Understanding Israel’s Corrosive Influence on Western Democracy
by John Chuckman
June 5, 2014
Something troubling is quietly underway in the Western world, that portion of the world’s governments who style
themselves as liberal democracies and free societies. Through a number of avenues, people’s assumptions about the role
of government are being undermined as their governments evolve towards a pattern established in the United States. No, I
do not mean in building a neo-Roman marble repository of sacred founding writ and adopting three wrangling branches of
government with empty slogans about freedom and justice for all. I do mean in the way governments, however elected and
organized, regard their responsibilities towards their citizens and the world community.
Of course, the United States in many matters often prods, cajoles, or threatens other states to follow where it leads,
such as with votes at the U. N. or whether a country should send at least token forces for one of America’s colonial
wars to lend appearances of international effort. Despite America’s poor economy and declining relative future
prospects, it still has many resources for pushing others, much like the profligate grandson of a magnate whose once
great family fortune is in decline but still large. Still, a good deal of what is happening results from new forces
which only reinforce America’s imperial tendencies.
People in the West often elect governments who turn around to do things voters did not want done, and they realize they
being lied to by their governments and corporate press, but they pretty much feel helpless to remedy the situation.
London saw the largest peace march in history just before Tony Blair secretly threw in his lot with the criminals who
hit Iraq with the equivalent in deaths and destruction of a thermonuclear bomb on a large city. Special interests
increasingly dominate the interests of government because they increasingly pay its campaign costs and extend other
important favors. Citizens in many places feel the meaning of casting a ballot has been diminished as they watch their
governments ignore extreme injustice, hear their governments make demands and threats over matters which do not warrant
threats, see themselves become ensnared in wars and violence they never wanted, and generally feel their governments are
concerned with matters of little concern to them. That, if it needs to be said, is not what democracy is about. And
where do we see governments making reforms to remedy the situation threatening democracy? Almost nowhere.
It might at first seem an odd thing to write - considering the influence Israel exerts in the Western world (what other
country of 7 million is in the press virtually each day?) and all the favorable press it receives (every major newspaper
and broadcaster having several writers or commentators who see their duty as influencing public opinion on Israel’s
behalf, and The New York Times submits all stories about Israel to Israeli censors before publishing) - but Israel is an
inherently unstable state. No matter how much money is poured into it for arms and force-fed economic development, it
cannot be otherwise. Its population is hostile to the people with whom it is surrounded and intermixed, living something
of a fantasy which shares in equal parts ancient myths and superstitions and white-picket-fence notions of community
with no neighbors who do not resemble each other. Its founding stories also have a fairy tale quality, heroic with a
mythical division of good and evil, always ignoring the violence and brutality which cannot be forgotten so easily by
its victims and the manipulation of imperial powers which defrauded others as surely as any phony mining stock
promotion. Its official views and the very language in which they are expressed are artificial constructs which do not
accurately describe what they name, words like “militant” or “terrorist” or “existential.” Its official policy towards
neighbors and the people it displaced has been one of unrelenting hostility. Its leaders in business and government
almost all securely hold dual passports, hedging their bets. Its average citizens face a hard time in an economy shaped,
not for opportunity and economic freedom, but for war and the policing of millions of captives and unwelcome residents.
None of this is indefinitely sustainable, and modern Israel is a highly artificial construct, one neither suited to its
regional environment nor amenable to all the powerful trends shaping the modern world: globalization, free movement of
peoples, multiculturalism in immigration, and genuine democratic principles, not the oxymoron of democracy for one group
only.
It is the many desperate efforts to work against these hard realities, almost like someone screaming against a storm,
which have unleashed the forces now at work on the Western world. Israel, as just one example, against the best judgment
of many statesmen, was permitted and even assisted to become a nuclear power. The thinking being that only with such
weapons can Israel feel secure and be ready to defend Jews abroad from a new Gotterdammerung. The truth is, as is the
case with all nuclear weapons, Israel’s arsenal is virtually unusable, except, that is, as a powerful tool for
blackmail. Israel has blackmailed the United States several times, the latest instance being over Iran’s nuclear
program, a program which every reliable intelligence source agrees is not aimed at producing weapons. More than one
Israeli source has suggested that low-yield nuclear weapons are the best way of destroying Iran’s technology, buried
deeply underground, a suggestive whisper in American ears to do what Israel wants, or else.
Analysis suggests that what Israel truly wants is the suppression of Iran as a burgeoning regional power so that Israel
can continue to perform the powerful and lucrative role as the United States’ surrogate in Western Asia along with its
always-held-quiet, numerous dealings with that other great bastion of democracy and human rights, Saudi Arabia.
There have been many unanticipated, and extremely unpleasant, results from just this one matter of Israel’s nuclear
weapons. Take Israel’s relationship with the former South African government and that country’s own drive decades ago to
achieve status as a nuclear power. We do not know all the details, but we know from now-published documents that Israel
once offered literally to sell nuclear warheads and compatible missiles to apartheid South Africa. We know further that
South Africa did achieve its goal, there having been a rush, secret program to remove its weapons when the apartheid
government fell, Britain’s late weapons expert, Dr. Kelly, possibly having been murdered for the detailed information he
possessed on the disposition of South Africa’s fissile material. We know further that there was a nuclear device tested
at sea, likely a joint Israeli-South African test, its unmistakable flash having been recorded by an American satellite.
Just this one aspect of Israel’s behavior worked directly against the aims and wishes of many in the West, supporting
both apartheid and proliferation of nuclear weapons. Further, in order to accomplish these things, large efforts had to
be made at deception and secret dealing with a number of governments whose intelligence services would certainly have
come across trails of evidence. Those are rather weighty matters for governments to decide without the knowledge of
voters.
Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons acts both as a threat and a stimulus to other states in the region to obtain
their own. Iraq tried to do so and was stopped, twice. Finally, America used, as a pretext for a bloody invasion which
killed at least half a million, Iraq’s nuclear weapons when it was clear to all experts by that time that Iraq no longer
had any working facilities for producing them. It violently swept Iraq off the region’s chess board to please Israel,
much as today Israel wants it to do with Iran. Countries which have seriously considered, or once actually started,
working towards nuclear weapons in the region include Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Egypt, and Libya, and in all cases their
motives involved, at least in part, Israel’s arsenal. The United States today is in the midst of a massive, years-long
campaign to cleanse the Middle East of what its rulers regard as undesirable elements. What determined these undesirable
elements? The chief characteristic was whether they respect the general foreign policy aims of the United States,
including, importantly, the concept of Israel as favored son of the United States in the region with all the privileges
and powers accorded that status.
Certainly the selection had nothing to do with whether the countries were democracies, and certainly it had nothing to
do with whether the countries recognized and respected human rights, John Kerry’s pandering or Hillary Clinton’s
histrionics to the contrary. America pays no attention to such niceties when it comes to Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Yemen,
Egypt, and many other places of strategic interest to it, including Israel. The values given lip service in the American
Constitution and at Fourth of July picnics have as much to do with foreign policy as they do with the muffled screams
from Guantanamo and the rest of the CIA’s torture gulag or the horrific invasion of Iraq and the systematic, large-scale
use of extrajudicial killing.
There is elaborate machinery which has grown up around the relationship between America and Israel since 1948, when
President Truman made the fateful decision, reportedly against his own best private judgement, to quickly recognize the
government of Israel and extend to it the then-immense prestige of the United States in the immediate postwar period.
That machinery – its chief features being highly-organized and well-funded special interest campaign financing, assays
of every elected or appointed American official for his or her friendliness to Israel as with regular junkets for new
Congressmen, and the most intimate and regular access by both lobbyists and Israeli officials to the highest officials
in Washington - is now part of the political landscape of the United States, taken for granted as though it were the
most natural thing in the world. But it is not natural, and, over the long term, it is not even in keeping with the
interests of the United States.
Being enmeshed in that decision-distorting machinery, rather than simply demanding Israel return to the Green Line and
support a reasonable settlement, is what ultimately produced 9/11, the war on terror, the invasion of Iraq, systematic
extrajudicial killing, the consignment of tens of millions of people to tyranny, including the people of Egypt and
Palestine, the dirty business of the engineered civil war inflicted upon Syria, and swallowing America’s national pride
many times as with the Israeli attack on an American spy ship, Israel’s seizure of neighboring land, and Israel’s
incessant espionage on its greatest benefactor. And some of these avoidable disasters had further internal effects in
rationalizing the establishment of many elements of an American police state.
The nature of this relationship itself demonstrates something about the unstable nature of Israel. America has many
allies and friends who do not behave in these ways because it is simply not necessary, but Israel is constantly
reaching, trying to improve or enhance or consolidate its situation, trying to seek some greater advantage. It assumes
in its external affairs what appears a completely amoral, results-at-any-cost approach, from stealing farms and homes
and water to stealing secrets, playing a long series of dirty tricks on the world along the way, as it did at Entebbe or
in the Six Day War or in helping South Africa or in releasing horrible malware like Stuxnet or in abusing the passports
of other nations to carry out ugly assassinations – all secure in the knowledge that the world’s most influential nation
is captive to the machinery, unable to criticise or punish. The trouble is that such acts endlessly generate new
hostilities every place they touch. It cannot be otherwise, yet Israel and its apologists speak only in terms of rising
anti-Semitism to shut critics up, a practice which generates still more hostilities since most people don’t like being
called names and the act of doing so only increases awareness of the many dishonesties employed to keep Israel afloat.
The nature of the American-relationship machinery has proved so successful in shaping policy towards Israel that it has
been replicated in other Western countries. Only recently, we read the words of a former Australian Prime Minister
warning his people of the machinery there now influencing government unduly. In Canada, traditionally one of the
fairest-minded of nations towards the Middle East, our current, extremist prime minister (an unfortunate democratic
deficit in Canada making it possible to win a majority government with 39% of the vote) has trashed Canada’s traditional
and respected position and worked steadily towards establishing the same backroom-influence machinery. So now we
experience such bizarre events as a federal Minister suddenly, much like Saul struck along the road to Damascus,
blurting out some sentence about Israel, unrelated to anything else he was saying or being asked by reporters present.
Our 39% Prime Minister himself has assumed the exalted role of Canada’s Don Quixote in the fight against Anti-Semitism,
despite the fact that genuine anti-Semitism almost does not exist in our tolerant country. But prominent apologists for
Israel have in the past complained of Canada’s balanced policies not favoring Israel enough, and our Don Quixote has
ridden to their rescue. Of course, along the way, his party will enjoy a new source of campaign funding, adding yet a
new burden to Canada’s existing democratic deficit.
No one I think entirely planned from the beginning this set of outcomes. It really has been a matter of innumerable
adjustments, accommodations, and opportunistic maneuvers which no one might have predicted in 1948, those days which
were, at one and the same time, joyful for many Jews staring back into the utter darkness of the Holocaust and tragic to
a people having nothing to do with those murderous events, who were stripped of property and rights and dignity, a
situation which has only become worse since what they quite understandably call Nakba. But the corrosion of democracy in
Western governments afraid of ever saying no to Israel and too willing to add to party political coffers in exchange for
favorable words and acts is real and palpable, and it is going to do nothing but become worse. The situation is best
characterized as a race for the bottom.
ENDS