Ch 3 - Israel first

“We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq … swung American public opinion in our favor.”

     -- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, April 16, 2008

On January 13, 2012, the digital edition of Foreign Policy published Mark Perry’s article “False Flag.” The subtext read: “A series of CIA memos describes how Israeli Mossad [Israel’s spy/espionage service] agents posed as American spies to recruit members of the terrorist organization Jundallah to fight their covert war against Iran.” One small section leaps off the page:

The [American] officials did not know whether the Israeli program to recruit and use Jundallah is ongoing. Nevertheless, they were stunned by the brazenness of the Mossad’s efforts. “It’s amazing what the Israelis thought they could get away with,” the intelligence officer said. “Their recruitment activities were nearly in the open. They apparently didn’t give a damn what we thought.”

According to US intelligence, the Israeli spies were equipped with American money and fake American passports, and posed as CIA agents—known as a “false flag” operation— to recruit Jundallah terrorists from Pakistan to attack Iranians. Jundallah is a radical Sunni Muslim group, while Iran is 95-percent Shia Muslim. The Sunni Muslims and the Shia Muslims are the two main—and opposing—sects within the Islamic religion. Iran is a declared enemy of the United States, a sworn enemy of Israel, and a target for certain radical Sunni groups. For Israel, finding a way to attack Iran without being condemned as an aggressor was highly desirable. So the Israeli spies posed as Americans to recruit Sunnis to their cause, putting Americans in peril, as Perry wrote:

[My article] “sparked White House concerns that Israel’s program was putting Americans at risk,” the [American] Intelligence officer told me. “There’s no question that the US has cooperated with Israel in Intelligence-gathering operations against the Iranians, but this was different. No matter what anyone thinks, we’re not in the business of assassinating Iranian officials or killing Iranian civilians.”

However, Israel is in that business and it’s well documented. Perry’s article continued:

Israel’s relationship with Jundallah continued to roil [piss off] the Bush administration until the day it left office, this same Intelligence officer noted. Israel’s activities jeopardized the administration’s fragile relationship with Pakistan, which was coming under intense pressure from Iran to crack down on Jundallah. It also undermined US claims that it would never fight terror with terror, and invited attacks on US personnel.

“It’s easy to understand why Bush was so angry,” a former intelligence officer said. “After all, it’s hard to engage with a foreign government if they’re convinced you’re killing their people. Once you start doing that, they feel they can do the same.” A senior administration official vowed to “take the gloves off” with Israel, according to a US intelligence officer. But the United States did nothing—a result that the officer attributed to “political and bureaucratic inertia [a tendency to remain unchanged].”

There were general similarities to the war in Iraq. Israel wants an enemy removed, they can’t, won’t, and don’t do it, so they get the US to do it for them, regardless of the potential 

negative and deadly consequences for Americans.

On Saturday, August 28, 2004, the Washington Post published an article by Bradley Graham and Thomas E. Ricks entitled “FBI Probe Targets Pentagon Official.” 

The official in question was Larry Franklin, who worked as a desk officer in what’s known as the Near East and South Asia Bureau, one of the regional policy sections of the Pentagon. He was being investigated for allegedly passing classified information to Israel. Franklin, who was Jewish, had a boss named William J. Luti, also Jewish, who previously helped run the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, which worked on policy for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. According to Graham and Ricks, 

... that office is one of two Pentagon offices that Bush administration critics have claimed were set up by Defense Department hawks to bypass the CIA and other Intelligence agencies, providing information that President Bush and others used to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.

Another Jew, Douglas J. Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy, ran that exaggeration department. His boss was Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, who was also Jewish. Wolfowitz, an emphatic and outspoken fan of the invasion of Iraq, reported directly to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The article continued:

A law enforcement official said that the information allegedly passed by Franklin went to Israel through the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a pro-Israel lobbying organization. The information was said to have been the draft of a presidential directive related to US policies toward Iran.

The story mentions that two employees of AIPAC were also being investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). An AIPAC spokesman Josh Block issued a written statement insisting the allegations were baseless and false.

Another AIPAC official said: “Our folks are pretty outraged about this. We’ve had these kinds of accusations before, and none of them ever proved to be true.” David Seigel, spokesman for the Israeli Embassy, said: “We categorically deny these allegations. They are completely false and outrageous.” Israel is a close ally of the United States, but espionage investigations here involving its government are not unprecedented. In 1987, a US Navy intelligence analyst, Jonathan J. Pollard (also Jewish), admitted to selling state secrets to Israel and was sentenced to life in prison.

As the investigations continued, the New York Times continued elements of the story on September 6, 2004 with “Spy Case Renews Debate over Pro-Israel Lobby’s Ties to Pentagon,” by James Risen and David Johnston. Risen and Johnston mention that the two AIPAC officials being interviewed by the FBI were Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman. They wrote:

But leading critics of the Pentagon hard-liners have repeatedly argued that Mr. Wolfowitz, Mr. Feith and others have used the Sept. 11 attacks as a pretext to pursue issues that in some ways mirror the interests of Israel’s conservative Likud government.

One piece of evidence repeatedly cited by the critics is a 1996 paper issued by the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, an Israeli think tank, calling for the toppling of Saddam Hussein in order to enhance Israeli security. Entitled A Clean Break, the 1996 paper was intended to offer a foreign policy agenda for the new Likud government of Benjamin Netanyahu. The paper argued: “Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq—an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right—as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions.” Among those who signed the paper were Mr. Feith; [ Jewish] David Wurmser, who later worked for Mr. Feith at the Pentagon and now works for Vice President Dick Cheney; and [Jewish] Richard Perle, a leading conservative who previously served as chairman of the Defense Policy Board, a group of outside consultants to Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld.

A year later, on August 6, 2005, when the New York Times published “Use of Espionage Law in Secrets Case Troubles Analysts” by Eric Lichtblau and David Johnston, we learn that Mr. Rosen and Mr. Weissman had been fired by AIPAC and that they and Mr. Franklin would be charged with what amounted to “conspiracy to communicate national defense information to persons not entitled to receive it.” Lichtblau and Johnston conclude that the “indictment stops short of accusing the three defendants of espionage, but it strongly suggests that they were improperly acting as emissaries to Israeli diplomats.”

Four (!) years later, after legal haggling and multiple motions, this case against the duo was dismissed. On May 1, 2009, Politico.com reported in a story by Ben Smith and Josh Gerstein that the Justice Department was dropping the prosecution of Rosen and Weissman and quoted US Attorney Dana Boente: 

“Given the diminished likelihood the government will prevail at trial under the additional intent requirements imposed by the court and the inevitable disclosure of classified information that would occur at any trial in this matter, we have asked the court to dismiss the indictment,” Boente said. 

In the interim, Mr. Franklin pleaded guilty and was sentenced to twelve and one-half years in prison. 

AIPAC meanwhile, through its wealthy supporters, made out just fine. In a New York Times article from March 5, 2006 entitled “Pro-Israel Group Roiled by Prosecution of Two Ex-Officials,” the authors Scott Shane and David Johnston uncovered internal sentiment: 

“The feeling in the Jewish community is one of indignation [shocked disgust] at AIPAC’s being unfairly targeted by federal prosecutors for trying to find out what everyone in this town is trying to find out, [which is] what the government is thinking,” said Douglas M. Bloomfield, who was a legislative director of AIPAC in the 1980s, and who now writes a syndicated column on American Mideast policy. As the marquee conference speakers attest, AIPAC’s clout has not visibly diminished by the criminal case. Membership has increased 25 percent in the last two years to more than 100,000, and the budget has grown to $45 million, the group said. “As always, the organization is completely focused on its core mission, the strengthening of the US-Israel relationship,” said Patrick Dorton, an AIPAC spokesman. 

By about 2016, AIPAC’s income was close to $80 million, and its related American Israel Education Foundation was separately budgeted close to $60 million. The education foundation pays for dozens of American politicians to visit Israel for a week every couple of years. Most would argue “propaganda” is a better word than “education” to describe these sponsored trips.

The aforementioned scholars Walt and Mearsheimer (see chapter 1) described AIPAC this way in their book The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy:

AIPAC’s success is due to its ability to reward legislators and congressional candidates who support its agenda, and to punish those who challenge it. … AIPAC makes sure that its friends get strong financial support from the myriad [very many, diverse] pro-Israel PACs [political action committees that can legally donate to campaigns]. Those seen as hostile to Israel, on the other hand, can be sure that AIPAC will direct campaign contributions to their political opponents. … The bottom line is that AIPAC, which is a de facto [unofficial] agent for a foreign government, has a stranglehold on the US Congress. Open debate about US policy towards Israel does not occur there, even though that policy has important consequences for the entire world. 

In 1992, David Steiner, the president of AIPAC, was forced to resign after he was recorded bragging about AIPAC’s influence over elections and officials. In late December 1992 the website Washington Report on Middle East Affairs published Steiner’s entire conversation with Jewish New York businessman Haim (“Harry”) Katz, who was apparently posing as a potential donor. After first cautiously clearing Katz’s credentials as a Jew and potential supporter, Steiner talked about certain US politicians and their level of dedication to Israel. 

The call began with his disclaimer “AIPAC does not rate or endorse candidates, does not solicit money …”, but after Steiner let his guard down it became “We commissioned a poll and got some people, and I’ve got to raise $27,000 to pay for the poll … so I have, so what I’m trying to do is make a priority list, because I don’t know how far you want to go … how old are your kids anyway? … You have three children that could write checks; do they have their own checking accounts?”

Along the way Steiner and Katz bring up Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, a “good friend” who was involved in a sexual harassment scandal, before the discussion switches gears:

Katz (HK): Let me tell you, I was planning, I was planning to, to … Inouye, by the way, is in real trouble? He’s been there forever …

Steiner (DS): Yeah! Well, we might lose him. There’s been such a sea of change, such trouble this year—I can’t believe all our friends that are in trouble. Because there’s an anti-incumbency mood, and foreign aid has not been popular. You know what I got for, I met with [US Secretary of State] Jim Baker and I cut a deal with him. I got, besides the $3 billion, you know they’re looking for the Jewish votes, and I’ll tell him whatever he wants to hear …

HK: Right.

DS: Besides the $10 billion in loan guarantees which was a fabulous thing; $3 billion in foreign, in military aid, and I got almost a billion dollars in other goodies that people don’t even know about.

HK: Such as?

DS: Seven hundred million [dollars] in military draw-down, from equipment that the United States Army’s going to give to Israel; $200 million which Israel can draw upon; puts them in the global warning protection system, so when there’s a missile fired, they’ll get the same advanced notification that the US [has] …  joint military exercises—I’ve got a whole shopping list of things.

HK: So this is from Baker?

DS: Baker and the Pentagon.

The conversation was recorded on October 22, 1992, about two weeks before the American presidential election. After mentioning how he helped raise a million dollars for Bill Clinton in New Jersey, the conversation continued:

DS: We’ve also raised for other guys who are running too, because they’re friends. [Iowa’s Tom] Harkin, the senator, you know you have to be with everybody.

HK: Let me ask you. Clinton, if he becomes, I mean what will he do for Israel, better than [George H.W.] Bush, if he becomes [president]. I know Bush gave you a hard time, this and that … 

DS: I’ll tell you, I have friends on the Clinton campaign, close associates. [Soon to be Vice President Al] Gore is very committed to us.

HK: Right. Clinton, if he … have you spoken to him?

DS: I’ve known Bill for seven, eight years from the National Governors Association. I know him on a personal basis. I have friends. One of my friends is Hillary Clinton’s scheduler, one of my officers’ daughters works there. We gave two employees from AIPAC leave of absences to work on the campaign. I mean, we have a dozen people in that campaign, in the headquarters. 

HK: You mean in Little Rock? [The capital city of Arkansas. Clinton was governor.]

DS: In Little Rock, and they’re all going to get big jobs. We have friends. I also work with a think tank, the Washington Institute. I have Michael Mandelbaum and Martin Indyk being foreign policy advisers. Steve Speigel—we’ve got friends—this is my business.

Thomas L. Friedman published an article in the New York Times on November 5, 1002 entitled “Pro-Israel Lobbyist Quits over Audiotaped Boasts”:

In a statement on Tuesday night, Mr. Steiner said: “In an effort to encourage and impress what I thought was a potential political activist, calling on the telephone, I made statements which went beyond overzealousness and exaggeration and were simply and totally untrue. This included, among other statements, false statements about a meeting with Jim Baker, and false statements about the Clinton campaign.”

Nice try.

The undercover reporter in the 2018 TV production The Lobby—USA discovered similar information:  

We examine how the lobby, led by AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, secured unwavering support in Congress. (We then hear the voice of David Ochs, founder of Halev, which helps pay for Jewish young adults to attend the AIPAC annual conference.) “Congressmen don’t do anything unless you pressure them, and the only way to do that is with money.”

In the last couple of years it appears AIPAC’s influence is waning to a degree as more American politicians, particularly Democrats, question its actions and those of the country it represents. But there are dozens of other pro-Zionist organizations in the United States to pick up the slack.

As for espionage, there have been other cases of Jews in the United States passing along delicate information. On December 31, 2008, a Washington Post headline read “Retiree Pleads Guilty to Giving U.S. Secrets to Israel in the 1980s.” Carrie Johnson wrote:

A retired engineer from New Jersey whose clandestine [secret] activities went undetected for more than two decades pleaded guilty yesterday to a criminal charge accusing him of serving as an unregistered agent for Israel. Ben-Ami Kadish passed classified documents to an Israeli handler between about 1980 and 1985, when he worked at a US Army research and engineering center at the Picatinny Arsenal in Dover, N.J. authorities say.

Kadish apparently received only nominal gifts and dinners in exchange for fifty to one hundred documents, handled by the same man who had handled Jonathan Pollard’s efforts. Johnson continued:

Kadish, a US citizen born in Connecticut, checked classified papers out of an Army research library and passed them to an Israel official, identified for the first time by prosecutors yesterday as Yossi Yagur. Yagur photographed materials related to nuclear weapons, the F-15 fighter jet program and the US Patriot missile defense system, according to reports.

So, not so “delicate” information.

Meanwhile, Israel not only does what it wants with American interests, as we have seen it also feels free to use US allies for “false flag” operations. In the article “Fake Passports Fuel Questions about Israeli Role in Hamas (Palestinian) Official’s Slaying” by Howard Schneider in the Washington Post on February 18, 2010, we see another example of Israel doing whatever it wants.

The story explains that six of the eleven agents who carried out the assassination in Dubai were carrying fake British passports containing the names of Israeli citizens. It was widely understood the operation was carried out by Israel’s Mossad spy agency. The outrage over the maneuver reached all the way to then-British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown:

“The British passport is an important document that has got to be held with care,” Brown said. “The evidence has got to be assembled about what has actually happened and how it happened and why it happened.” 

It happened because the Israelis will do whatever it takes to kill whoever they want to kill, even if it embarrasses or compromises the security of their “allies,” as Schneider reveals: 

Israel has a record of using foreign passports to conceal the movements of its undercover operatives and has run into diplomatic trouble with Canada, New Zealand, Britain and others over the practice. The Mossad agents who tried to assassinate Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal in Jordan in 1997, for example, carried Canadian documents. The Dubai case has the added wrinkle that the names and some other data on the passports match those of Israeli citizens who emigrated here from Europe, and who were shocked to find themselves mentioned in the material released by Dubai police. That has left Israeli officials in a quandary; on the one hand trying to maintain the country’s “policy of ambiguity”—neither confirming nor denying its involvement in covert operations—and on the other, having to explain how the names of some of its citizens ended up on forged documents cited in an international murder investigation. In Israel’s first official comments on the matter, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman told Army Radio on Wednesday that despite the presence of the names, there is “no reason to think that it was the Israeli Mossad and not some other service or country up to some mischief.”

A comment bordering on the comical if it weren’t so appalling.

On the battlefield as well, Israel is no stranger to tossing aside standards and agreements while committing offenses. As one will learn in the chapters that follow, rules and conventions are meaningless. From simple international violations to atrocities, there is never an expression of remorse.

On January 27, 2007, David S. Cloud and Greg Myre wrote in the New York Times under the headline “Israel May Have Violated Arms Pact, US Says” that the Bush administration would report to Congress that Israel had “fired American-supplied cluster munitions into southern Lebanon during its fight with Hezbollah last summer”:

Cluster munitions are anti-personnel weapons that scatter tiny but deadly bomblets over a wide area. The grenade-like munitions, tens of thousands of which have been found in southern Lebanon, have caused 30 deaths and 180 injuries among civilians since the end of the war, according to the United Nations Mine Action Service. … Any sanctions against Israel would be an extraordinary move by the Bush administration, a strong backer of Israel, and several officials said they expected little further action, if any, on the matter. But sanctions against Israel for misusing the weapons would not be unprecedented. The Reagan administration imposed a six-year ban on cluster-weapon sales to Israel in 1982, after a Congressional investigation found that Israel had used the weapons in civilian areas during its 1982 invasion of Lebanon.

Which raises the obvious question, why ever provide such a vicious weapon to Israel, knowing that Israel will use cluster munitions regardless of any accepted rules of war. After the invasion of Lebanon, it was up to the United Nations to send crews in to clean up and detonate the leftovers, bomblets that would have otherwise maimed and killed hundreds of innocents, if not more. Israel didn’t have to clean up after itself, but naturally it was investigating. Cloud and Myre noted that the “investigation is still under way, and military officials have refused to divulge any details in public.”

Accusations against the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are wide ranging, some more harrowing than others. In Haaretz on August 17, 2009, Morten Berthelsen and Barak Ravid wrote a story under the headline “Top Sweden Newspaper Says IDF Kills Palestinians for Their Organs”:

A leading Swedish newspaper reported this week that Israeli soldiers are abducting Palestinians in order to steal their organs, a claim that prompted furious condemnation and accusations of anti-Semitic blood libel from a rival publication. … The report quotes Palestinian claims that young men from the West Bank and Gaza Strip had been seized by the Israel Defense Forces, and their bodies returned to the families with missing organs.

Sometimes alive, sometimes dead. Another revelation from Berthelsen and Ravid: 

[Writer Donald] Bostrom’s article makes a link to the recent exposure of an alleged crime syndicate in New Jersey. The syndicate includes several American rabbis, and one Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, who faces charges of conspiring to broker the sale of a human kidney for a transplant.

Rosenbaum was convicted and sentenced three years later in July of 2012, as reported by NBC-4 New York in an online article “Brooklyn Man Sentenced 2-1/2 Years in Fed Organ Trafficking Case”: “Prosecutors allege Rosenbaum would buy organs from vulnerable people in Israel for as little as $10,000 and sell them to desperate patients for more than $100,000.”

Two-and-a-half years later, CBS-2 in New York picked up the story in an article published online “Black Market Kidney Broker, Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, Released from Prison”:

… Rosenbaum, an Israeli citizen, won’t be deported because federal immigration officials found that his crime was not one of “moral turpitude” that would have subjected him to being kicked out of the US, lawyer Edward Schulman said. … Rosenbaum, now 63, was arrested in 2009 in what became the biggest corruption case ever in New Jersey. He had been living legally in the US.

There was no distinct connection made between Rosenbaum and the IDF, but the original Swedish story by Bostrom does refer to alleged organ harvesting by the IDF as far back as 1992. The aforementioned Haaretz article, summarizing the Swedish article, makes reference:

“The sharp sounds from the shovels were mixed with the occasional laughter from the soldiers who were joking with each other, waiting to go home. When Bilal was put into his grave, his chest was revealed and suddenly it became clear to those present what abuse he had been put through. Bilal was far from the only one who was buried cut-up from his stomach to his chin and the speculations about the reason why had already started,” he writes.

Imagine an orthodox Jew finding out he was receiving a kidney from what he would consider an Arab “sub-human.” It would never happen—as in, they’d never tell him.

Fast-forward to June 7, 2020. The Haaretz headline read “Netanyahu Calls Police Killing of Autistic Palestinian Eyad Hallaq ‘A Tragedy’—During weekly cabinet meeting, Netanyahu tells ministers he expects their ‘complete examinations’ of the shooting.” 

In the story, journalist Noa Landau points out that the shooting of the disabled man brought worldwide outrage and condemnation to Israel, drawing comparisons to the police killing of George Floyd in the US, where riots and protests ensued in Minneapolis and beyond. The two fatalities occurred within days of one another.

Place your bets: A sincere interest by Netanyahu for an investigation, or a public relations maneuver, a month before he planned on annexing huge chunks of Palestinian land in the West Bank? He only commented because somehow people on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean had heard about it:  

“This is a person with disabilities, autism, who was suspected—as we know, wrongly—of being a terrorist in a very sensitive place. We all share in the grief of the family,” Netanyahu told the ministers. “I expect your complete examinations into this matter.” Hallaq, 32, was shot dead by Israeli policemen in Jerusalem’s Old City. A resident of the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Wadi Joz, he attended and worked in a special needs school in the Old City, just meters away from where he was shot on Saturday.

Another Haaretz headline link ran: “’He’s disabled,’ the caregiver screamed. ‘I’m with her,’ Eyad cried. The cop opened fire anyway: The last 5 minutes of Eyad’s life.”

Police departments in the US and Israel have shared weapons and training in recent decades. They also appear to share similar views and treatment of their minority populations. Black Lives Matter (BLM) was formed in the summer of 2013 after multiple highly publicized police murders of innocent black civilians in the United States. Released in August 2016, BLM’s platform position regarding Israel’s treatment of Palestinians should be noted, if you can find it. 

In the August 3, 2016 article in the Times of Israel called “In Platform, Black Lives Matter Accuses Israel of ‘Genocide’, backs BDS,” the writer Eric Cortellessa refers to some of the platform’s language:

Following the Republican and Democratic national conventions, groups associated with the Black Lives Matter movement released a platform Monday that labels Israel an “apartheid state” and excoriates [severely criticizes] the United States for its alliance with a country it alleges systematically perpetrates a “genocide” against the Palestinians. The platform, which demands “an end to the war against Black people,” marks the campaigns first official entry into American’s debate over specific federal policies. 

When one clicks the color-highlighted word “platform,” which at one point would have taken a reader to the policy language in its entirety, it instead takes a reader to a dead-end and closed link. A similar result occurs when one attempts to link from any other related news story or website.

The BLM 2016 Palestinian platform has been censored. All links to the platform have been purged from the internet, while stories criticizing the BLM statement are readily available.

Fortunately a document from the previous year entitled 2015 Black Solidarity Statement with Palestine is still viewable. It appears to have served as a template for the provocative BLM version that included the word “genocide,” raising the ire of Zionists. The 2015 document could be seen on the host site blackforpalestine.com, and although once available for review, it seems to have gone dormant in 2019. 

You may turn to chapter 7 to read the declaration in its entirety.