Jeremy Kuzmarov

Without U.S. support Israel’s leaders could have been compelled to seek a just resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict instead of pursuing a Greater Israel

In his 1983 book The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel & the Palestinians, Noam Chomsky argued against the grain that the Israelis had compromised their country’s security in choosing to ally with the U.S. and were sowing the seeds of their own destruction.

According to Chomsky, Israeli leaders felt invincible because of U.S. weapons supplies and pursued a rejectionist course toward the Palestinians when a durable peace was needed to guarantee Israel’s security.

As Israeli politics shifted more to the right, messianic proponents of a Greater Israel took over the government and carried out repeated military aggression that antagonized Israel’s neighbors and made its people more vulnerable to attack.

Chomsky was a Zionist in his youth who had worked on a Kibbutz in the late 1940s but became disillusioned by the racism toward Palestinians that he saw as pervasive in Israeli society.

Chomsky felt that the Zionist project could have been successful if it adhered to the vision of Ahad Ha’am, Martin Buber and Albert Einstein of a bi-national state where Arabs and Jews learned to live together peacefully and with mutual respect.

Chomsky did not believe that the Israeli lobby had manipulated U.S. leaders into supporting Israel—rather he believed that the U.S. executive branch supported Israel because it functioned as a strategic proxy that helped the U.S. in its goal of trying to dominate the Middle East and exploit its oil resources.

Over the years, Israel performed much of the dirty work for the U.S.—as when it humiliated U.S. nemesis Gamal Abdel Nasser in the 1967 Six-Day War; helped undermine the Assad dynasty in Syria, and assisted in U.S. regime-change operations directed against Iran, which had escaped the clutches of U.S. neo-colonial control under the Shah following the 1979 Islamic Revolution.^[1]

Chomsky was attacked for years by neo-conservative intellectuals and other academics for being supposedly a closet anti-Semite and far-left extremist (Chomsky identified with anarchism and libertarian strains of socialism).

But today it seems even more clear that Chomsky was correct in his analysis and that the U.S.-Israeli alliance—by which the U.S. poured (and continues to pour) billions of dollars in weaponry each year and assisted Israel in developing into a military technological powerhouse—has been a catastrophic one, not only for the Palestinians, but also for Israelis and Jews the world over.

The Fall of Israel

Dr. Dan Steinbock is an internationally renowned expert on world geopolitics who has published a new book with Clarity Press called The Fall of Israel: The Degradation of Israel’s Politics, Economy & Military.

The book affirms many insights that Chomsky made in Fateful Triangle while tracing Israel’s moral degradation under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu.

Steinbock starts The Fall of Israel by juxtaposing the brutality of Israeli attacks in Gaza with the mass protests directed against widening social inequality, political corruption and the attempt by Netanyahu’s government to impose judicial reforms designed to eviscerate what was left of Israel’s democracy.

Steinbock writes that “the common denominator of the destruction of the Gaza Strip and the mass protests against Jewish autocracy is the fall of Israel.”^[2]

That fall is reflected in increasing suppression of dissent, historical revisionism in education, routinization of torture, and widespread anti-Arab settler pogroms. It is further epitomized by a halt in Israel’s tourism industry as a result of the Gaza War, the downgrading of Israel’s credit rating, and an increased brain drain.

Hamas and Hezbollah shelling in response to Israeli attacks has displaced an estimated 200,000 Israelis from their homes; foreign laborers are exiting the country and the cancelation of 150,000 Palestinian work permits in the West Bank has brought construction to a standstill.

In the fourth quarter of 2023, Israel’s economy shrank by 20% on an annualized basis, a figure that may grow worse if countries like Turkey sustain boycotts on imported goods that Israel depends on.^[3]

Like Chomsky, Steinbock links Israel’s degradation to its alliance with the U.S., emphasizing that Israel’s militarization has been “enabled by the symbiotic bilateral ties with Washington and massive U.S. military aid.”^[4]

U.S. neo-conservatives and Jewish donors have hastened the empowerment of right-wing proponents of a Greater Israel atop Israel’s government who hold a racist contempt for Palestinians and support the construction of illegal settlements in the Occupied Territories to drive Palestinians further off their land.^[5]

Steinbock quotes a prescient 1968 essay by Yeshayahu Leibowitz, an Israeli orthodox Jew and public intellectual called “The Territories,” which envioned Israel’s supposedly glorious triumph in the 1967 Six-Day War over Egypt and Nasser—when it acquired the West Bank and Gaza—as a “dark prelude to endless colonial wars that could turn Israel into a police state, subvert democratic institutions, foster corruption, transform Palestinians into an exploited underclass and the Israeli military into suffering from the kind of colonial demoralization seen previously in Algeria and Vietnam (and more recently in Iraq and Afghanistan).”^[6]

Leibowitz proved to be prophetic, though Steinbock notes that the seeds of self-destruction started even earlier with the 1948 Nakba, or ethnic expulsions, of about 700,000 Palestinians during Israel’s independence war, which set the groundwork for today’s calamities.

The Nakba and Origins of Likud

The Nakba was rooted in a colonial mentality among Jewish settlers in historic Palestine that went back to Theodor Herzl, the father of the Zionist movement, who envisioned himself as a Jewish “Cecil Rhodes” and the Israeli state as a “rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism [represented by the Arabs].”^[7]

[…]

Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, convened a group of a dozen senior military and security figures—including Moshe Dayan and future Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin—who prepared the plans for ethnic cleansing and supervised its execution.^[8]

A key figure in the operation was Menachem Begin, Israel’s prime minister from 1977 to 1983, who was the founder of Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud Party (originally called Herut).

Begin traced his lineage to the revisionist Zionism of Ze’ev Jabotinsky which emphasized the importance of armed struggle and saw Italy and its fascist leader Benito Mussolini as an ideological soulmate.

In 1948, Begin was head of the paramilitary arm of the Haganah, the Irgun, which carried out the Deir Yassin massacre when more than 100 Palestinians were murdered and another 650 were driven from their homes.

The New York Times published a letter in December 1948 signed by Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt and other prominent Jewish intellectuals that characterized Begin’s Herut Party, the forerunner of Likud, with being a political party “closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.”^[

Likud has always sustained the vision of a Jewish state from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River and has been hostile to the peace process and the idea of a Palestinian state. This is in contrast to Israel’s Labor Party, which has been willing to at least consider Palestinian statehood.

Punitive Doctrine and More Ethnic Cleansing

Steinbock emphasizes that dominant figures in Israel’s military apparatus—notably Ariel Sharon and Moshe Dayan—lay the foundation for Israel’s punitive military doctrine by which brutal reprisals and disproportionate retaliation were adopted in response to terrorist attacks.^[10]

After the Nakba, Palestinian fedayeen mounted raids into Israel from Gaza and other border regions. This triggered brutal reprisals by Israeli commando units like those led by Sharon in Qibya in the West Bank in October 1953 where nearly 70 villagers were killed, two-thirds of whom were women and children, and 50 houses were demolished, with some inhabitants still inside.^[11]

A missed opportunity occurred in the mid 1950s during the prime ministership of Moshe Sharett, the Henry Wallace of Israel,^[12] whose yearning for peace was undermined by right-wing elements in his Cabinet who carried out undercover terrorist attacks in Egypt designed to undermine Sharett’s peace overtures to Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Continuing from the pattern of the Nakba, large-scale ethnic cleansing was carried out after the 1967 Six-Day War.

Some 245,000 Palestinians were forced to flee from the West Bank and Gaza Strip into Jordan; 116,000 from the Golan Heights to Syria; and 11,000 from Gaza to Egypt, with many becoming dependent on UNRWA (UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees).

[…]

Netanyahu Clan’s Extremism

Benjamin Netanyahu’s father Benzion, a professor of Judaic Studies at Cornell University, worked for a period as an assistant to Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s personal secretary and shared his insistence on the creation of an “Iron Wall” to separate Jews in Israel from the Palestinians.^[14]

As an old man in the 1990s, Benzion denounced the Oslo peace agreement as representing the potential ruin of Israel, and supported the invasion of Gaza “even if it brings us years of war.” Benzion sustained throughout his life an Orientalist bias characteristic of the neo-conservatives, stating that “the tendency to conflict is the essence of the Arab. He is an enemy by essence…his existence is one of perpetual war.^[15]

Benjamin’s views that have now landed him at The Hague are very reminiscent of his father’s and also those of his grandfather Nathan Mileikowsky, a Russian-born rabbi and early Zionist champion known for his advocacy against socialist Zionism and anti-Zionists.^[16]

After migration to Israel, Mileikowsky raised funds for the pre-state Yishuv and collaborated with Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, the founding father of religious Zionism whose son, Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, is the revered spiritual father of Israel’s settlers and the messianic far right.^[17]

As a young man Benjamin served in an elite reconnaissance unit of the Israeli military and, after studying at MIT, became connected to powerful neo-conservatives in the U.S. through Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, head of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement who tried to link the fate of Israel, world Jewry and the United States.

[…]

From the start, his career has been overshadowed by dark-money controversies and, in 1997, police recommended his indictment on corruption charges for influence-peddling, foreshadowing the more recent criminal cases against him.^[18]

[…]

Netanyahu’s aversion to a two-state solution, ironically, led his government to funnel money to Hamas, which was viewed as an instrument to undermine the secular Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and divide the Palestinian people so they could be conquered.^[21]

Netanyahu’s power base has been preserved in part because of his connection to the late Sheldon Adelson, a billionaire casino owner tied to organized crime, and other U.S. billionaire neo-conservatives like Irving Moskowitz who has financed the settler movement in Israel.

[…]

Extremists in the Cabinet

[…]

Israel’s Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, is a devotee of Rabbi Meir Kahane (1932-1990), an FBI informant who founded the ultra-right wing Jewish Defense League, and was filled with hatred toward Arabs.^[23]

Advocating for the expulsion of Arab citizens of Israel, Ben-Gvir first gained notoriety in 1995 by brandishing a Cadillac hood ornament that had been stolen from Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin—“we got his car and we’ll get him too,” Ben-Gvir said, weeks before Rabin’s actual assassination.^[24]

[…]

Steinbock calls Netanyahu’s Minister of Defense, Bezalel Smotrich, “a vehement opponent of a Palestinian state and self-proclaimed fascist, racist and homophobe who lives in an illegally built West Bank settlement.” In 2021, he declared that David Ben-Gurion should have “finished the job” and kicked all Palestinians out when Israel was founded.

[…]

Resource War and Jared Kushner’s Dream

[…]

After October 7, Israel’s intelligence ministry prepared a secret memorandum that called for the transfer of Gaza’s population “outside the combat zone” to Egypt, which was an overt demand for ethnic cleansing. Wealthy U.S. investors like Jared Kushner were salivating at the prospect of developing high-end condominiums and resorts on Gaza’s beach-front property.^[30]

[…]

Crucial U.S. Military Support

[…]

Since most of those arms were purchased with U.S. taxpayer money through the U.S. Foreign Military Sales (FMS) program, American citizens effectively funded most of the carnage in Gaza. The financial flows that made possible the destruction comprised the annual $3.8 billion in U.S. military aid, plus an additional $1.4 billion to buy more weapons.^[35]

[…]

Via  https://covertactionmagazine.com/2025/04/03/the-u-s-israeli-alliance-has-sowed-disaster-for-israel/