From Yahweh to Zion

by Laurent Guyénot

  Benjamin Netanyahu also symbolizes the increasingly important role played by neoconservatives and American Jews in general concerning the fate of Israel, which currently enjoys unprecedented support from American Jewish billionaires. He himself lived, studied, and worked in the United States from 1960 to 1978, between his 11th and his 27th year—except during his military service—and again after the age of 33, when he was appointed deputy ambassador to Washington and then permanent delegate to the United Nations. His political destiny was planned in the United States; in that sense, Netanyahu is a creature of the neoconservatives. The only thing that distinguishes him from them is that, for public relations reasons, he does not possess American nationality. Indeed, a significant number of neoconservatives are Israeli citizens, have family in Israel, or have resided there themselves. Elliott Abrams wrote in 1997, before becoming deputy national security adviser in the Bush II administration: “Outside the land of Israel, there can be no doubt that Jews, faithful to the covenant between God and Abraham, are to stand apart from the nation in which they live. It is the very nature of being Jewish to be apart—except in Israel—from the rest of the population.”551

  In 1996 the neoconservatives threw all their weight behind their ultimate think tank, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), directed by William Kristol and Robert Kagan. PNAC recommended taking advantage of the defeat of communism to reinforce American hegemony by preventing the emergence of any rival. Their Statement of Principles vowed to extend the current Pax Americana, which entailed “a military that is strong and ready to meet both present and future challenges.”552 In its September 2000 report entitled Rebuilding America’s Defenses, PNAC anticipated that US forces must become “able to rapidly deploy and win multiple simultaneous large-scale wars.” This required a profound transformation, including a new military corps, the “US Space Forces,” to control both space and cyberspace, and the development of “a new family of nuclear weapons designed to address new sets of military requirements.” Unfortunately, according to the authors of the report, “the process of transformation […] is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.”553

  PNAC’s architects played the American hegemony card by draping themselves in the super-patriotic discourse of America’s civilizing mission. But their duplicity is exposed in a document brought to public knowledge in 2008: a report published in 1996 by the Israeli think tank Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS), entitled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, written specifically for the new Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. The team responsible for the report was led by Richard Perle, and included Douglas Feith and David Wurmser, who figured the same year among the signatories of PNAC. As its title suggests, the Clean Break report invited Netanyahu to break with the Oslo Accords of 1993, which officially committed Israel to the return of the territories it occupied illegally since 1967. The new prime minister should instead “engage every possible energy on rebuilding Zionism” and reaffirm Israel’s right to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.554

  One thing has not changed since the time of Ezra: Israel needs a foreign empire. Since its founding in 1948 and even more so since its expansion in 1967, Israel’s security and sustainability have depended totally on American support. America must therefore remain imperial. But the fall of communism meant the end of the Cold War. And the end of the Cold War would inevitably trigger a refocusing of the United States on internal politics, a return to the founding principles defended by the traditional conservatives (fallen to the rank of “paleoconservatives”). These principles include this famous warning from George Washington during his farewell speech: “The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest. […] Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification. […] And it gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens (who devote themselves to the favorite nation), facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country, without odium, sometimes even with popularity.”555

  Israel needed to prevent at all costs an isolationist turn by the United States, which would lead to the abandonment of its “passionate attachment” for Israel. It was therefore necessary to boost the imperialistic spirit of the United States, relying on internal forces already predisposed to such a mission. These historically tended to be on the Democratic side, among the members of the Council on Foreign Relations, notably Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s national security adviser and member of the influential Council on Foreign Relations. Brzezinski was basically Russophobic due to his Polish origins. He was the figurehead of the geostrategic current advocating a modern version of the Great Game, which he summarizes in his book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperative (1998). His vision, inherited from the British theorists of the end of the nineteenth century, consists essentially of preventing Russia from allying itself with Europe by digging a “blood trench” between the Slavic and Latin peoples and controlling everything from Central Asia to Ukraine. Afghanistan has always played an important role as a buffer state, and it was Brzezinski who, under Carter, had instigated the destabilization of the pro-Soviet secular regime through the financing and arming of the mujahideen (favoring the radical Islamic allies of Pakistan over the moderates like the pro-Iranian Ahmed Massoud).556 However, Brzezinski was far from sharing the neoconservative passion for Israel; he even spoke out against Bush Sr.’s Gulf War I. In any case, he remained on the sidelines of the Clinton government and no longer had much influence in Washington in the 1990s.

  The alliance of Brzezinski and his friends at the Council on Foreign Relations was therefore far from sufficient to bring America into a major military adventure in the Middle East. For this, the United States needed an enemy. Just as the First and Second World Wars were necessary to found Israel, the Cold War (or Third World War) provided the necessary context for the implementation of the Zionist program; the 1967 annexations would never have been possible without this context. After the dislocation of the Communist bloc, Israel needed a new world war, or at least a new threat of world war, to retain the support of the United States. So a new enemy, perfectly fitted to Israel’s needs, magically appeared. The new paradigm developed by the masters of hasbara (Israeli propaganda) is summarized in two slogans: the “war on terror” and the “clash of civilizations.”

  The first was already widely disseminated since the 1980s, especially by Benjamin Netanyahu himself. During his years at the Washington embassy and the United Nations, Netanyahu contributed more than anyone else to introducing into the American consciousness the idea that Arab terrorism not only threatened Israel, but also the United States and the democratic world in its entirety. It is the central message of his books, International Terrorism: Challenge and Response (1982); Terrorism: How the West can Win (1986); and A Place Among the Nations: Israel and the World (1993). In the latter, he drew a systematic analogy between Arafat and Hitler, and introduced the farfetched claim that the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin Al-Husseini, had been “one of the initiators of the systematic extermination of European Jewry” by advising Hitler, Ribbentrop, and Himmler (a claim without historical substantiation, but already current in Israeli propaganda). He also wrote: “Violence is ubiquitous in the political life of all Arab countries. […] International terrorism is the quintessential Middle East export and its techniques are those of the Arab regimes and organisations that invented it..”557 In Fighting Terrorism: How Democracies Can Defeat Domestic and International Terrorists (1995), he coined the term “war on terror.”


  Netanyahu appeared regularly on CNN in the early 1990s, contributing to the transformation of the world’s leading news channel into a major Zionist propaganda tool.558 As Kevin Barrett explains, “The effect of the ubiquitous terror trope is to delegitimize the exercise of power by Muslims, and to legitimize the exercise of power against them. Above all, it delegitimizes any Muslim resort to violence—even in self-defense—while offering carte-blanche legitimacy to violent aggression against Muslims.”559

  The term “clash of civilizations,” which refers to a broader process encompassing “the war on terror,” was used for the first time by one of the most influential thinkers of the neoconservative current, Bernard Lewis (holder of Israeli, British, and American passports) in an article in the September 1990 issue of Atlantic Monthly, entitled “The Roots of Muslim Rage.” The concept was taken up in a manifesto by Samuel Huntington in Commentary magazine in the summer of 1994 and then in a book by the same author published by the Olin Foundation, a neoconservative think tank. After the Soviet peril, prophesied Huntington, here comes the Islamic peril. And do not be mistaken: “The fundamental problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.” Huntington functioned as a liaison between Brzezinski (with whom he co-wrote articles) and the neoconservatives. He shared Brzezinski’s pragmatism and vision of the Great Game: “The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion, but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do.”560 This was music to the ears of the neoconservatives, who make Huntington a true intellectual star.

  Never in history has a book of geopolitics been the subject of such international media hype. Between 1992 and 1994 a parody of intellectual debate was acted in the press, opposing, on one side, Francis Fukuyama and his prophecy of the “end of history”—meaning “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government”—and, on the other side, Samuel Huntington and his vision of the “clash of civilizations.” Interestingly, like Brzezinski, Fukuyama and Huntington are members of the Trilateral Commission, and Fukuyama is a member of PNAC. Both were token goys, with Fukuyama playing the role of Huntington’s stooge, until the attacks of September 11, 2001, validated the latter’s prophecy in an appallingly dramatic way. Huntington’s book, meanwhile, has been translated into fifty languages and commented on by the entire world’s press. At the same time, the “clash of civilizations” has been implanted in mass consciousness by Hollywood, as Jack Shaheen explains in Real Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People (Olive Branch Press, 2012), based on the analysis of more than a thousand films over thirty years.561

  The neocons pressured the Clinton administration to intervene in Iraq, helped by a network of Zionist moles within the FBI and other secret services. On February 26, 1993, a bomb exploded under the World Trade Center in New York City, killing six people, injuring more than a thousand and causing $300 million damage. In the course of the trial it was revealed that an FBI informant, a former Egyptian army officer named Emad Salem, had been asked to supply the conspirators with explosives he believed to be fake and destined for a sting operation. As reported in The New York Times, October 28, 1993: “Law-enforcement officials were told that terrorists were building a bomb that was eventually used to blow up the World Trade Center, and they planned to thwart the plotters by secretly substituting harmless powder for the explosives, an informer said after the blast. The informer was to have helped the plotters build the bomb and supply the fake powder, but the plan was called off by an F.B.I. supervisor who had other ideas about how the informer, Emad A. Salem, should be used, the informer said.”562

  The neocons nevertheless called for a global war on terrorism, but Clinton did not relent. In a possibly unrelated incident, on September 11, 1994, a drunken pilot by the name of Frank Eugene Corder crashed his Cessna 150 L into the White House lawn two floors below Clinton’s bedroom, killing himself in the process.

  Next came the Oklahoma City bombing of April 19, 1995. It was, according to investigator Michael Collins Piper, orchestrated or perhaps simply monitored and diverted by the Mossad: “The Mossad’s intent was for the tragedy to be linked to the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein and that this ‘false flag’ could be used to force then-president Bill Clinton to invade Iraq and bring down Saddam, Israel’s hated enemy.” But “President Bill Clinton refused to go along with the Zionist agenda and directed those responsible for the investigation—namely the Justice Department and the FBI—to cover up the false flags.”563

  As late as 2004, a book by former television journalist Jayna Davis, The Third Terrorist, acclaimed by pro-Zionist elements in the monopoly media, purported to demonstrate that Saddam and bin Laden, were involved in a highly unlikely alliance to blow up the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City and blame it on American white supremacists. It is in this context that Monica Lewinski was hired as a White House intern, and has sex with President Clinton from November 1995 to March 1997. After the Clinton administration successfully thwarted the Israeli psychological operation, on January 17, 1998, the first revelation of the President’s affair with 22-year-old Monica Lewinsky appeared in Newsweek. Lewinsky, the daughter of Zionist east European immigrants, and a graduate of Lewis & Clark College, was a Queen Esther of a new kind. She had confided in her coworker Linda Tripp, who then proceeded to secretly record her torrid phone conversations with Clinton, while Lewinsky kept, unwashed for two years, her blue dress with the incriminating sperm stains. Syrian newspaper Tishrin Al-Usbu’a speculates that “her goal was to embarrass President Clinton, to blackmail him and weaken his status before Netanyahu’s government.”564

  Indeed, on January 21, 1998, while The Washington Post published an article on the Lewinsky case, Clinton urgently received Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu for an unannounced 90-minute interview. On January 26, 1998, Clinton received a real ultimatum, in the form of a letter signed by Elliott Abrams, Robert Kagan, William Kristol, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and other neoconservatives urging him to use his State of the Union address to make removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime the “aim of American foreign policy” and to use military action because “diplomacy is failing.” Were Clinton to do that, the signers pledged to “offer our full support in this difficult but necessary endeavor.”565 Clinton did nothing: his speech was entirely centered on the economy (the central theme of his election campaigns and his presidency). In the months that followed, the “Monicagate” scandal became an ordeal for Clinton, who was charged with perjury and threatened with impeachment.

  The “New Pearl Harbor”

  In November 2000, Bush Jr. was elected under conditions that raised protests of electoral fraud. Two dozen neoconservatives took over key positions in foreign policy. The White House spokesman, Ari Fleischer, was a neocon, as was the president’s main speechwriter David Frum, who co-authored in 2003 a book with Richard Perle, An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror. Dick Cheney, after leading the victorious Bush campaign, chose for himself the vice presidency, picked Scooter Libby as his deputy, and took the leading role in forming Bush’s government. He entrusted the State Department to Colin Powell, but surrounded him with neocon aides such as David Wurmser. Another “Sabbath goy” was National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, a Russia specialist with no expertise in the Middle East, which made her entirely dependent on her neocon adviser Philip Zelikow. William Luti and Elliot Abrams, and later Eliot Cohen, were also tasked with steering Rice. But it was mainly from within the Defense Department under Donald Rumsfeld that the most influential neocons were able to fashion US foreign and military policy. Richard Perle occupied the crucial position of director of the Defense Policy Board, responsible for defining military strategy, while Paul Wolfowitz became the “soul of the Pentagon” as deputy secret
ary with Douglas Feith as under secretary. As for President Bush, he once declared to journalists: “If you want a glimpse of how I think about foreign policy, read Natan Sharansky’s book, The Case for Democracy. It’s a great book.” Sharansky is a radical Zionist, founder of the party Yisrael Ba’aliya (“Israel for aliyah”) and chairman of One Jerusalem, which advocates Israeli sovereignty over a unified Jerusalem.566

  After eight months in the presidency (almost half of them on vacation) Bush was confronted with the “catastrophic event” that PNAC had called for a year earlier. The culprit was immediately identified as Osama bin Laden. It was a real “Hanukkah miracle” for Israel, commented Haaretz journalist Aluf Benn: “Osama bin Laden’s September 11 attacks placed Israel firmly on the right side of the strategic map with the US, and put the Arab world at a disadvantage as it now faces its own difficult decisions about its future.” On the day of the attacks, acting Prime Minister Ariel Sharon announced at a press conference: “The war against terror is an international war. A war of a coalition of the free world against all of the terror groups…This is a war between the good and the bad, between humanity and those who are bloodthirsty. The criminal attack today on innocent civilians in the United States, is a turning point in war against international terror.”567 As for Netanyahu, he commented: “It’s very good […] it will generate immediate sympathy […], strengthen the bond between our two peoples, because we’ve experienced terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive hemorrhaging of terror.”568