American Dream wrote:The use of the term "Israel Firster" reflects a broader trend which chooses to frame opposition to Israeli policies, and US support for them, in terms of defending or protecting US "national interests", and which appears increasingly disposed to criticising apologists for Israeli occupation on the grounds that they are being disloyal to these "national interests", rather than on the grounds that they are enabling a profound injustice.
...it risks abandoning a principled opposition to Israel's occupation grounded in broadly appealing progressive values – it is wrong to demolish people's houses; it is wrong to torture children; it is wrong to shell schools and hospitals with white phosphorus; it is wrong to violently prevent a people from exercising self-determination in violation of international law; etc . – in favour of a critique based on parochial, unappealing and potentially quite vicious insinuations about people's – mainly Jews' – "loyalty". This isn't antisemitism. But it isn't the way to win the struggle, and nor should it be how we'd want to win it.
My alarm bells ring whenever someone tries to persuade people that loyalty to their own country is intrinsically wrong, and imply that it is "parochial, unappealing and potentially quite vicious". This is especially true when the conflict in question is not between loyalty to one's own country and to one's moral values, but between loyalty to one's own country and to a foreign country.
Here Stern-Weiner completely lost me:
It is not, contra Greenwald and Sullivan, "plainly true" that many prominent apologists for Israel are "Israel Firsters". As noted above, virtually all of these supposedly principled devotees of the Jewish state were completely silent on or else actively critical of Israel before it became a 'strategic asset' of the US establishment. As Finkelstein observes, after '67 Israel also effectively became "a 'strategic asset' of American Jews"
He appears to be deliberately, and misleadingly, conflating "Jews" with "zionists", when in fact, until the late 60s, zionists comprised a very small, albeit highly wealthy and influential, minority among Jewish Americans. The vast majority did not accept zionism at all, prior to 1967, and indeed were "actively critical of Israel", or at best indifferent. This, despite a massive propaganda campaign orchestrated from Hollywood beginning in 1960 to glamorize Israel and those who "rose up" [made
aliyah] to participate in the ethnic cleansing and colonization of Palestine.
Before 1967, most Jewish Americans considered the US, not "Israel" to be the Promised Land, where they and their families could enjoy freedom and prosperity. In contrast, life in Israel, especially for new immigrants, was quite harsh and often very disappointing, not at all living up to the hype. As a consequence, most Jewish Americans identified as Americans only, and did everything they could to integrate seamlessly into the fabric of American society. Furthermore, up until the mid-1960s America's political establishment treated Israel as a foreign country, and the US' relations with it were both kept at arm's length and balanced with the US' relations with Arab states. In this context, most American Jews strove to avoid any stigma of dual-loyalty or allegiance to a foreign state.
Israel's 1967 war was a watershed: its dramatic, easy conquest in 6 days, over no less than four neighboring countries marked the beginning of a new image for the zionist state. Overnight, Israel was transformed from David to Superman. Everybody loves a winner. Zionist triumphalism became fashionable. The propaganda went into overdrive. Most importantly, with the US President himself oddly subservient to Israel, and with the halls of power suddenly filled with Israel's agents, the stigma of conflicting loyalties no longer applied. On the contrary: Israel acquired a certain mystique associated with the heights of power and influence. Instead of provoking suspicion, those who identified with zionism were treated with respect, and found doors opening before them. Expressing active loyalty to Israel became a career-enhancing move.
As a result of these factors, zionist recruitment and activism in the US at the grassroots level skyrocketed after 1967. Thus, the number of Jewish Americans who
became zionists increased dramatically, not, as Stern-Weiner says, that they were "devotees of the Jewish state" who had been intimidated into silence before.
People like Stern-Weiner not only erroneously conflate Jews with zionists, they ignore the dramatic changes taking place within the "US establishment" during the 1960s, which is when the zionists went from trying to influence it, to dominating it, beginning with the so-called "Jewish lobby's" ability to apply effective pressure on Congress, the zionist influence over Hollywood, and culminating with the presidency of
Lyndon Johnson, a staunch zionist who had, during WWII, worked to raise money to buy weapons for Jewish underground fighters in Palestine. Johnson's relationship with zionism was mutually very beneficial:
[Johnson's] major political break came in 1948, when he captured a Senate primary marred by massive fraud; his 87-vote margin of victory earned him the moniker “Landslide Lyndon.”
...
Even though he came from a Texas environment populated by few Jews and fewer Zionists, Johnson had worked closely with a variety of pro-Israel figures before coming to the presidency. In many ways, he owed his political career to Abe Fortas, a committed Zionist and the attorney who masterminded his defense in the 1948 election dispute. Fortas remained a counselor to Johnson throughout his career; Johnson named him to a Supreme Court vacancy in 1965.14
In the 1950s, meanwhile, Johnson used his position as Senate majority leader to build up the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee (DSCC), raising money nationally and then inserting funds into battleground states. This effort brought Johnson into close contact with prominent Jewish labor leaders, such as David Dubinsky of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, and high-profile Jewish financiers, such as Arthur Krim, an entertainment lawyer who served a stint as finance chairman of the Democratic National Committee.15
Link
In the following taped conversation between Johnson and his confidant Abe Fortas, it's clear that these two zionists, Fortas and Krim, had unprecedented intimacy with and access to the president. It took place in 1968, when Johnson had decided to leave the White House and not seek re-election, but not before taking the pivotal step of selling the state-of-the-art Phantom jets to Israel. In order to justify this, and give some semblance of "even-handedness", he wanted to sell inferior weapons to Jordan, a move that was encountering some opposition from the "Jewish lobby":
Johnson: I've got to make a decision on those [Phantoms]....before I go out of office....But I want the Russians to turn me down on disarmament. I've got a letter on his [Alexsei Kosygin's] lap now....He's not going to pee a drop with me: I know that. But I've got to have that behind me so I can use it as an excuse....I'm not going to give 'em [Phantoms] unless I can protect myself. I'm not going to be a goddamned arms merchant. I'm going to make them [Soviets] be the outlaws if I can.
Fortas: Sure, that's very good.
Johnson: Now that's what I'm trying to do. And this little Eppie [Evron -- Israeli embassy] is the only one that's got sense enough in their organization to see it....He's just as bright as that goddamned [
unclear] dog of mine. He catches everything that comes along without telling him....I haven't had one goddamned bit of trouble with...Eppie or Feinberg. They're smart. Arthur Krim.
Fortas: Isn't this fellow Feinberg wonderful?
Johnson: He is just the finest I ever saw. Except Krim. Krim's the best man....Krim's the only one that's like you....I see him damn near every week....because....I just like to listen to him....
I let him see every damn document that comes in....I have never heard of one little thing he's ever said.
Fortas: Yeah. Well, he's a saint.
Link
So, when Stern-Weiner, Chomsky and Finkelstein mention that Israel became "a strategic asset" of the "US establishment" after 1967, this is both incomplete and misleading: this was not a cause, but an effect, of the power of what was then referred to as "the Jewish lobby" and its de facto takeover of the "US establishment" during the 1960s after Kennedy's assassination. (It is far more accurate to call it the zionist lobby, because its prime purpose was not to promote American Jewish interests, but those of the zionist state).
Below is a fascinating description of the context in which the US' "special relationship" with the zionist state was forged during the Johnson presidency. I post it here in its entirety, just because it's so entertaining (although Halsell refrains from stating the obvious, that Mathilde Krim was what the Mossad charmingly refer to as a "
swallow":
How LBJ's Vietnam War Paralyzed His Mideast Policymakers
By Grace Halsell
In the summer of 1967, I was a staff writer for President Lyndon B. Johnson at the White House. I was aware of that year's Middle East crisis but, like most Americans, understood little about it other than the fact that it involved Jews and Arabs. In that year I did not know a single Arab, and possibly LBJ did not either. Like most Americans, I was pro-Israel, Israel having been sold to most all of us as the underdog.
Everyone around me, without exception, was pro-Israel. Johnson had a dozen or more close associates and aides who were both Jewish and pro-Israel. There were Walt Rostow at the White House, his brother Eugene at State, and Arthur Goldberg, ambassador to the United Nations. Other pro-Israel advisers included Abe Fortas, associate justice of the Supreme Court; Democratic Party fundraiser Abraham Feinberg; White House counsels Leo White and Jake Jacobsen; White House writers Richard Goodwin and Ben Wattenberg; domestic affairs aide Larry Levinson; and John P. Roche, known as Johnson's intellectual-in-residence and an avid supporter of Israel.
I did not "know," but could sense, that events of great portent were transpiring. I heard rumors of CIA Director Richard Helms sending a warning to LBJ that the Israelis were about to attack, and the president getting word from Moscow that if the Israelis attacked any Arab country, the Soviets would go to that nation's defense.
I could see the comings and goings of Abe Fortas and Arthur Goldberg, and I knew that Walt Rostow, in particular, had close Israeli connections, and met frequently with Israeli Embassy Minister Ephraim (Eppy) Evron.
On occasion I saw a strikingly attractive blonde woman who, I learned, was an ardent supporter of Israel and a woman of whom the president was fond. Her background sounded like material from a spy novel. She was born Mathilde Galland in 1927 in Italy, where she was reared as a Roman Catholic. Then, when her family returned to her father's birthplace in Switzerland, she became a Lutheran.
While a student in Geneva, she fell in love with a young Bulgarian Jew, David Danon, who had been brought up in Palestine and exiled by the British for his association with the Irgun Zvai Leumi, a Jewish terrorist group led by Menachem Begin. Danon was studying to become a medical doctor, but spent most of his time recruiting and carrying out secret Irgun operations throughout Western Europe.
In later interviews with former Time reporter Donald Neff, Mathilde said that as a teenager she saw Danon as a dashing and heroic figure, an activist dedicating his life to the founding of a Jewish state in Palestine. He was a personal friend of the Stern Gang terrorists, led by Yitzhak Shamir, who killed British resident minister Lord Walter Moyne in Cairo during World War II, and the Irgun terrorists who blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946, with heavy loss of life. As bloody as these actions were, Mathilde said, she saw them as heroic. They represented the depth of the convictions of Danon and the Irgunists—and drew her to them.
Mathilde became so enamored of the Jewish struggle and of Danon's daring undercover operations in Europe that she converted to Judaism and married Danon. Then she, too, became an Irgun agent.
Reporter Neff, in his book entitled Warriors for Jerusalem: The Six Days That Changed the Middle East, documents Mathilde's role as a young "gun-runner" for the Jewish terrorist group. "As a seemingly innocent petite and pretty blonde out for a bicycle ride along Switzerland's borders," wrote Neff, "she in reality was taking messages and explosives into neighboring France and Italy—to be passed on to the Irgunists.
Five years after the creation of Israel obviated the need for pretty blonde gunrunners, Mathilde received a Ph.D. in genetics at the University of Geneva in 1953. She and Danon then moved to Israel, where she became a cancer researcher at the Weizmann Institute. After the birth of a daughter, she and Danon separated. While still at Weizmann, however, she met and later married the rich—and 20 years her senior—Arthur Krim, a motion picture executive who became finance chairman for the Democratic National Committee.
American Jews such as Krim and Abraham Feinberg—a New York banker and the first Jew to become a prominent moneyraiser in presidential campaigns—were by then bringing in well over half of the Democratic Party's funds. Thus it was natural that such fund-raisers would become very important to many Democratic candidates—and particularly to the leader of the Democratic Party, Lyndon B. Johnson.
LBJ often invited the Krims to his Texas ranch. There also were many instances in which Arthur and Mathilde were guests at the White House, and other times when, for many days running, Mathilde—without her husband—was a guest there. The Krims built a house near the LBJ ranch known as Mathilde's house, and Johnson often traveled there by helicopter.
The Krims, as well as other Jewish Americans who were closely associated with Johnson, advised and counseled him on the events leading up to the Six-Day War of June 1967. On the Memorial Day weekend in May 1967, Mathilde and her husband were guests at the LBJ ranch. On arrival at the ranch, Johnson learned that the Soviets had warned the U.S. that if Israel attacked an Arab state, the Soviets would go to the aid of that state. The State Department was preparing a message for LBJ to send to Israel.
While awaiting the draft message, Johnson got behind the wheel of his Lincoln Continental and took Mathilde and Arthur Krim for a drive over the hill country. They were at a neighbor's house when an aide brought Johnson a message drafted by the State Department for Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol. It relayed to Israel Moscow's warning that "if Israel starts military action, the Soviet Union will extend help to the attacked party."
After reassuring Eshkol of America's interest in Israel's safety, the draft message cautioned: "It is essential that Israel not take any preemptive military action and thereby make itself responsible for the initiation of hostilities." The president strengthened the warning by adding two words so that the sentence read, "It is essential that Israel JUST MUST NOT take any preemptive military action. . ."
On June 3, Johnson traveled to New York to deliver a speech at a Democratic Party fund-raising dinner. He moved on to a $1,000-a-plate dinner dance, sponsored by the President's Club of New York, whose chairman was Arthur Krim. While at the table, fund-raiser Abe Feinberg leaned over the shoulder of Mathilde Krim, seated next to Johnson, and whispered: "Mr. President, it [Israel's attack] can't be held any longer. It's going to be within the next 24 hours."
On June 4, Johnson went to the home of his close adviser and friend, Justice Abe Fortas. The following day, June 5, Rostow woke Johnson with a phone call at 4:30 a.m. "War has broken out," Rostow said. The Israelis had attacked Egypt and Syria.
Mathilde Krim was a guest at the White House and, before going to the Oval Office, and apparently before waking Lady Bird or notifying anyone else, Johnson dropped by the bedroom where Mathilde was sleeping and gave her the news: "The war has started."
At 7:45 a.m., Johnson talked—for the first time—on the hot line with Moscow. Soviet Premier Aleksi Kosygin expressed the hope that the United States would restrain Israel. Both leaders vowed to work for a cease-fire.
On that day—June 5, 1967—I walked the White House corridors as the telephone lines and news tickers recorded developments of the first morning of the war that would change the Middle East. I learned that in the war's first hours, Israeli planes had destroyed the air forces of both Egypt and Syria on the ground.
Unconcealable Glee
Several U.S. officials in a State Department Operations Room briefing could not conceal their glee over Israel's successes. With a wide smile, Eugene Rostow said, "Gentlemen, gentlemen, do not forget that we are neutral in word, thought and deed."
At the State Department's noon briefing on June 5, press spokesman Robert J. McCloskey repeated those words for reporters. (Since the U.S. was not neutral but totally supportive of Israel, however, this statement would need—over the next several weeks—endless clarification.)
Also on June 5, Arthur Krim wrote a memo to the president saying: "Many arms shipments are packed and ready to go to Israel, but are being held up. It would be helpful if these could be released." Johnson got the shipments on their way.
Walt Rostow, in a memo to the president, referred to the results of Israel's surprise attack on Egypt and Syria as "the first day's turkey shoot." On June 6, in another memo to the president, Walt Rostow recommended that the Israelis not be forced to withdraw from the territories they had seized—short of peace treaties with the Arab states.
"If the Israelis go fast enough and the Soviets get worried enough," he wrote, "a simple cease-fire might be the best answer. This would mean that we could use the de facto situation on the ground to try to negotiate not a return to armistice lines but a definitive peace in the Middle East."
Mathilde Krim, still a guest in the White House, left for meetings in New York. Before departing, however, she wrote out a statement supportive of Israel which she asked the president to deliver "verbatim to the American people." Johnson was sufficiently impressed with her comments to, later in the day, read some of them to Secretary of State Dean Rusk. But the president did not, as she had asked, read them to the American people.
Jordan, treaty-bound to come to the aid of Egypt and Syria if either were attacked, had done so and, on June 7, Israel captured the Old City of Jerusalem. Also on June 7, Wattenberg and Levinson wrote in a memo to Johnson that the U.N. might attempt "to sell Israel down the river."
They urged LBJ to support Israel's claim to the territories seized militarily. They referred to McCloskey's statement that the U.S. was neutral, suggesting LBJ issue a statement affirming total support for Israel which, they said, might stop American Jews from meeting in Lafayette Square to protest the "neutrality" statement.
While Johnson never minded getting pro-Israel advice from such close friends as Mathilde Krim or Abe Fortas, he apparently resented advice from relatively minor White House staffers such as Wattenberg and Levinson. Seeing Levinson he stormed:
"You Zionist dupe! You and Wattenberg are Zionist dupes in the White House! Why can't you see I'm doing all I can for Israel! That's what you should be telling people when they ask for a message from the president for their rally." As LBJ abruptly stormed off, Levinson reports, he stood there, "shaken to the marrow of my bones."
Meanwhile, on the night of June 7, the USS Liberty, a Navy "ferret" ship equipped to monitor electronic communications, had approached within sight of the Gaza Strip so the National Security Agency personnel aboard could intercept the military communications jamming the airwaves. The president retired at 11:30 p.m., but White House logs reported that at one minute to midnight he got a call from Mathilde Krim, still in New York.
By June 8, despite U.S. and Soviet demands for a cease-fire, the Israelis were planning one more attack to take Syria's Golan Heights. Perhaps to prevent U.S. intelligence from learning of their plan, despite Syria's acceptance of the cease-fire, the Israelis dispatched planes to the USS Liberty. One roared over the Liberty so closely that the portholes of the aircraft's reconnaissance cameras were clearly visible. Lieutenant James M. Ennes, deck officer, saw on its wings Israel's insignia, the Star of David.
Ennes glanced at the U.S. flag atop his ship's tall mast. If he could see the Israeli pilots in their cockpits, he reasoned, the pilots could certainly see the large U.S. flag. It was not long after the last of several such Israeli reconnaissance flights, however, that an Israeli aircraft swooped down and fired rockets directly at The Liberty. Rocket fragments and 30mm bullets punched through the heavy deck plating—and through the flesh of the stunned crewmen. Then more planes—with cannon and napalm—turned the Liberty into a floating hell of flames and screaming men.
The Israeli attacks killed 34 Americans and wounded 171. The ship was partly flooded when an Israeli torpedo boat hit the U.S. ship with a torpedo below the water line. Another machine-gunned the ship's life rafts when the crew tried to launch them.
Only by a miracle did The Liberty remain afloat. But its threat to Israel's plans was finished. The next day, June 9, Israeli forces attacked and captured the Golan Heights. On Saturday, June 10, the war's sixth day, Israel agreed to a cease-fire.
It was Rostow who first notified Johnson of the assault on the Liberty. Asked who did it, Rostow said he did not know. Later the Israelis said they had done it, by mistake.
Johnson sent an immediate report to Kosygin that the Israelis had torpedoed a U.S. ship. Thus the Kremlin now knew about the Israeli attack, but the American people did not. From the beginning, the Johnson administration covered it up. Surviving crew members were separated from each other and the Navy was ordered to make certain that no survivor talked with any reporter—or to anyone else—about the assault on the USS Liberty.
It went virtually unnoticed. Not only the crew of the USS Liberty, but all Americans were victims. Johnson and most of those who entered and left the Oval Office were oriented toward Israel. For that matter, I too, was ready and eager to believe in 1967 that the Arabs, not the Israelis, had started the war and that the bombing raid on the USS Liberty was not intentional, but a mistake.
While there can be no moral justification for the White House cover-up orders to the Navy after the assault on the Liberty, from hindsight Johnson's political motivation is obvious. It was the same motivation that led him subsequently to listen to the Jewish friends and advisers who urged him not to put any pressure on the Israelis to relinquish territories they had seized in the Six-Day War.
In 1967, President Johnson felt he needed all the support he could get to I 'win" in Vietnam. Many American Jews were liberals outspokenly opposed to the war there. Johnson was told if he gave all out support to Israel—which would include ignoring the Israeli attack on the Liberty influential Jewish Americans would stop opposing his Vietnam policies.
In a memo to the president, Wattenberg, whose parents had moved to the U. S. from Palestine and who was known as a strong supporter of the Jewish state, said flatly that if the president came out with strong support for Israel, he would win American Jewish support for the war in Vietnam. Many American Jewish leaders are "doves" on Vietnam, Wattenberg wrote, but "hawks" on a war with Arab states.
"You stand to be cheered now by those (American Jewish leaders) who were jeering last week," Wattenberg wrote the president. He added that the Mideast crisis could be "a bonus" for Johnson. All-out support of Israel, he predicted, would "help turn around 'the other war'—the domestic dissatisfaction about Vietnam."
The support given by the American Jewish leaders "was welcome to the president," as reporter Donald Neff observed, when at every turn he was being attacked by critics, particularly in the media, of his Vietnam policy.
I was, at the time, a typical American. I was convinced back then that the Arabs had started the war and deserved what they got. I didn't try to reason how, if the Arabs had started the war, they were surprised with their air forces on the ground and how it was that Israel so easily seized all of Palestine, including the rest of Jerusalem. Instead, like millions of Americans, I was thrilled by the might of "little Israel."
Yet, despite the euphoria around me, what I saw in the White House planted questions in my mind. As Americans we had just passed through a dangerous Middle East conflict that threatened to explode into World War III. There were two parties to the conflict, Arabs and Jews. But for weeks on end I had seen only one set of advisers who could call or see Johnson whenever they pleased. The Arabs had no voice, no representation, no access, whatsoever.
It was only later that I came to reflect on how America, which devoted so much of the efforts of its "best and brightest" to the problem of Vietnam, had in 1967 quite unwittingly stumbled into a Middle East quagmire that, long after the fall of Saigon, would continue to enmesh U.S. soldiers and diplomats, and project an image of double standards and insincerity onto U.S. diplomacy all over the world.
Far more than his failed policies in Vietnam, the Middle East policies that LBJ allowed to fall into place in the June 1967 war would remain to haunt the U.S. for decades to come.
Grace Halsell, a Washington-based writer, is the author of Journey to Jerusalem and Prophecy and Politics, as well as several other works of nonfiction. List
For more details about how Israeli agents were effectively coordinating Israel's 1967 criminal land grab from within the White House, see
here.The so-called "special relationship" with Israel is in large part the legacy of the Johnson White House. It was soon followed by Kissinger's "purges" during the 1970s of the US State Department "Arabists" -- experienced, highly-skilled diplomats with extensive knowledge of the Arab countries -- who were replaced with personnel whose only qualification, in many cases was their absolute devotion to Israel.
By the 1980s, under the Reagan White House, zionists had come to dominate the US Defense establishment as well. See former Senator Paul Findley's 1989 book "They Dare to Speak Out" for details about how serious this problem is, and how much it has cost the US, on many levels. Here's an excerpt:
...In 1984 people known to have intimate links with Israel were employed in offices throughout the bureaucracy and particularly in the Defense Department, where top-secret weapons technology and other sensitive matters are routinely handled.
The bureaucracy is headed by Fred Ikle, undersecretary of defense for international security. The three personalities of greatest importance in his area are Richard Perle, Idle’s assistant for international security policy; Stephen Bryen, Perle’s principal deputy, whose assigned specialty was technology transfer; and Noel Koch, principal deputy to Richard Armitage, assistant secretary for international security affairs. Koch was formerly employed by the Zionist Organization of America. Perle previously served on the staff of Democratic Senator henry Jackson of Washington, one of Israel’s most ardent boosters, and had the reputation of being a conduit of information to the Israeli government. Stephen Bryen came to the administration under the darkest cloud of all.
Bryen’s office is represented on the inter-agency unit, known as the National Disclosure Policy Commission, which approves technology transfers related to weapons systems. The commission includes representatives of State, National Security Council and the intelligence services, as well as Defense. Bryen was publicly accused in 1978 of offering a top-secret document on Saudi air bases to a group of visiting Israeli officials.
The accusation arose from an incident reported by Michael Saba, a journalist and former employee of the National Association of Arab Americans. Saba, who readily agreed to a lie detector test by the FBI, said he overheard Bryen make the offer while having breakfast in a Washington restaurant. At the time, Bryen was on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. A senior career diplomat expresses the problem State Department officials encountered during that period: “Whenever Bryen was in the room we always had to use extreme caution.” During the controversy, Bryen was suspended from the commit staff but later reinstated. He later left the committee position and became executive director of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), an organization founded – according to The Jewish Week – to “convince people that the security of Israel and the United States is interlinked.” When Bryen moved to a position in the Defense Department, his wife, Shoshona, replaced him at JINSA.
After nine months the investigating attorneys recommended that a grand jury be empanelled to consider the evidence against Bryen. According to the Justice Department, other witnesses testified to Bryen’s Israeli contacts. Indeed, a Justice Department memorandum dates January 26, 1979, discussed “unresolved questions thus far, which suggest that Bryen is (a) gathering classified information for the Israelis, (b) acting as their unregistered agent and (c) lying about it. . . .” The Justice Department studied the complaint for two years. Although it found that Bryen had an “unusually close relationship with Israel,” it made no charges and in late 1979 closed the file. Early in 1981 Bryen was hired as Richard Perle’s chief deputy in the Pentagon. He remains in this highly responsible position today.
Perle himself was also the subject of an Israel-related controversy. An FBI summary of a 1970 wiretap recorded Perle discussing classified information with someone at the Israeli embassy. He came under fire in 1983 when newspapers reported he received substantial payments to represent the interests of an Israeli weapons company. Perle denied conflict of interest, insisting that, although he received payment for these services after he had assumed his position in the Defense Department, he was between government jobs when he worked for the Israeli firm.
Because of these controversies both Perle and Bryen were given assignments in the Reagan administration which – it was expected – would keep him isolated from issues relating to Israel. But, observes a State Department official, it has not worked out that way. Sensitive questions of technology transfer which affect Israeli interests are often settled in the offices of Perle and Bryen.
Despite the investigation, Bryen holds one of the highest possible security classification at the Department of Defense. It is a top secret/code word classification, which gives him access to documents and data anywhere in government, almost without limit. A high official in the Department of State explains the significance of his access: “With this classification, Bryen can keep up to date not only on what the United States has in the way of technology, but on what we hope to have in the future as the result of secret research and development.
“I’ll Take Care of the Congress”Admiral Thomas Moorer recalls a dramatic example of Israeli lobby power from his days as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. At the time of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war Mordacai Gur, the defense attaché at the Israeli embassy who later became commander-in-chief of Israeli forces, came to Moorer demanding that the U.S. provide Israel with aircraft equipped with a high technology air-to-surface anti-tank missile called the Maverick. At the time, the U.S. had only one squadron so equipped. Moorer recalls telling Gur:
I can’t let you have those aircraft. We have just one squadron. Besides, we’ve been testifying before the Congress convincing them we need this equipment. If we gave you our only squadron, Congress would raise hell with us.
Moorer looks at me with a steady piercing gaze that must have kept a generation of ensigns trembling in their boots: “And do you know what he said?” Gur told me, “You get us the airplanes; I’ll take care of the Congress.’” Moorer pauses, then adds, “And he did.” America’s only squadron with Mavericks went to Israel.
Moorer, speaking in his office in Washington as a senior counselor at the Georgetown University Center for Strategic and International Studies, says he strongly opposed the transfer but was overruled by “political expediency at the presidential level.” He notes President Richard Nixon was then in the throes of Watergate. “But,” he adds,
I’ve never seen a President – I don’t care who he is – stand up to them [the Israelis]. It just boggles the mind.
They always get what they want. The Israelis know what is going on all the time. I got to the point where I wasn’t writing anything down.
If the American people understood what a grip those people have got on our government, they would rise up in arms. Our citizens don’t have any idea what goes on. Link
"If you're not careful the newspapers will have you hating the oppressed and loving the people doing the oppressing." - Malcolm X
