The Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel

Detailed findings on the military operations and attacks carried out in the Occupied Palestinian Territory from 7 October to 31 December 2023

Video on the Commission report.

(I have copied and pasted the webpage below. I would entitle it differently, maybe something about the heavy costs to the US for supporting Israel, how Israel is inconsistent with our values, and how we are undermining the rules based, liberal world order in order to support Israel.)

Will the Israel Lobby Cause America’s Downfall?

 ALISON WEIR  MARCH 11, 2024  ISRAEL LOBBY

In full view of the world, the US is facilitating “some of the worst crimes of our age,” an action that could ultimately cause America’s downfall… Why is this happening and what can be done about it?

By Alison Weir

British journalist and author Owen Jones recently made a video describing in excruciating detail Israel’s ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank. Many others have also reported on this. Medical Aid CEO Melanie Ward says that “children are being starved at the fastest rate the world has ever seen.”

Jones concludes that Israel’s ruthless actions – publicly supported by Western governments at a time when the world is seeing  them in real time – could prove the downfall of the West.

He points out that “Western governments have openly facilitated some of the worst crimes of our age” and concludes: “I don’t think the West is ever going to recover from this.”

It’s important to examine why the West is taking such irrational, immoral, and self-destructive actions.

The causation is clear, although relatively few are willing to mention it, and there’s always a cost in stating it. The major factor in this potentially catastrophic situation is the pervasive and extremely powerful influence of the pro-Israel lobby.

There are highly influential lobbies for Israel in many countries, including the UK, France (also see this), and Europe in general.

In this piece I will focus on the United States. Since in today’s world the US is considered the world’s most powerful country, the lobby is especially active here.

However, as I document in my book, the importance of the United States to the establishment of Israel was recognized even before that – over a century ago, in the early years of the movement to create a Jewish state on land that was 95% non-Jewish. As I report:

One of the founders of political Zionism, Max Nordau, wrote a few years after the [1897] Basel conference, “Zionism’s only hope is the Jews of America.”

At that time, and for decades after, the large majority of Jewish Americans were not Zionists. In fact, many actively opposed Zionism. In the coming years, however, Zionists were to woo them assiduously with every means at hand. The extent to which Nordau’s hope was eventually realized is indicated by the statement by a prominent author on Jewish history, Naomi Cohen, who in 2003 wrote, “but for the financial support and political pressure of American Jews… Israel might not have been born in 1948.”

To this might be added Zionists’ success in influencing American politicians, the media, and much of the general public.

While there are many Jewish Israelis and Jewish Americans who fervently oppose Israeli actions, their efforts are eclipsed by virtually all the national Jewish establishment organizations in the US.  These have multi-million dollar budgets, enormous reach, and falsely imply that they represent all Jewish Americans, even though a growing number impose Israeli violence.

These organizations continue to support Israel even in the midst of today’s carnage in Gaza.

For years, ambitious politicians from both parties have competed to be more pro-Israel than anyone else, repeatedly vowing their loyalty to Israel and its alleged right to exist.

Numerous pro-Israel billionaires (some of them are listed here) donate to political parties with the condition that they support Israel. (It is difficult to find any American billionaires who donate on behalf of full rights for Palestinians.)

In addition, Israel partisans are embedded in the government and successfully promoted the devastating Iraq War. Pro-Israel organizations and individuals have similarly long pushed for war against Iran.

Individuals close to Israel have repeatedly been investigated for leaking classified information to Israel, but these investigations are almost always quashed.

Pro-Israel individuals play a major role in news media, sometimes at the top.

While on occasion there are excellent, accurate media reports on Israel-Palestine, in general US news coverage is Israel-centric and often extremely flawed.

The situation is similar for popular media, where Hollywood plays a significant role in influencing attitudes about Israel, Arabs, and Muslims. Top movie producers have worked with Israel to defend its actions.

Similarly, social media and internet companies include numerous Israel partisans and periodically shadow ban or outright ban organizations and individuals that provide factual information on the situation.

Lobby organizations also target campuses.

A study found that advocacy organizations supporting Israel spent roughly 100 times more than their opposition.

A number of books have documented the influence of the Israel lobby in the US, including: They Dare to Speak Out, by Paul Findley; The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt; and The Lobby: Jewish political power and American foreign policy, by Edward Tivnan.

While pro-Israel organizations and individuals attacked these books and tried to claim they are “antisemitic,” these well-documented books make clear that there have long been Jewish groups and individuals opposing the lobby and supporting Palestinian rights.

Experts raise the alarm

Meanwhile, intelligence, military, and diplomatic experts have periodically pointed out the damage Israel is doing to the United States, but the media rarely report their statements.

Below are a few:

(More videos on the topic are here and here.)

It is time for more Americans to learn these facts and to speak out. It is time to stop allowing Influential groups of all sorts to cancel those whose information they dislike.

If Americans are to avoid their country’s decline and protect their families from its impact, it is essential to diagnose the cause and address it.

Until enough people are more concerned about supporting genocide and ethnic cleansing than they are of spurious accusations of antisemitism and are willing to speak about these uncomfortable facts, this lobby on behalf of a ruthless, supremacist foreign country will continue to dominate US policies, causing intolerable tragedy abroad and potentially fatal destruction at home.

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Alison Weir is executive director of If Americans Knew, president of the Council for the National Interest, and author of Against Our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create Israel. She first spent time in Gaza and the West Bank in early 2001 as a freelance journalist.

•      Cosmos and Time in World, Universal, and Multiversal Civilizations
       https://youtu.be/qOR1XjvuEDY?si=Jz3XjOzsaANmgQjR
•      Big History and Emerging Political Complexity
       https://youtu.be/9oRC7rsdxD8?si=cl1nSsLEVFNvDmVk
•      Big History and a Coming of Age Story
       https://youtu.be/OsDxIHwAiYo?si=Zojus0PvEtve60RZ
•      SETI and Big History
       https://youtu.be/o6JGbeSQn0E?si=8Y_TvcZIM19Pshm1
•      Origins of Life
       https://youtu.be/gyMJjJj7NGY?si=VKsUMp7OrPCQT1q8

https://jbh.journals.villanova.edu/

BY LOWELLGUSTAFSON ON SEPTEMBER 24, 2019

Articles

The Tree of Knowledge System: A New Map for Big History Gregg Henriques, Joseph Michalski, Steven Quackenbush, Waldemar Schmidt 1 – 17 PDF HTML

Beachcombing and Coastal Settlement: The Long Migration from South Africa to Patagonia — The Greatest Journey Ever Made Barry Wood 19 – 46 PDF HTML Português

Mythopoetic imagination as a source of critique and reconstruction: alternative storylines about our place in cosmos Heikki Patomäki 77 – 97 PDF HTML

The Star-Galaxy Era in Terms of Big History and Universal Evolution Leonid E. Grinin, Anton L. Grinin 99 – 122 PDF HTML Português

Toward a Big History Interpretation of Religion Ken Baskin 147 – 166 PDF HTML

Book Reviews

Marine Resources and Prehistoric Adaptations: A Review of Trekking the Shore Barry Wood 167 – 170 PDF HTML

A Cosmological Crisis? A Review of Nasser Zakarayia, The Final Story: Science, Myth, and Beginnings Ken Baskin 171 – 176 PDF HTML

Contributors 177 – 178 https://bighistory.org/

Is criticism of AIPAC or Israel Anti-Semitism? Seems like Congress is off the mark.

https://www.thenation.com/article/ilhan-omar-anti-semitism-democratic-party-aipac/

Equal opportunity gerrymandering

Legislative power brokers across the country have long designed district lines in back-room deals that entrenched their control for years, if not decades. But now, Democratic lawmakers in New Jersey are carrying out a power grab in an unusually public fashion: They are seeking to make Republicans a permanent minority by essentially writing gerrymandering into the State Constitution.

The New Jersey plan comes amid a national reckoning over the consequences of gerrymandering and has been met by fierce opposition across the political landscape — and not just from Republicans and nonpartisan watchdog groups.

Even some national Democratic leaders have criticized the plan, fearing that it undercuts Democratic efforts to attack what they term Republican strong-arm tactics in state capitals across the country. Republicans in Wisconsin and Michigan are facing an intense backlash after state legislatures there voted to strip power from newly elected Democratic governors.

Republicans have also come under fire for legislative gerrymandering in states like North Carolina.

Eric H. Holder Jr., a former attorney general under President Barack Obama and a potential presidential candidate in 2020, called on the Democratic lawmakers in the New Jersey Legislature, who have significant majorities in both chambers, to rethink their plan.