Netanyahu and His Marionettes

By David Bromwich, Reader Supported News

10 August 15

enjamin Netanyahu is laying siege to the Congress of the United States, not for the first time. He has thrown his voice and channeled his influence into the arena of American legislative politics, to abort the P5+1 nuclear settlement with Iran, which was signed on July 14 by the US, Britain, France, Germany, China, and Russia. The Israeli strong man's latest intervention is in keeping with the rest of his political career. Netanyahu owes all his importance and his success to actions that have been purely destructive.

He was first elected in 1996 on the wave of Israeli settler chauvinism that followed the signing of the Oslo Accords. His rise occurred in the wake of the assassination of his opponent, a courageous defender of the accords, Yitzhak Rabin. A public memorandum detailing the strategy for Netanyahu as leader of Israel was written by the neoconservative war propagandist Richard Perle, along with a small committee of others. The strategy document, "A Clean Break," called for Israel to free itself from the tedious demands of diplomacy once and for all, curtail its efforts to negotiate with Palestinians toward the creation of a state, and give up the idea of joining a neighborhood of nations in the Middle East. With American help, instead, Israel could stand alone as the dominant power, a position it should never compromise by bargaining for peace. To achieve this end, three countries had to be undermined, subdivided, or destroyed: Iraq, Syria, and Iran.

So far, things have gone roughly according to plan. Iraq and Syria are out of the picture -- the latter with considerable satisfaction to the people around Netanyahu. But Iran has continued to pose a stumbling block; and as early as 2008, Barack Obama's interest in lowering the terrorist threat to the US by calming the violence of the region was perceived by Netanyahu as a threat to his plan for dominance.

From their first meeting in 2009, Netanyahu made it plain that Obama was an obstacle to be overcome by any means necessary -- political assaults from the rear and flanks; concocted international incidents; speeches to Congress and the United Nations and AIPAC and Congress again. Obama was to be treated as an enemy in all but name. The story was to be circulated that Obama, possibly from motives of racial resentment, was profoundly unfriendly to the state of Israel. In the six years that followed their first meeting in May 2009, a continuous strand of Netanyahu's foreign policy has been devoted to weakening the Obama presidency.

Over the same period, the Republican party set itself as a primary goal the nullification of everything Obama proposed. It was natural therefore that its alliance with Netanyahu would grow increasingly public. Only self-respect in the Republicans and a sense of decency in Netanyahu could have prevented it. But one should not underrate the element of racism in Netanyahu's resolve. On the day of the last Israeli election, in March 2015, which ended by returning him to office with a far-right, settler-based coalition, Netanyahu sent a panic Facebook message to his followers. "The right-wing government is in danger," he wrote. "Arab voters are coming out in droves to the polls. Left-wing organizations are busing them out." His followers had a particular duty to vote in order to offset the droves of Arabs.

Now, "droves" is a word normally applied to cattle, just as "swarm" is applied to insects and "hordes" to murderous barbarians. The chairmen of White Citizens' Councils in the American South in the 1950s used to warn their faithful against the "hordes of n-----s" that would vote them out of office unless white people came out and voted. For Netanyahu, President Obama has always been one of the "droves." He has treated Obama with a degree of disrespect approaching and often crossing into contempt, without parallel in the previous relations of American leaders and our professed allies. The black caucus noticed this when they boycotted Netanyahu's speech to Congress in March; and among Jewish lawmakers, Dianne Feinstein has spoken with well-earned disgust of Netanyahu's "arrogant" presumption that he speaks for all Jews.

Reactions of this sort are likely to intensify among those (including the present writer) who feel the disgrace of a foreign leader singling us out in a speech carried in US media, which was addressed peculiarly to Jewish Americans and implicitly separated our interests from those of other Americans. The gesture embodied by such a speech bears a family resemblance to incitement to treason. Imagine a leader of India puffing himself up to deliver a special address to Americans of Indian descent, asking them to subvert the authority of the president who signed a trade deal the Indian prime minister judges to be disadvantageous. And yet, the relations today of Netanyahu to many of the biggest American Jewish donors, and of the same donors to the Republican Party -- these linkages are so extended and tangled that lesser actors can barely account for their actions. But they feel no responsibility to render an account. They only know that their arms and legs move obediently to execute a pilgrimage to Jerusalem or Las Vegas. And then they vote and then comes the money.

The defection to the Republican side by Chuck Schumer was predictable, but the terms in which he cast his decision tell us much about the man and the situation. It has been said that one can judge a politician's intent not only by the things he says but by the things he crucially omits. In Schumer's written defense of his vote with the war party, in a text of some 1,700 words apparently drafted by the senator himself, a word that never appears is "Israel." (The exception is the almost anonymous appearance of the country in a catalogue with five other countries said to have been direct or indirect victims of Iran). But depend on it, Israel was on Schumer's mind.

He has often said, with an artless self-love, that his name in Hebrew, "shomer," means "guardian"; and he takes pride in the fact because he thinks of himself as the appointed guardian of Israel's interests in the US. How bizarre and again how unprecedented this is! Think of any other nation in the world. Imagine an Italian-American named Frank Consiglieri assuring his listeners that his name means "advocate" in Italian and he is supremely vigilant for the interests of Italy as a lawmaker in the US.

Schumer voted for the Iraq war on a rationale similar to the one he now urges as the path of reason and good sense with Iran. He may or may not recognize that he is only assisting the Likud and the neoconservatives with part three of the Middle East "clean break" strategy: Iraq, Syria, Iran. Their calculation is simple. When the work of destruction is complete, one country in the region will stand upright and intact amid the surrounding rubble.

How many Americans know that the Iran deal is supported by the vast majority of Israel's defense and security establishment? The opinions of the security officials within Netanyahu's government are impossible to discern because they have been placed under gag order; but the suffrage of qualified judges in Israel, as also in Europe, Russia, China, and the IAEA, forms a strange contrast with the current alignments in America. "As unanimous as the politicians are in backing the prime minister," J.J. Goldberg recently wrote in Forward, "the generals and spymasters are nearly as unanimous in questioning him. Generals publicly backing Netanyahu can be counted on -- well -- one finger." Equally strange is the fact that security support for the deal is an open secret in the Israeli press, and in an American Jewish paper like Forward, but the evidence is subordinated to a point of near invisibility in the New York Times and other mainstream outlets.

In defending the deal, in the most sober, straightforward, unapologetically argumentative and honest speech of his career, President Obama spelled out the reasons why its acceptance would surrender no opportunity while rejection would squander a chance that will not return.

If, in a worst-case scenario, Iran violates the deal, the same options that are available to me today will be available to any U.S. president in the future. And I have no doubt that 10 or 15 years from now, the person who holds this office will be in a far stronger position with Iran further away from a weapon and with the inspections and transparency that allow us to monitor the Iranian program.

Politicians and propagandists who oppose the deal have spoken of fifteen years as if it were the blink of an eye; but fifteen years is a long time in the history of a nation; and Americans should know it. Fifteen years ago George W. Bush had not yet won the presidency and delivered to the world his vision of a new Middle East. Destruction makes faster work than rebuilding or reform, but much that is good can happen in fifteen years.

Obama delivered this speech at American University -- recalling President Kennedy's speech in support of the Test Ban Treaty at the same institution 52 years ago -- and with full awareness of the parallel he said: "Does anyone really doubt that the same voices now raised against this deal will be demanding that whoever is President bomb those nuclear facilities?" Kennedy at a press conference on August 20, 1963 faced a similar pretense of scientific skepticism founded on destructive intent, and had to answer questions about the opposition of Dr. Edward Teller, a fierce advocate of atmospheric nuclear testing. Asked whether he had curtailed a recent series of tests for political reasons, Kennedy replied:

Obviously, we don't like to test in the atmosphere unless the test is essential. Every test in the atmosphere produces fallout and we would, it seems to me, be remiss in not attempting to keep the number of tests to the minimum, consistent with our national security. ... So we kept a careful eye, and we in fact did more tests, several more tests than we had originally planned six months before. ... I think that they were an impressive series. But it would be very difficult, I think, to satisfy Dr. Teller in this field.

Schumer is following the Dr. Tellers of our age, but they have invented nothing, improved nothing, are good at nothing except starting wars. They are, however, trained and seasoned by experience in the art of spreading fear. By joining their ranks again in 2015, as he did in 2003, Chuck Schumer has made much harder the fight against the chief hope today for lowering the risk of nuclear proliferation. He has done it for reasons no more compelling than those that drove the feverish opposition to Kennedy in 1963.

Meanwhile, 58 members of the US Congress have landed in Jerusalem, on a visit set to last from August 4 to August 10. Their trip was bought and paid for by the charitable arm of AIPAC. The lawmakers obeyed the command of Prime Minister Netanyahu to visit him instead of their own constituents in early August if they want support in the future by prominent Jewish donors. A gesture of more abject servility cannot be imagined. By agreeing to take the trip at this time -- so easy to decline if only for the perception of the thing -- these captive representatives have in effect declared their confidence in Netanyahu and their dependence on his favor. He will come back for more.

Very likely we can expect to hear something from the same representatives concerning the "flaws" in the Iran deal which Schumer says prompted his early declaration of a negative vote. "Even more troubling [than the 24-day delay on inspections]," said Schumer," is the fact that the US cannot demand inspections unilaterally." The demand for immediate inspections, any time, any place, is not an initiative of Schumer's at all but a late-found and richly publicized Netanyahu obstruction, like his demand that Iran recognize Israel as "the Jewish state." It is tantamount to setting a precondition of total and round-the-clock American surveillance of Iranian sites. The only government that would submit to such a regimen is a client government; and the objection could only be satisfied in the aftermath of regime change.

The most puzzling detail in Schumer's defense of his negative vote is the reversal on which it closes. He admits that the heart of the nuclear deal works against the development of nuclear weapons quite effectively. "When it comes to the nuclear aspects of the agreement within ten years, we might be slightly better off with it. However, when it comes to the nuclear aspects after ten years and the non-nuclear aspects, we would be better off without it." There, for all his elaborate show of scruple, he gives the game away. The "nuclear aspects" are the substance of the agreement. That is why they call it the nuclear deal. But no, for Netanyahu and Schumer what offends is the prospect of Iran's re-entry into the global community as a trading partner and a non-nuclear regional power of some resourcefulness. This emergence can only curb Israel's wish to dominate for another half century as it has done for the past half century. That, and not anything resembling an "existential threat," is the real transition at issue.

In conclusion, Schumer tells his Democratic listeners that he does not want a war with Iran; but this is a hollow pretense. The preponderance of influential persons who side with him, as they did on Iraq in 2003, do indeed want a war, and they say they do. They say that war is inevitable, and that the sooner we get over delusions of compromise, the better for Israel and America. Even if he were in earnest, what could the peaceable Senator Chuck Schumer do? A shomer, after all, a guardian and not a buccaneer -- how could he prevail against the many who are made of sterner stuff? The Republican candidate now ranked third in the polls, Scott Walker, has said he would bomb Iran on his first day as president.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

Free Speech: What Difference?

By Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News

10 August 15

o you believe in the overthrow of the U.S. government by force or violence?” asked the Southern judge, a white man, looking down at the elderly civil rights activist, a black woman. She thought for a moment. “Your Honor,” she answered in her grandmotherly voice. “By force.”

Jack Radey, an eternally youthful Berkeley Bolshevik, tells the joke with delight. But the laughter recalls a grim reality, a coordinated government effort until 1958 to smash the Communist Party (CPUSA). Whatever one thinks of American communists, and I am a long-time critic, this was an assault on freedom of speech, press, and assembly more severe and systemic than any of the horrific attacks from Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Taking advantage of hysteria over the country's impending entry into World War II, in June 1940 the U.S. Congress overwhelmingly passed the Alien Registration Act. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt sponsored the bill, while Howard W. Smith, an anti-labor Democratic congressman from Virginia, led its passage and gave it his name. The Smith Act initially targeted suspected anarchists, fascists, and communists, but soon fixated on “the commies.”

Along with requiring all foreign-born nationals to register, the Smith Act imposed up to 20 years behind bars and hefty fines for anyone who, with intent “prints, publishes, edits, issues, circulates, sells, distributes, publicly displays any written or printed matter advocating, advising, or teaching the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying any government in the United States by force or violence.”

Read the words. They could not more blatantly violate the plain language of the First Amendment, that “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or of the people peaceably to assemble.” No one should be surprised. The Supreme Court has long ignored or “balanced away” the First Amendment to justify government squelching of unpopular speech, especially in time of war, hot or cold.

Equally dispiriting was the inconstant behavior of the American Civil Liberties Union. From its founding in 1920, the ACLU had stalwartly defended and greatly popularized the right to express unpopular opinions. But they began to waver in the late 1930s, when the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) called ACLU activities into question. Anti-communist ideologues on the ACLU board – including the Socialist Party’s longtime leader Norman Thomas – took the threat as an opportunity to push through a resolution making anti-communism official ACLU policy, which in later years the group publicized in its legal pleadings and public statements.

The resolution caused Harry F. Ward to resign as chair, and the board then fired one of the ACLU’s founders, labor leader Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. It isn’t clear whether her “sin” in the board’s eye was joining the Communist Party in the 1930s in opposition to the Nazis, or in refusing to quit the party after the Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1939.

Nor did the communists help their cause by applauding the Smith Act prosecution of rival Trotskyists in Minneapolis in 1941, much as Trotsky and his followers had earlier cheered HUAC attacks on the CP. The communists similarly launched a national campaign to deny free speech to the racist anti-Semite Gerald L.K. Smith. Whatever the faction, the old left of those years too often dismissed free speech as nothing more than “bourgeois civil liberties.”

Now officially anti-communist, the ACLU condemned the Smith Act and – with a visible lack of zeal – continued to defend those prosecuted under it. The group also strengthened pre-existing ties to J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI, with some staff members acting as informants. “The ACLU’s greatest failure during the cold war, was turning a blind eye on the FBI,” wrote historian Samuel Walker. “At best, it simply refused to pursue allegations of FBI abuse. At worst, it was an active apologist.”

This hurt because J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI Director, was campaigning in government to use the Smith Act to smash the CPUSA, much as he had helped to smash the Industrial Workers of the World, the Wobblies, after World War I. The Justice Department followed his lead in July 1948, indicting Eugene Dennis and 11 other top communist leaders. The trial began the following year at Manhattan’s Foley Square courthouse and lasted nine stormy months. The CP staged a political defense that rallied thousands of its own troops in almost daily demonstrations, while the administration and its amen chorus in the mass media used the hullabaloo to increase fear of a communist “fifth column” and help sell Truman’s Cold War policies. Given the temper of the times, nothing the communists did or did not do seems likely to have changed the political dynamic.

The trial itself was anything but fair. Many non-communist observers found Judge Harold Medina obviously biased against the defendants and their lawyers. The prosecution never proved with hard evidence that the party actually advocated a violent overthrow of the government other than perhaps in theory, but the jury followed Judge Medina’s lead in finding all the defendants guilty. Medina sentenced one of them, a distinguished war veteran, to three years in prison, and all the others to 5 years. He also imprisoned their lawyers for contempt of court and subjected them all to disbarment proceedings.

Upholding the convictions and contempt charges, the Supreme Court offered absolutely no Constitutional challenge to the Smith Act’s restriction of speech, press, or assembly. The ruling in Dennis v. United States was, in the opinion of the ACLU’s founder and longtime executive director Roger Baldwin, “the worst single blow to civil liberties in our history.”

The Justice Department saw the ruling more as a green light to begin prosecuting lesser communist leaders around the country. The defendants found it almost impossible to find lawyers willing to run the risk of taking their case, while the government went to great lengths to deprive the defendants of the funds to pay for their defense.

This civil liberties shambles went on until 1958, when a largely new Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren overturned a Smith Act conviction in Yates vs. United States. The justices left the law standing, but ruled that it did not prevent advocating the violent overthrow of government as an abstract idea, but only as part of some imminent plot.

With a couple of exceptions, the decision in Yates put a stop to the Smith Act prosecutions. But it also opened the way for some in my generation to take a wonderfully awkward and extremely effective view of civil liberties.

We started by simply refusing to leave the protection of free speech, press, and assembly to lawyers, judges, and a Constitution whose meaning the Supreme Court rewrites at will. Civil liberties is a birthright we best defend with public education and massive civil disobedience. When in the 1960s students at Berkeley and other universities demanded almost complete free speech on campus, and were willing to fight to get, we got it. When we dramatically insisted that free speech be extended to suspected Communists or anyone else, we severely shredded the non-stop effort by supposedly liberal university and government officials to redbait us. When mostly black civil right activists took to the streets and highways, we won the beginning of a campaign we must now continue to ensure that black lives matter. When enough young people burned their draft cards in public, we held a war-making government in check. But when protesters willingly allowed themselves to be herded into wire-enclosed “free speech zones,” the right to protest lost most of its punch.

One measure of the determination we exhibited is really quite funny. Back in 1919, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote a unanimous opinion for the Supreme Court upholding the conviction of anti-war draft resistors in Schenck vs. the United States. Two of his phrases became free speech gospel of the 1960s. Both were taken out of context. Neither held any force of Constitutional law, not even in the Yates decision. People still misquote his words, making them much stronger than he intended. In our version:

Government should not restrict speech unless it creates a “clear and present danger” – and the lack of restriction should permit almost any expression unless it crosses the line into falsely shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater.

In 1969, the Supremes came close to catching up, ruling in the Brandenburg decision that government cannot forbid the advocacy of law-breaking or violence unless it is likely to produce “imminent lawless action.” But, with the supposed war on terror, Washington now stifles the speech of suspected Muslim jihadis, and popular objections are few and far between. So much for our written Constitution and our “core American values.”

A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he is researching a new book, "Big Money and the Corporate State: How Global Banks, Corporations, and Speculators Rule and How to Nonviolently Break Their Hold."

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.