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Source: Jonathan Cook
The billionaire class want you thinking Israel controls the West
Western elites don’t care what you think or say, so long as you don’t notice that they are the ones making money from a genocide, asset-stripping western economies and trashing our planet
Inevitably, the more extreme the West's actions – by, for example, actively aiding Israel's genocide in Gaza – the more extreme the assumptions about the causes of that behaviour.
As a result, some are falling into an easy trap laid for them by western establishments. They assume that tiny Israel controls the West and its foreign policy, and then dedicate their energies to making the case for this analytical framework.
In a sense, the debate about whether Israel controls the West or the West controls Israel cannot be won on facts alone. It is too easy to select the facts that suit your view. It makes more sense to try to understand the context in which this debate is taking place, and address the question of “Cui bono?”, or “Who ultimately benefits?”
I published a long essay this week, which you can read here, making the case that the West uses Israel to provide a moral gloss to its own larger, colonial aims in the oil-rich Middle East – aims the West has been pursuing for more than a century, when Britain promised to implant an explicitly “colonial” entity, one it fashioned as a “Jewish state”, in the throat of the Arab world.
To be clear, the thesis that the West controls Israel, not the other way round, does not preclude the obvious fact that Israel advances its own particular aims, and meddles in western domestic politics to advance those aims. It can do so as long as those goals do not conflict significantly with the West’s larger imperial agenda of “full-spectrum global military domination” and resource control.
You can believe Israel is fully a western client state without having to dismiss the fact of a powerful Israel lobby that seeks to widen its room for manoeuvre within overall western foreign policy objectives, or the fact that some Israeli leaders, such as Benjamin Netanyahu, are more difficult for Washington elites to handle than others.
You can also square it with the fact that Israel – in so far as its aims roughly accord with the foreign policy agenda of an unseen, permanent bureaucracy in Washington – can run rings around a US President trying to rein it in as part of his own myth-making, as Barack Obama signally tried and failed to do.
Political passivity
This surface politics is what we are encouraged to see as “real politics”. It is not. Elections, as the saying goes, would not be allowed if they made any real difference. The so-called right and left in western political systems share the same basic assumptions about foreign policy: continuing western control of global resources.
Questioning the purpose of Nato, and the neo-colonialism it embodies, is itself enough of a red flag to get you designated as Public Enemy No 1, as former UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn soon found out. As will the new UK leader of the Green Party, Zack Polanski, if he starts making significant electoral inroads.
Mainstream political parties have the freedom to bicker over the details of domestic policy. That is what we are encouraged to focus on. Whether we should support extreme austerity that benefits wealth elites, or slightly less extreme austerity that also benefits wealth elites but slightly less so. Whether we support a Brexit that benefits one set of oligarchs, or a Remain that benefits another set of oligarchs.
More broadly, western elites – the billionaire class – protect themselves and the structures of power they have created to maintain their wealth by manufacturing, mainly through the establishment media, deep misconceptions about the nature of our political systems. They want us looking in the wrong places.
For many – the majority – the mistake is to think that we, the people, control the political system but that corrupt politicians have failed us.
For others, it is to imagine that powerful lobbies – like the Israel one – distort and poison what would otherwise be far more responsive and benign political structures.
Both lead to political passivity by misdiagnosing reality. Both assume that our politics can be fixed by dealing with surface issues.
In the first case, the answer is to elect a Donald Trump in the US or a Nigel Farage in the UK who claim – in direct contradiction of their own histories positioned within western elites – to be outsiders who champion ordinary people. Not surprisingly, they want you scapegoating “illegal immigrants”, “benefit scroungers” and “the traitorous left”, not taking on the billionaire class they really represent.
In the second case, the answer is to root out a foreign agent – the Israel lobby – that has infiltrated and contaminated the political system, and thereby restore that system to health.
Both these futile chases after illusory political change simply buy more time for the billionaire class and their discredited power structures, ones pushing our and other species to the brink of extinction, to continue business as usual.
Double boon
The “Israel controls the West” assumption is a double boon for the billionaire class, and is utterly self-sabotaging for those who want real political change.
First, it shifts our attention away from where real power lies and who it serves: the billionaire class and their hangers-on.
Second, the billionaire class, by falsely asserting that the genocidal state of Israel represents Jews, can then easily denounce the claim that Israel controls the West as the a new form of "antisemitism". Western states, supposedly waging a battle against this “new antisemitism”, can then justify accreting stronger powers to crush free speech and expand terror laws.
A proper analytical framework – one far more useful if we want to change our current, dire reality – leads in an entirely different direction.
It understands that there is a far more plausible reason why the West has provided the bombs to destroy Gaza, undermined the role of UN aid agencies to help Israel starve 1 million children to death, and operated spy flights over Gaza to collect intelligence to assist Israel in targeting journalists and killing aid workers.
A proper analytical framework can explain why Trump and European leaders wish to feign indignation at Israel attacking an ally, Qatar, even though it is clear that the US gave Israel clearance for the attack – an attempted assassination of the Hamas negotiators who were close to signing a ceasefire deal to bring home the Israeli captives we are told Israel and the West care so much about they have had to murder and maim hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to advance these captives’ return.
The truth is that we live in a bubble of political make-believe. The media and Hollywood – the public relations arms of the billionaire class – create fairy-tale narratives designed to keep us ignorant, divided and squabbling. They don’t care what you think or say so long as you don’t notice that the billionaire class is making money from a genocide, asset-stripping western economies and trashing our planet.
The enormity of all this is too grave, too terrifying for most of us to cope with. But cope with it we must – if we are to stand a hope of changing our world for the better.
[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]
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