John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY MICHAEL WEAVER IN CHECKPOINT ASIA
“The Soviet-Israeli War 1967-1973: The Soviet Struggle vs Israel in the War of Attrition
“The Soviets played a far more direct, long-lived and impactful role in the notionally Egyptian-Israeli struggle than is generally understood"
https://www.checkpointasia.net/the-soviet-israeli-war-1967-1973-the-soviet-struggle-vs-israel-in-the-war-of-attrition/
"Soviet leaders not only supported Egypt’s agenda, they had their own goals in the region. Moscow considered Israel to be a nuclear-armed American threat to the Soviet heartland."
While the author says some things with which I disagree, that quote represents an important insight.
One virtually never examined in America’s press or in its politics.
Israel may be reasonably viewed as a kind of American colony in the Middle East, a highly privileged one, representing a special arrangement whereunder both Washington and Zionist-oriented Jews receive mutual benefits.
America got a colony in a very strategic position in the Middle East, and it got to play postwar protector of Jews – a role close to the opposite of its true long-term record in foreign affairs and in domestic arrangements.
Note, even in the 1940s, Jews were excluded in large numbers from prestigious American universities and private clubs. In the late 1930s, America actually turned away boatloads of Jewish refugees from Hitler’s Germany, confirming Hitler in his view that they were just as unwanted in America as in Germany.
Nevertheless, despite America’s rather dark history, its new postwar “good guy” role, assumed for the sake of obtaining a strategic Middle Eastern colony, was certainly welcomed by Jews at home and abroad, making for an enthusiastic army of cooperation in America’s colonial arrangements.
Israel, despite its genuinely colonial and dependent status – the country literally floats on a sea of public and private subsidies and a myriad of beneficial special arrangements and contracts with the United States, the total size of which few appreciate when they quote only America’s formal assistance - got to play refuge homeland for Jews, even though most of the world’s Jews do not live there and likely never will.
Israel’s work towards acquiring nuclear weapons had to be known to all the important insiders in America’s power establishment. There were just so many matters affected, including the theft of fissile materials in the United States, where American high officials and experts just had to see things happening.
So, too, Israel's later, 1970s, secret cooperation with South Africa in exchanging supplies of strategic materials like uranium ore for Israeli technical nuclear assistance. Nationalist (apartheid) South Africa, briefly before its collapse in the early 1990s, became a small nuclear power. It had at least half a dozen bombs or warheads. It was protected in the 1970s and into the 1980s, both because Washington valued it as an anti-communist fortress state in Africa and because of its important assistance to Israel.
In late 1979, the unmistakable double flash of a nuclear test was observed in the Indian Ocean by a special American satellite called Vela. The matter was suppressed and never allowed to be developed in the press. It is thought to have been a joint Israeli-South African test.
Clearly, on the whole, the American establishment approved of Israel's efforts on all fronts.
The only important voice against Israel's going nuclear in the early 1960s was that of John Kennedy. His view was never made public, only communicated through secret exchanges. He declared it a matter of national policy that Israel’s secret work at Dimona in the Negev desert not be allowed to create another, and illicit, nuclear state.
Of course, in doing so, Kennedy was - in just one more matter, as with Cuba or relations with the Soviet Union – going against the most powerful insider currents of the Dark State.
After Kennedy's death, Lyndon Johnson became the most expansive friend Israel ever enjoyed having in the White House, even more so than today’s Donald Trump.
