JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: THE POLITICAL AIMS OF TRUMP'S "PEACE PLAN" APART FROM ITS OTHER INTENTIONS - IMPORTANT HIGHLIGHTS OF THE WASHINGTON-ISRAELI AXIS - ROLE OF AMERICAN JEWS IN POLITICS - COMPARE BLACKS WITH AT LEAST SIX TIMES THE POPULATION - AMERICA'S SHAMEFUL RECORD ON MONEY IN ELECTIONS A SELF-INFLICTED WOUND - HARRY TRUMAN'S POWERFUL 1948 PRECEDENT STILL HAUNTS AMERICAN POLICY - TRUMP'S GROTESQUE EXCESSES - THE NEOCON WARS - AMERICA'S LARGE POPULATION OF PEOPLE UNINTERESTED IN FOREIGN AFFAIRS - THE CONTINUING ROLE OF XENOPHOBIA AND NATIVISM IN AMERICAN POLITICS

John Chuckman


COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY PHILIP WEISS IN MONDOWEISS


“Trump’s plan is a calculated effort to strip pro-Israel Jews from Democrats”


https://mondoweiss.net/2020/01/trumps-plan-is-a-calculated-effort-to-strip-pro-israel-jews-from-democrats/


I'm sure that is an accurate assessment. Nothing done in Washington concerning Israel is without a deep political calculation.

I’m sure Jewish voters are welcome, but the Jewish community in America only represents around two percent of total population. It might be important in key swing locations but, overall, it is quite a small. Just compare the roughly thirteen percent of population blacks represent in America, yet we do not see serious efforts to attract them away from the Democrats.

However, Jewish votes undoubtedly come with campaign funds, and, in view of the relatively small number of Jewish voters, it is the campaign funds and ancillary supports that are certainly the main target.

The remarkable success of American Jews in business, the professions, science, and the arts has made them a group of extremely important donors, whether in politics or other matters.

So, the political calculation always involves money, which in American politics is "the mother's milk."

The American political system itself has given money its central role in elections. It represents a self-inflicted wound.

Congress never placed serious limits on campaign donations or serious limits on the activities of lobbyists, despite various debates and limited efforts over time.

All establishment politicians, of both parties, benefit from the situation and have little motive to change it.

That approach was then backed up and cemented into place by a Supreme Court ruling, about as bizarre as the old Dred Scott slave-era decision, that “money is free speech.”

The Supreme Court justices, of course, all represent appointments made over the years from the same pool of establishment politicians who have never acted seriously to limit money’s role in elections.

The system has many pernicious effects, but perhaps the most serious of all has been American foreign policy in the Middle East being put up for sale.

Trump’s series of imperial diktats concerning Israel and matters he truly has no legal authority over have been a glaring example.

America is in the position to issue effective diktats because of its imperial, military situation in the world, making it inclined to flout the authority of international organizations such as the UN, an organization much hated in Israel owing to its longstanding efforts to limit Israel to its original boundaries and to support many just claims by Palestinians.

With a man like Trump, flouting international organizations has its own, separate appeal. He has a huge streak of American nativism and xenophobia in him, and same characteristics define the nature of much of his base constituency.

America has always had that ugly streak in its make-up. It may have either grown or diminished at times, and its targets have altered with changing circumstances, but it remains a constant presence. Up through the 1940s, American Jews themselves were included as targets. Everything from exclusive clubs refusing membership and Ivy League colleges sharply limiting acceptances to the Klu Klux Klan adding them to its list of hatreds.

But that has changed, and I think there can be little doubt that it reflects the large role of Jewish money in American politics but also the emergence of re-created Israel as a focal point. American Evangelicals, as one large group who were not historically very friendly to Jews (remember, the KKK burned crosses as a threat), were much won over by all the Biblical associations and mumbo-jumbo of Israel.

Truman’s experience in 1948, with immensely powerful lobbying for the recognition of Israel, headache-inducing delegation after delegation (read Truman’s memoirs), and then the miracle of winning an election he had been consigned previously to lose by virtue of new massive support given him, established the pattern we have to this day in Washington concerning all serious politicians and support and aid and favor for Israel. It literally has been woven into the country’s political fabric.

Trump’s excesses on the topic of Israel are perhaps only slightly greater than Lyndon Johnson’s were, who, among other egregious bids for support, overlooked completely Israel’s vicious attack on the American spy ship, USS Liberty, during the Six Day War in 1967, the war that conquered the very territories Israel still occupies and Trump’s “peace plan” toys with.

America has become trapped by its relationship with Israel, almost like some prehistoric animal that stepped into a tar trap ten thousand years ago in California.

The endless, unwarranted hostility towards Iran (which Israel hates for its size and influence in the region, not for its threat to a nuclear power), the immense public subsidy given to Israel (about five hundred dollars per year per Jewish citizen of Israel), immense benefits granted in many contracts with Washington and in free trade and in the recognition of dual citizenship (something Washington did not do historically), plus still other matters, including ready access to the highest American officials and to America’s military-security establishment, access probably not equaled by even the best traditional American allies.

And there is the whole matter of conspiring to keep Israel’s nuclear arsenal hidden and never questioning it. No one ever even asks whether Israel’s arsenal should be regarded in the same light as North Korea’s, and it is very much an appropriate question.

Finally, we have the series of horrors called the Neocon Wars, which, on the whole have been an effort to destroy nations not compliant with American policy in the Middle East and, more or less, pave them over, almost resembling a vast 1960s urban renewal project, one which has cost maybe two million lives, the creation of tens of millions of refugees, some of whom almost destabilized Europe, and trillions of dollars. It has been organized vicious insanity, and Trump, in his original campaign, questioned it just a bit, while afterwards behaving as though he had never uttered the words.

I don’t think it unfair to summarize the effects of Truman’s 1948 precedent plus America’s terrible laws about campaign funds and lobbying upon American politics and policy in that fashion. They have been deadly and represent a set of developments about which few ordinary Americans can be aware because they do not closely look at foreign affairs.

Indeed, ordinary Americans’ total lack of interest in foreign affairs serves the Washington-Israeli axis well. Remember in the first campaign of George Bush, the President who launched the Neocon Wars, one of his campaign stunts in selected locations was laughingly talking about the way he ignored the “international section” when reading the newspaper. The people receptive to that kind of appeal are in Trump’s base, and they are blithely unaware of just how much America has invested in those very “international affairs.”

Trump with his various initiatives concerning Israel has quite literally run a kind of giant public auction for large campaign contributions and the kind of persuasive support that often accompanies them, as in high-end news outlets, all of which tend to support Israel and those deemed to be working on Israel’s behalf.

The auction has had a series of pieces “under the hammer,” from Jerusalem to the Golan and to membership in UNESCO and cutting aid to Palestinians, and now to the “peace plan.”

Jokes are made about America’s having the “finest government money can buy,” but the situation hardly represents humor with millions of lives in the Middle East being directly affected by its workings.

Trump’s effort I believe it also accurate to say, represents direct interference in the next Israeli election on behalf of Netanyahu, a close friend of son-in-law Jared Kushner and his family.

It is all at least as unfair and underhanded as “the Washington political swamp” Trump supporters still love to naively attack.