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by Peter A. Belmont / 2012-02-09
Discussions of “Israel Firsters” seem to condemn such “firsters” (the AIPAC types and their media and pundit camp followers) as if they were somehow remarkable or blameworthy in today’s America.
I take a bit of a different view, even though I deplore America’s 44-year support for Israel’s illegal settlement project and have no use whatever for any Israel Firster.
The USA’s benighted but long-continuing process of calculating/computing/determining the “national interest” as a sort of running balancing of the more focused interests of the various big-money “players” or “oligarchs” that determine 99% of the USA’s policies (BIG-OIL, BIG-ARMS, BIG-BANKS, BIG-ZION, etc.) allows each of these “special interests” to assert its own interests “first”; thus BIG-ZION quite naturally asserts its own vision/version of Israel’s interests as its own, and, indeed, “first”. If there is no countervailing pressure from another oligarchic “BIG” interest, then BIG-ZION will prevail, and what it wants will have been determined to BE the USA’s national interest.
Does it matter that a majority of Americans had no voice? I’d say yes, but then who am I? Merely one of the 99% of unwashed. Didn’t the BIG-BANKs do us all in in 2008 (and before and after)? Didn’t the BIG-ARMS get us into two ridiculous wars, against the real interests of the 99%. Of course. But so what?
This is America, land of the free. And no-one freer than the oligarchs.
My suspicion, probably not worth much, is that the CEOs of most of the BIGs are social friends of the AIPAC-niki and would regard pro-Israel as a naturally polite position to take (some of our best CEO friends are AIPAC-niki!). So that a CEO of a BIG-BANK which (qua bank) has no interest in Israel may hang back from interfering with AIPAC’s participation in the joint enterprise of “eating the USA for lunch” unless it sees a VERY PERSUASIVE reason to oppose USA support for right-wing Israel. And it seems that they don’t.
So, “Israel first”? Only in the same sense as ARMS first, OIL first (and fighting global warming last), etc. And doesn’t “Citizens United” allow the rich and the poor alike to sleep under bridges, SORRY, I mean to influence politics in the USA?
So “Israel Firsters” are as protected as anyone else who is disgustingly rich and willing to spend a large chunk of that disgusting wealth to promote a project that may well run counter to the actual interests of the vast majority of the American people, interests with names like: democracy, rule of law, human rights, peace, and freedom.
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