahu-approved bloggers Breitbart, Hoft, and Johnson).

In ramping up the effort to turn Israel into an anti-Obama wedge issue, a group of neoconservative Netanyahu allies have started a independent political committee called the Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI). The group’s name was inspired by the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe, an organization that Netanyahu’s father, Benzion, helped lead during World War II in part to raise money for the right-wing Irgun militia in Palestine. The group’s board comprises a Who’s Who of Washington neoconservatives. It is directed by Noah Pollak, a former assistant editor of Azure, the in-house journal of the Adelson-funded Shalem Center, several of whose fellows are now in Netanyahu’s inner circle of advisers. Pollak was credited with helping the Israeli army launch a YouTube channel to rebut accusations that it committed war crimes in the Gaza Strip and elsewhere.

This month, the ECI established a Super PAC in order to use unlimited corporate contributions for political attack ads. The group’s first major presidential campaign ad buy targeted Representative Ron Paul (R-Texas), a fervently anti-war libertarian candidate who has called for an end to the special relationship between Israel and the United States. Scheduled to air in the key primary state of South Carolina, where the Republican electorate is dominated by right-wing evangelicals, the ad features Gary Bauer, an ECI board member, Christian right leader and failed presidential candidate staring into the camera, warning that “Ron Paul’s conservatism is isolationist and conspiratorial.” (Bauer endorsed former Senator Rick Santorum, a right-wing Catholic, who has declared, “All the people that live in the West Bank are Israelis. They are not Palestinians. There is no Palestinian. This is Israeli land.”)

Jewish concerns

While Obama and the Democratic Party elite have kept silent in the face of Netanyahu’s American shadow war, its polarizing effects have prompted resistance from an unexpected place: the Jewish-American establishment. Weeks of Republican attacks on Obama for his supposed molly-coddling of Israel enemies caused deep discomfort in the offices of mainstream Jewish groups, which have lobbied for decades to consolidate support for Israel in both major American political parties. With Israel deliberately being shaped into a campaign wedge issue, some Jewish leaders worried that rank-and-file Democratic voters would begin to sour on the US-Israel special relationship.

In October, two of the US’s oldest and most prominent Jewish organizations, the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee, released a “National Pledge for Unity” urging politicians, religious leaders and other Jewish groups aimed at preserving bipartisan support for Israel. “We want the discourse on US support for Israel to avoid the sometimes polarizing debates and political attacks that have emerged in recent weeks, as candidates have challenged their opponents’ pro-Israel bone fides or questioned the current administration’s foreign policy approach vis-a-vis Israel,” declared Anti-Defamation League national director Abraham Foxman. “The last thing America and Israel need right now is the distractions of having Israel bandied about as a tool for waging political attacks.”

The Emergency Committee for Israel and the Republican Jewish Coalition, an Adelson-funded, pro-Netanyahu group that claims to raise “tens of millions” of dollars for Republican candidates each election cycle, not only rejected the unity pledge, but accused its authors of attempting to suppress pro-Israel activism. In a defiant statement by its chairman, neoconservative activist William Kristol, the ECI proclaimed, “This attempt to silence those of us who have ‘questioned the current administration’s foreign policy approach vis-a-vis Israel’ will re-energize us.” Thus the show went on. The effort to lower the temperature only became another occasion for the pro-Netanyahu operation to raise the heat. As their anti-Obama campaign intensifies, Israel is being merged seamlessly with traditional right-wing wedge issues such as abortion, gay marriage and the menace of immigration.

The deepening wedge

In his writings and in the company of his inner circle, Netanyahu has expressed almost as much disdain for liberal Jewish supporters of Israel as he has for the professed enemies of the Jewish state. His book, A Durable Peace, is filled with attacks on Israeli advocates of a negotiated peace with the Palestinians, accusing them of “cloying sentimentalism” and falling victim to the “relentless Jewish desire to see an end to struggle.” Netanyahu was said to privately fume about Obama’s Jewish senior advisor, David Axelrod, and his then-Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, an ardent liberal Zionist whose father was born and raised in Israel. Netanyahu reportedly called them “self-hating Jews.”

After two decades of cultivating the culture warriors of the American right as allies against those seeking “an end to struggle,” Netanyahu is beginning to see results. He initiated and propelled a polarization process that has enabled Republicans to use Israel as a cudgel for attacking their opponents, and did so over the objections of powerful mainstream Jewish-American interests. Haim Malka, a senior fellow for the center-right Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, predicted in a recent paper: “The partisan wedge is likely to deepen, posing considerable challenges to Israel and the US-Israeli partnership.”

In the past, America’s Israel lobby sold the US-Israel alliance as a marriage of two vibrant democracies united by shared liberal values. In the current environment of heightened polarization, the special relationship is increasingly marketed to Americans as a united front of besieged bastions of Western civilization against an incipient Islamic onslaught. Rapture ready evangelicals, right-wing ultra-nationalists, and Republican Jews are far more likely to be attracted to this sort of alliance than cosmopolitan liberals. And this may be exactly the way Netanyahu wants it.

But he is far from confident that he can dislodge Obama. Steeling himself for a possible second Obama term, Netanyahu has signaled his intention to move up the date of Israel’s national election. Hanan Krystal, a political analyst for Israel Radio, explained Netanyahu’s possible motives to Reuters: “At the highest echelons, they have long been saying that if Obama is elected for a second term, the carrot will be replaced by a stick.”