GILAD ATZMON • Via Unz

In 1994 I enrolled in a postgraduate course in philosophy at a British University. On my first day at the University I had to complete a few routine administrative duties such as registering my name with the philosophy department and meeting my supervisors. I was also told that I had to join the student union. Being a subservient type, I walked over to the Student Union hall where I soon realized that the task was slightly more complicated than I had expected. There were a plethora of student unions to choose from: The Black Student Union, The Asian Student Association, The Socialist Students, The Gay Student Society and more. Confused, I asked for assistance. They asked where I was from. When I told them “Israel,” I was told that the “Jewish Student Union” was my home.

It was then, at the Student Union Hall, that I first encountered the identity split between Israel and the Jewish Diaspora. It would take some time before I was able to define this binary tension in philosophical or post political terms and before I understood the Jewish dilemma in terms of Nationalist/Identitarian dialectics. Two decades later, the political battle now going on in America is basically an extension of that internal Jewish debate.

Back in 1994 I didn’t see any reason to join the Jewish Student Union. I had never identified ‘as a Jew’ and Judaism meant little to me. Israel was my place of birth. My ‘identity’ as I then saw it was geographically oriented. Fortunately, I managed to complete my postgraduate course without becoming a ‘union member.’ But my thoughts about that morning at the student union hall have evolved into a few controversial books and hundreds of papers on ID politics and the current Identitarian dystopia.

In 2011 I wrote The Wandering Who? A Study of Jewish Identity Politics. The premise of the book was that if Israel defines itself as the ‘Jewish State’ then we have to dissect the meaning of the J-Word. We have to grasp how Judaism (the religion), Jews (the people) and Jewishness (the spirit, ideology and culture) relate to each other and how these terms influence Israeli politics and the activities of the Jewish Lobby around the world. Instead of studying ‘Zionism,’ an archaic term that is not relevant to most Israelis, my book focused on Jewish identifications. I did not address the problematic question of ‘who and what Jews are,’ I tried instead to find out what those who call themselves Jews identify with.

While this question is certainly germane to an understanding of Israel and the Middle East conflict, it is also crucial to an understanding of the current American dystopia. Instead of asking ‘who Americans are’ let us explore what Americans identify with.

In the post-political era, America is divided into two camps, let’s call them Americans and Identitarians. Americans see themselves primarily as American patriots. They often subscribe to a nationalist populist ideology and, like the Israelis, identify with a piece of geography. On the other hand, Identitarians are primarily liberals and progressives. They identify themselves in biological and sociological terms, and they see themselves first as LGBTQ, Latino, Black, Jewish, feminist etc. Their bond with the American nationalist ethos is at most secondary and often non-existent.

This division in America between ‘nationalism’ and ‘identitarianism’ is similar to the dichotomy I observed at the student union hall in 1994. In fact, Israel has become a prime model for American nationalists. Similarly, it is Jewish progressive ideology that inspires Identitarians globally and in America in particular. It is the pervasiveness of Jewish ideologies within both nationalist and Identitarian discourses that sustains the dominance of Jewish and Israeli political institutions in American politics.

The Israeli Lobby’s hegemony over American foreign policy and its force in advocating policies that favor Israel has been widely recognized. Numerous studies on the topic have been published, such as: The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (Prof John Mearsheimer and Prof Stephen Walt), The Power of Israel in The United State (Professor James Petras). Alison Weir’s website, If Americans Knew routinely presents a devastating chronicle of Israeli intervention in American politics. The Washington Report on the Middle East Affairs has been producing outstanding work as well. The crucial question is, why have Americans let this happen?

My study of Jewish ID politics suggests that America isn’t just influenced by one Jewish lobby or another. The entire American political-cultural-spiritual spectrum has been transformed into a internal Jewish exchange. Most American do not see the true nature of the battle they participate in and, for the obvious reasons, their media and their academics do not help. It is more convenient to keep Americans in the dark.

America is rapidly moving towards a civil war. The divide isn’t only ideological or political. The split is geographical, spiritual, educational and demographical. In a Voxarticle titled, “The Midterm Elections Revealed that America is in a Cold Civil War,” Zack Beauchamp writes, “This is a country fundamentally split in two, with no real room for compromise.” Of the midterm election Beauchamp reports that “American politics is polarized not on the basis of class or even ideology, but on identity… One side open to mass immigration and changes to the country’s traditional racial hierarchy, the other is deeply hostile to it.” He correctly observes that “Republicans and Democrats see themselves as part of cultural groups that are fundamentally distinct: They consume different media and attend different churches; live in distinct kinds of places and rarely interact with people who disagree with them.”

Despite this American schism, Israel and its Lobby are somehow able to influence both sides, managing to finding pathways to the secluded corridors of both parties. Although Democrats and Republicans can no longer talk to each other, it seems that both are happy to talk to Israel and the Lobby. And it is at AIPAC’s annual conference that these political foes compete in their eagerness to appease a foreign state. This anomaly in American politics demands attention.

As a former Israeli, I had not observed the effects of the Israel/ Jewish Diaspora dilemma until I had my experience at the Student Union Hall in Britain. Israel was born with the Zionist desire to eradicate the identity of Jews as cosmopolitans. Zionism promised to bond the Jew with the soil, with a territory, with borders. Thus, it is consistent with the Zionist paradigm that Israel is notorious for its appalling treatment ofasylum seekers, immigrants and, of course, the indigenous people of the land. Israel has surrounded itself with separation walls. Israel deployed hundreds of snipers in its fight to stop the March of Return – a ‘caravan’ of Palestinian refugees who were marching towards its border. Israel has been putting into daily practice that which Trump has promised to deliver. For a Trump supporter, Israel’s politics is a wet dream. Maybe Trump should consider tweaking his motto in 2020 into ‘Let’s make America Israel.’ This would encompass building separation walls, bullying America’s neighbors, the potential to cleanseAmerica of the ‘enemy within,’ and so on. It is not surprising that in 2016 Trump beat Clinton in an Israeli absentee exit poll. The Israelis do love Trump. To them, he is a vindication of their hawkish ideological path. Although during the election Trump was castigated as a vile anti-Semite and a Hitler figure by the Jewish progressive press, once elected, Fox News was quick to point out that Trump was actually the ‘First Jewish President.’

We can see that Israel, Trump and his voters have a lot in common. They want militant anti immigration policies , they love ‘walls,’ they hate Muslims and they believe in borders. When alt right icon Richard Spencer described himself on Israeli TV as “a White Zionist” he was actually telling the truth. Israel puts into practice the ideas that Spencer and Trump can so far only entertain. But the parallels between Israel and the Trump administration’s Republican voters is just one side of the story.

In my recent book, Being in Time – A Post Political Manifesto, I point out that while the old, good Left tried to unite us by insisting that it was not important whether one was Black, a Woman, a Muslim, a Jew or Gay; in the class war, we were all united against capitalism. It was the new Left that taught us to speak ‘as a’: as a Jew, as a Gay, as a Black and so on. Instead of being one people united in the struggle for justice and equality, within the post political realm we are pulled into endless identity battles.

Seemingly, this Identitarian revolution has been inspired by a few Jewish ideological and philosophical schools including, most importantly, the Frankfurt School. Truth must be said, when it comes to ID politics, Diaspora Jewish ideologists are often slightly more advanced than others, not because Jews are more clever than anyone else but simply because Jews have engaged in identity politics far longer than anyone else. While Gay identity politics is about four decades old and Feminism is maybe a century old, Jewish identity politics started in Babylon two and a half millennia ago. In fact, Judaism can be realised as an exilic Identitarian project. It deliberately and carefully sustains Jewish cultural, spiritual and physical segregation. Although Jews often drop their religion and dispose of God, many cling to Jewishness. For one reason or another, Jews often choose to operate within Jews- only political cells such as Jewish Voice for Peace, Jewish Voice for Labour and so on. These Jewish bodies tend to preach inclusiveness while practicing exclusivity.

So it is hardly surprising that Jewish Identitarian philosophy and Jewish Identitarian success provides the model that inspires most, if not all, Identitarian politics within the New Left milieu in general and the current Democratic Party in particular. This isn’t the place to discuss at length or in depth the reasons behind Jewish identitarian success, however, it should be mentioned that while most Identitarians are taught to celebrate victimhood, to blame others for their misfortune, Jewish Identitarianism has a subtle dynamic balance between victimhood and entitlement.

Naturally, Jewish ideologists are at the helm of the Identitarian revolution. Maybe more well known is the fact that a chief funder of that revolution is financier George Soros and his Open Society Institute. Soros may genuinely believe in the Identitarian future: It is cosmopolitan, it is global, it defies borders and states but far more significantly, it also serves to divert attention from Wall Street and capitalist crimes: as long as Identitarians fight each other, no one bothers to fight Wall Street, Goldman Sachs and corporate tyranny. Soros didn’t invent this strategy, it has long been called ‘divide and conquer.’

The abovesheds light on the depth of influence of Jewish politics in America. While Israel is an exemplar of contemporary Republican goals, Democrats are emulating Jewish Diaspora identitarianism. The two contradictory Jewish ideologies are each well- ensconced within the two rival ideologies that are tearing America apart. The red Republican counties want America to be Israel Again. Thelarge metropolitan areas near America’s coasts have adopted the twelve tribes of Israel model – a loose Identitarian coalition threatened by Samaritans, Canaanites, Amalekites or as Hillary Clinton calls them the ‘basket of deplorables.’

The story of Jewish political strength in America doesn’t end there. A New York Jew can easily metamorphosize from an hard-core Identitarian into rabid Zionist settler and vice versa, but such a manoeuvre is not available to ordinary Americans. White nationalist Richard Spencer can not make the political shift that would turn him into a progressive or a liberal just as it is unlikely that a NY transsexual icon would find it possible to become a ‘redneck.’ While Jewish political identity is inherently elastic and can morph endlessly, the American political divide is fairly rigid. Jewish ideologists frequently change positions and camps, they shift from left to right, from Clinton to Trump (Dershowitz), they support immigration in their host counties yet oppose it in their own Jewish State, they are against rigid borders and even states in general, yet support the two state solution in Palestine (Chomsky). Gentiles are less flexible. They are expected to be coherent and consistent.

It was this manoeuvrability that made PM Netanyahu’s 2015 speech in front of a joint session of Congress a ‘success,’ although it might well have been considered a humiliation for any American with an ounce of patriotic pride. As we wellknow, Bibi can communicate easily with both Republicans and Democrats just as he cansimultaneously befriend Trump and Putin. He deploys snipers at the Gaza border with orders to kill while considerately peppering his statements with LGBTQ human rights advocacy. Not many Americans have dared to address this topic, but I believe that there are some who, by now, can see the situation clearly.

It was the Israeli in me who saw the disparity between ‘Israeli’ and ‘Jew’ at the Student Union Hall because I was raised as an Israeli patriot. I was trained to love and even die for the soil I mistakenly believed to be mine. As an Israeli, I was also trained to think tribal but speak universal, and I learned how to whine as a victim yet exercise oppression. But at a certain point in my life, around my thirties, I started to find all of it too exhausting. I wanted to simplify things. I demoted myself into an ordinary human being.

Will Israel-lobby-captured OTFI sanction Americans?

by Grant Smith Posted on August 30, 2018

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) was ordered to register as an Israeli foreign agent on November 21, 1962 when it was part of the American Zionist Council. AIPAC has never complied with the order, and the Department of Justice has never enforced it. AIPAC’s associated think tank, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) was spun off from AIPAC as a survival tactic during a 1980s FBI investigation into AIPAC over economic espionage that produced America’s worst-performing bilateral trade agreement. Incredibly, decades later both organizations appeared to want to get into law enforcement and were instrumental lobbying President George W. Bush for the 2004 launch of the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence (OTFI) Treasury unit. (See Washington Institute for Near East Affairs congressional testimony in support of the creation of OTFI to be headed by Stuart Levey)

Although OTFI proclaims it is “safeguarding the financial system against illicit use and combating rogue nations, terrorist facilitators, weapons of mass destruction (WMD) proliferators, money launderers, drug kingpins, and other national security threats,” the secretive office has a special blind spot for major terrorism generators, such as tax-exempt money laundering from the United States into illegal Israeli settlements and proliferation financing and weapons technology smuggling into Israel’s clandestine nuclear weapons complex.

As AIPAC and WINEP demanded in 2003, the office as initially led by Undersecretary of Treasury Stuart Levey, who worked in unusually close coordination with the Israeli government. Levey’s Harvard thesis (PDF) was about how Israel lobbying organizations could become more effective by staying beneath the radar of public scrutiny and distancing themselves from the notoriety generated by the illicit activities of such ideological fellow travelers as the Jewish Defense League. JDL was a Department of Justice-designated terrorist organization involved in bombings and more recently had a supporter indicted for 2017 violence against a peaceful protester of AIPAC’s policy conference.

In its early years OTFI rebuffed Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) attempts to obtain information about OTFI operations and the purpose of Levey’s numerous taxpayer-funded trips to Israel by citing the Bank Secrecy Act. OTFI is even more impenetrable to outside scrutiny than most Treasury offices, most particularly OTFI’s personnel records. Levey made OTFI briefers available mostly for private presentations and off-the-record Q&A sessions to a limited number of organizations well-known for having the advancement of Israel as a top organizational goal, such as WINEP and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

When Levey finally stepped down in 2011, the top job at TFI was transferred to David Cohen, who worked at the same Washington DC law firm as Levey, Miller, Cassidy, Larroca & Lewin LLP (which later merged into Baker Botts LLP). Cohen continued Levey’s practice of curtailing OTFI’s availability to any concerned public opposition. On September 12, 2012, Cohen refused to answer reporter questions about Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons, and whether sanctioning Iran, a signatory to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, over its internationally-inspected civilian nuclear program was an example of endemic double standards at OTFI. In 2015, Mondoweissobserved that the key requirement for Americans working in the top “counterterrorism” job at OTFI appeared to be being both Jewish and Zionist. Most Americans (70%) do not self-identify as Zionist. (Defined in the poll as any person who believes in the development and protection of a Jewish nation in what is now Israel.)

Cohen was succeeded by longtime OTFI employee Adam Szubin, former counsel to Stuart Levey, who was appointed to lead OTFI during the Obama administration, but never confirmed by the Senate. Szubin also visited Israel frequently on the taxpayer dime and, like Levey and Cohen before him, kept WINEP and AIPAC lobbyists well-briefed on OTFI initiatives. Szubin served as interim under secretary from January 20, 2017 until February 13, 2017. In 2017 the already narrow hiring criteria of OTFI was even further restricted. According to the news and intelligence website DEBKAfile, OTFI’s current leader Sigal Pearl Mandelker, also a dedicated Zionist, either had or still has Israeli citizenship.(PDF) Mandelker was confirmed by the Senate on June 21, 2017.

Within its own organization, Department of Justice policy has no issue with dual-nationals seeking and being granted sensitive jobs. (PDF) However, there are obvious potential conflicts of interests with an Israeli-American dual national, dedicated to the advancement of Israel, running OTFI. The progression reveals that the leadership of OTFI is being hand-picked by the Israel lobby on the basis of predicted devotion to advancing the strategic position Israel. This raises the question of how such influence negatively impacts Americans, as AIPAC and the Israel advocacy ecosystem prepare to expand the OTFI model across states and within the federal bureaucracy.

AIPAC is attempting to pass new laws and enforcement powers to target Americans found “guilty” of boycotting Israel over its endemic human rights abuses. Drafts of the “Israel Anti-Boycott Act” appear to allow secretive units such as OTFI or new units housed within the Export Import Bank to fine Americans up to $1 million and imprison them for up to 20 years for such boycott activities. Free speech rights arguments have not been much of an obstacle to such secretive extra-judicial operations. OTFI worked to successfully to imprison New Yorker Javed Iqbal for nearly six years over airing Hezbollah videos on his privately-owned cable network that Israel affinity organizations found distasteful. OTFI shut down nonprofit charities the Israel lobby opposed such as Al-Haramain, Benevolence International, Global Relief, and Kind Hearts with little due process. Because the Israel lobby’s “Israel Anti-Boycott Act” could go even further, it is particularly relevant to scrutinize OTFI as the model for taking sanctions applied mostly to disenfranchised foreigners, and turning them against American citizens residing and doing business in the U.S.

OTFI has extraordinary powers to sanction entities and individuals and enact secondary actions against entities that do business with them under broad executive orders. An examination of OTFI’s Specially Designated Nationals And Blocked Persons List (SDN) Human Readable Lists provides further evidence of Israel lobby regulatory capture. As part of its enforcement efforts, OFAC publishes the SDN list of individuals and companies it accuses of being owned or controlled by, or acting for or on behalf of, targeted countries. It also lists individuals, groups, and entities it claims are terrorists and narcotics traffickers designated under indicators that are not country-specific. Collectively, such individuals and companies are called “Specially Designated Nationals” or “SDNs.” Their assets are blocked, and banks and US persons are generally prohibited from dealing with them. Lawyers specializing in this area attest to the difficulty of removing those listed on the Treasury’s SDN list. The tipoff that the list is Israeli-approved, is the absence of well-known nuclear weapons technology traffickers for the only country in the region that actually has a clandestine nuclear weapons program – Israel.

TFI/OFAC operatives code each SDN individual or entity suspected of trafficking in nuclear weapons technology with the designator code “NPWMD” meaning “Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferators Sanctions Regulations” which cites 31 C.F.R part 544 authorities for the application of sanctions. However, Israeli film producer Arnon Milchan, who transacts millions of dollars through the US and international financial system, and his accomplice, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, are both known to the FBI and DHS as having facilitated the unlawful smuggling of hundreds of nuclear weapons triggers from the United States through a global network of front companies. Though never convicted, nothing prevents their listing on the SDN. However, neither individual nor their related business organizations or front companies used in the operation appear as sanctioned entities under the SDN.

In 2012, Belgian company Telogy International NV committed 23 violations of the Export Administration Act of 1979 (PDF) by smuggling 22 Tektronix oscilloscopes worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Oscilloscopes are critical nuclear weapons testing and production technology and export-prohibited without proper end-user licenses. OTFI’s agents never entered either Telogy or the company that acquired it, Electro Rent Corp, into the SDN database to ward off banks and others from doing business with it – because Telogy smuggled the oscilloscopes to Israel.

It appears that OTFI leadership has ordered SDN list compilers not to include any Israeli nuclear weapons traffickers on the list. In the current SDN there are multiple entries for countries not believed to have nuclear weapons programs, such as Iran and Syria. There is not a single SDN NPWMD entry for any Israeli individual or entity, despite the CIA’s having confirmed the existence of an Israeli nuclear weapons program in 1974, and that the program was fueled by material stolen from the United States in the 1960s. CIA considered Israel a proliferation threat to countries such as Taiwan (which appears a few times in the SDN) and South Africa. Indeed, there are only a handful of SDN entries for Israel at all, which mostly appear to be Russian oligarchs with Israeli passports.

AIPACs Israel Anti-Boycott Act legislation requires “enforcement actions” under some of the same authorities used by OTFI, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, 50 U.S.C. § 1701-1706, in declaring as a “US national emergency” grassroots-led boycotts of products made in illegal Israeli West Bank settlements and other Israeli products and services. These boycotts are not really US emergencies in any sense, but rather target a grassroots strategy to protest of Israel’s dismal human rights record. AIPAC considers the OTFI model of unaccountable, anonymous judges, jurors and financial executioners as an appropriate model to apply to Americans and foreigners who engage in entirely peaceful, lawful, First Amendment protected boycotts. AIPAC has lobbied for passage of the Israel Anti-Boycott Act for years even though statistically significant polling reveals that 69.1% of Americans oppose it.

One of the most cherished rights in America is the Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment to the US Constitution which provides, “in all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right…to be confronted with the witnesses against him.” However, the right only applies to criminal prosecutions, and not civil cases or other proceedings. But it is a commonplace American expectation that citizens will not be punished for accusations of wrongdoing by anonymous accusers. OTFI and SDN operate beyond such expectations.

Having already served as de facto criminal prosecutors, judges and juries, and financial access executioners of foreigners, OTFI agents may upon passage of the Israel Anti-Boycott Act turn their extrajudicial powers on fellow Americans. Until now, OTFI staff has never borne any burden of confrontation by the accused. And even Americans who disagree with OTFI’s selective interpretations of laws, based on executive orders and other authorities used to place foreigners on the SDN list, are unable to meaningfully interact with the OTFI personnel making such punitive policy decisions – unless they are an attendee of a special briefing conducted by Adam Szubin and also already fully paid-up donors or members of AIPAC or WINEP. Though courts have held that the US Constitution applies to non-citizens, if a foreigner has been unjustly placed on the SDN with no due process, he or she is presently unable to make a phone call from overseas to a known OTFI agent and informally present their case. OTFI is now clearly worth a much closer examination, because if AIPAC has its way either OTFI or an operation very much like OTFI, with anonymous extra-judicial Treasury powers, handpicked by the Israel lobby, may soon sanction American companies and individuals it secretly finds “guilty” of boycotts.

Excerpt from a 61-page legal memorandum, with 1,230 pages of exhibits filed in DC District Court on August 24, seeking full release of OTFI personnel records alongside those of other Treasury units.

Grant F. Smith is research director of the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy and the plaintiff in civil action no. 17-CV-1796 seeking data to reveal “whether the depth of the Israel lobby’s capture of OTFI reaches all the way down to front-line employees.” He is the author of the 2016 book, Big Israel: How Israel’s Lobby Moves America now available as an audiobook.