The Israel lobby

The Al Jazeera Investigations expose of how the Israel lobby seeks to manipulate British politics has had a global reception far beyond the United Kingdom or the Arab world and revealed for the whole world to see the systemic plots by Israeli officials to sway European and of course American politics in directions that secure the interests of the settler colony.

A six-month undercover investigation has revealed how Israel relentlessly penetrates different levels of British government and parliamentary democracy to safeguard its continued theft of Palestine with total impunity.

In four consecutive episodes the world watches with incredulity how pro-Israel groups target the British youth, manipulate the open forums of a Labour Party Conference, and abuse the legitimate fear of anti-Semitism by deliberately conflating it with the equally legitimate critic of Zionism, and indeed plot to “take down”  British politicians whom they deem critical of their armed robbery of Palestine.

What does “take down” mean except target for character assassination anyone who dares to question Israel in any shape or form?

A key finding of this important piece of investigative journalism is the Israeli propagandists’ deliberate conflation of the critic of Zionism with anti-Semitism in order to paralyse the critical discourse and put on the defensive the slightest defence of the inalienable rights of Palestinians to their lives, liberties, and homeland.

The strategy has hitherto worked for the simple fact that it conceals a very simple truth: Anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism for a very rudimentary reason – not all Jews are Zionists and not all Zionists are Jews.

As we know only too well, Zionists not only tolerate but in fact embrace anti-Semitism if it servestheir ideological purposes.

There is enduring and sustained anti-Semitism in Europe and now particularly in the United States. That vintage European anti-Semitism, entirely dominant in Donald Trump’s campaign, is now coupled with Islamophobia, and Jews and Muslims     have united    to oppose them both.

Israel has absolutely not an iota of moral authority to carry the mantle of opposing anti-Semitism, while Zionist propaganda machineries are instrumental in promoting Islamophobia.

Zionism is an outdated, flawed and defunct ideology. Long before this Al Jazeera piece on The Lobby, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt did a similar expose in their pioneering essay The Israel Lobby (2002), for which they could not find a US publisher and they had    to publish it four years later in London Review of Books. An extended version of that essay later appeared as a book in 2007.

Whereas the primary site of Mearsheimer and Walt’s investigation and arguments was the US, the Al Jazeera investigation complements it by concentrating on the UK theatre of operation of the selfsame pernicious plotting against the democratic apparatus of a sovereign nation-state.

The lesson in these Al Jazeera revelations is something entirely different. The moral of the story is actually explained in two brief subplots before the actual narrative begins.

Each episode begins with scenes of a series of military attacks on the Palestinian youth, before it cuts to scenes of massive peaceful protests by supporters of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement.

The rest of each episode is then dedicated to outlining the manner in which the Israeli embassy, through one of its chief operatives, tries to manipulate British politics.

The significance of these episodes lies far more in the scenes showing the brutality of Israeli military occupation followed by scenes of those peaceful protests on behalf of the BDS movement than in the pernicious plots of the Israeli embassy.

 

This article is excerpted from, ‘The Israel lobby: All bark
but little bite’.

Courtesy: Aljazeera.com