U.S. neocons’ teamwork with the Israel Lobby has marked one of the greatest global calamities of the 21st century, writes Jeffrey Sachs.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Tel Aviv, Nov. 30, 2023. (State Department/Chuck Kennedy)
It’s official now. America’s closest ally, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the one accorded more than 50 standing ovations in Congress just months ago, is under indictment by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity and war crimes.
America must take note: the U.S. government is complicit in Netanyahu’s war crimes and has fully partnered in Netanyahu’s violent rampage across the Middle East.
For 30 years the Israel Lobby has induced the U.S. to fight wars on Israel’s behalf designed to prevent the emergence of a Palestinian State. Netanyahu, who first came to power in 1996, and has been prime minister for 17 years since then, has been the main cheerleader for U.S.-backed wars in the Middle East.
The result has been a disaster for the U.S. and a bloody catastrophe not only for the Palestinian people but for the entire Middle East.
These have not been wars to defend Israel, but rather wars to topple governments that oppose Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people. Israel viciously opposes the two-state solution called for by international law, the Arab Peace Initiative, the G20, the BRICS, the OIC and the U.N. General Assembly.
Israel’s intransigence, and its brutal suppression of the Palestinian people, has given rise to several militant resistance movements since the beginning of the occupation. These movements are backed by several countries in the region.
The obvious solution to the Israel-Palestine crisis is to implement the two-state solution and to demilitarize the militant groups as part of the implementation process.
Netanyahu Makes Endless War
Israel’s approach, especially under Netanyahu, is to overthrow foreign governments that oppose Israel’s domination, and recreate the map of a “New Middle East” without a Palestinian State. Rather than making peace, Netanyahu makes endless war.
What is shocking is that Washington has turned the U.S. military and federal budget over to Netanyahu for his disastrous wars. The history of the Israel lobby’s complete takeover of Washington can be found in the remarkable new book by Ilan Pappé, Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic (2024).
Netanyahu repeatedly told the American people that they would be the beneficiaries of his policies. In fact, Netanyahu has been an unmitigated disaster for the American people, bleeding the U.S. Treasury of trillions of dollars, squandering America’s standing in the world, making the U.S. complicit in his genocidal policies, and bringing the world closer to World War III.
If Trump wants to make America great again, the first thing he should do is to make America sovereign again, by ending Washington’s subservience to the Israel Lobby.
Netanyahu surrounded by supporters after his fourth address to a joint session of U.S. Congress, July 24, 2024. (C-Span still)
The Israel Lobby not only controls the votes in Congress but places hardline backers of Israel into key national security posts.
These have included:
Madeleine Albright (secretary of state for Clinton), Lewis Libby (chief of staff of Vice President Cheney), Victoria Nuland (deputy national security advisor of Cheney, NATO ambassador of Bush Jr., assistant secretary of state for Obama, under-secretary of state for Biden), Paul Wolfowitz (under-secretary of defense for Bush Sr., deputy secretary of defense for Bush Jr.), Douglas Feith (under-secretary of defense for Bush Jr.), Abram Shulsky (director of the Office of Special Plans, Department of Defense for Bush Jr.), Elliott Abrams (deputy national security advisor for Bush Jr.), Richard Perle (chairman of the Defense National Policy Board for Bush Jr.), Amos Hochstein (senior advisor to the Secretary of State for Biden), and Antony Blinken (secretary of state for Biden).
In 1995, Netanyahu described his plan of action in his book Fighting Terrorism. To control terrorists (Netanyahu’s characterization of militant groups fighting Israel’s illegal rule over the Palestinians), it’s not enough to fight the terrorists. Instead, it’s necessary to fight the “terrorist regimes” that support such groups. And the U.S. must be the one to lead:
“The cessation of terrorism must therefore be a clear-cut demand, backed up by sanctions and with no prizes attached. As with all international efforts, the vigorous application of sanctions to terrorist states must be led by the United States, whose leaders must choose the correct sequence, timing, and circumstances for these actions.”
As Netanyahu told the American people in 2001 (reprinted as the 2001 foreword to Fighting Terrorism):
“The first and most crucial thing to understand is this: There is no international terrorism without the support of sovereign states. International terrorism simply cannot be sustained for long without the regimes that aid and abet it… Take away all this state support, and the entire scaffolding of international terrorism will collapse into dust. The international terrorist network is thus based on regimes — Iran, Iraq, Syria, Taliban Afghanistan, Yasir Arafat’s Palestinian Authority, and several other Arab regimes, such as the Sudan.”
All of this was music to the ears of the neocons in Washington, who similarly subscribed to U.S.-led regime change operations (through wars, covert subversion, U.S.-led color revolutions, violent coups, etc.) as the main way to deal with perceived U.S. adversaries.
After 9/11, the Bush Jr. neocons (led by Cheney and Rumsfeld) and the Bush Jr. insiders of the Israel lobby (led by Wolfowitz and Feith), teamed up to remake the Middle East through a series of U.S.-led wars on Netanyahu’s targets in the Middle East (Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Syria) and Islamic East Africa (Libya, Somalia, and Sudan). The role of the Israel Lobby in stoking these wars of choice is described in detail in Pappe’s new book.
The neocon-Israel lobby war plan was shown to General Wesley Clark on a visit to the Pentagon soon after 9/11. An officer pulled a paper from his desk and told Clark:
“I just got this memo from the Secretary of Defense’s office. It says we’re going to attack and destroy the governments in 7 countries in five years — we’re going to start with Iraq, and then we’re going to move to Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran.”
In 2002, Netanyahu pitched the war with Iraq to the American people and Congress by promising them
“If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region[…] People sitting right next door in Iran, young people, and many others, will say the time of such regimes, of such despots is gone.”
A remarkable new insider account of Netanyahu’s role in spearheading the Iraq War also comes from retired Marine Command Chief Master Sargent Dennis Fritz, in his book Deadly Betrayal (2024). When Fritz was called to deploy to Iraq in early 2002, he asked senior military officials why the U.S. was deploying to Iraq, but he got no clear answer. Rather than lead soldiers into a battle he could not explain or justify, he left the service.
In 2005, Fritz was invited back to the Pentagon, now as a civilian, to assist Under-Secretary Douglas Feith in the declassification of documents about the war, so that Feith could use them to write a book about the war.
Fritz discovered in the process that the Iraq War had been spurred by Netanyahu in close coordination with Wolfowitz and Feith. He learned that the purported U.S. war aim, to counter Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, was a cynical public relations gimmick led by an Israel lobby insider, Abram Shulsky, to garner U.S. public support for the war.
Iraq was to be the first of the seven wars in five years, but as Fritz explains, the follow-up wars were delayed by the anti-U.S. Iraqi insurgency. Nonetheless, the U.S. eventually went to war or backed wars against Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Lebanon. In other words, the U.S. carried out Netanyahu’s plans — except for Iran.
To this day, indeed to this hour, Netanyahu works to stoke a U.S. war on Iran, one that could open World War III, either by Iran making the breakthrough to nuclear weapons, or by Iran’s ally, Russia, joining such a war on Iran’s side.
The neocon-Israel lobby teamwork has marked one of the greatest global calamities of the 21st century. All of the countries attacked by the U.S. or its proxies — Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Syria — now lie in ruins.
Meanwhile, Netanyahu’s genocide in Gaza continues apace, and yet again the U.S. has opposed the unanimous will of the world (other than Israel) this week by vetoing a U.N. Security Council ceasefire resolution that was backed by the other 14 members of the Council.
The real issue facing the Trump Administration is not defending Israel from its neighbors, who call repeatedly, almost daily, for peace based on the two-state solution. The real issue is defending the U.S. from the Israel Lobby.
Jeffrey D. Sachs is a university professor and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed The Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He is also president of the U.N. Sustainable Development Solutions Network and a commissioner of the U.N. Broadband Commission for Development.
This article is from Common Dreams.
